There are 1,700 Washington, D.C. students, 99 percent of them minorities, who attend safe, quality private schools in the District thanks to a voucher program passed narrowly by the Congress four years ago.
Two of those children are classmates of Sasha and Malia Obama at the prestigious Sidwell Friends School. If Democrats get their way on the language of the omnibus spending bill, Sarah and James Parker will lose their $7,500 scholarships at the end of next school year. Unlike the Obama children, they don't have the money to attend at full price tuition, so they'll be back to their public school:
Deborah Parker says such a move would be devastating for her kids. "I once took Sarah to Roosevelt High School to see its metal detectors and security guards," she says. "I wanted to scare her into appreciation for what she has at Sidwell." It's not just safety, either. According to the latest test scores, fewer than half of Roosevelt's students are proficient in reading or math.
That's the reality that the Parkers and 1,700 other low-income students face if Sen. Durbin and his allies get their way. And it points to perhaps the most odious of double standards in American life today: the way some of our loudest champions of public education vote to keep other people's children -- mostly inner-city blacks and Latinos -- trapped in schools where they'd never let their own kids set foot.
Dick Durbin is the culprit behind the language, which would sunset the program unless both the Congress and the D.C. City Council agree to reauthorize it. Durbin himself attended a Catholic school in St. Louis, but is willing to nix the federal government's attempt to level the educational playing field with $14 million in scholarships for inner-city kids.
School-choice advocates are hoping the new president, as per his rhetoric on the campaign trail, will stand up for educational innovation, and the futures of his daughters' classmates. The national school-choice movement has slowly been picking up Democratic support, state-by-state, despite fierce opposition by powerful teachers' unions, and Obama's support for the D.C. program would likely enable a national political shift on the issue.
Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.) will offer an amendment to strip Durbin's language from the bill, he said at a press conference today. But it's unlikely to succeed unless Obama, who attended his elite Hawaiian secondary school on a scholarship, were to take an uncharacteristically risky and leader-like stand on the school choice program.
Just to put it in perspective, for the cost of the following worthy projects in the omnibus bill, Congressional Democrats could send 1,700 economically disadvantaged kids to good schools, but they will likely refuse to do so:
$1 million for mormon cricket control in Utah
$2.1 million for the Center for Grape Genetics in New York - quick peel me a grape.
$2 million "for the promotion of astronomy" in Hawaii
$1.7 million for pig odor research in Iowa
$1,427,250 for genetic improvements of switchgrass
$1.7M "for a honey bee factory" in Weslaco, TX
$4,275,000 for improved airports in W.V.
I give you the priorities of our liberal betters.
