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Posts Tagged ‘Washington D.C. Schools’
December 18th, 2015 at 12:56 pm
School Choice a Casualty of the Omnibus Budget
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Education Week reports some disappointing news on the school choice front:

Although education spending as a whole got a $1.2 billion boost in a federal budget deal announced Wednesday, one small but high-profile program has been left out: Washington D.C.’s school vouchers.

The Scholarships for Opportunity and Results Act (SOAR), which creates a limited number of vouchers for students living in the District of Columbia, was not reauthorized in the omnibus spending bill, which is expected to be passed this week.

Recently departed House Speaker John Boehner was a champion of the Opportunity Scholarship Program, and the House signed off on reauthorizing SOAR earlier this fall even though it wasn’t up for renewal this year.

The Wall Street Journal editorializes:

The omnibus funds the program for fiscal year 2016 but fails to reauthorize it. This means that 20 years after the program was first debated, 10 years after it started, four years after Mr. Boehner revived it after President Obama had killed it, and a few months after the House passed a bill to reauthorize it, we’ll have to fight the battle all over again . . .

Perhaps this reflects the imbalance of passion. Democrats try to kill vouchers every year because unions demand it. Never mind that Opportunity Scholarship recipients have higher graduation rates and more parental satisfaction than D.C. public school students. Or that the children who get these scholarships are from households with an average household income below $21,000 a year.

This part of the editorial rankles: “A spokesman for the House Appropriations Committee chaired by Hal Rogers, which helped negotiate the omnibus, says only that ‘as this was a compromise agreement, not all priorities could be retained.’”

Four years ago, Republicans — and a significant number of Democrats — understood that protecting and extending the scholarship program was a fight worth having. And that was when Republicans didn’t control both houses of Congress.

February 14th, 2012 at 3:07 pm
Obama Budget Looks to Kill School Choice in Washington D.C.
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If there’s one controlling lesson after three years of the Obama Administration, it’s this: watch what he does, not what he says.

For all of his pieities about being a serious education reformer, Obama has time and again cast his lot with the liberal teachers unions that are perhaps the biggest threat to opportunity for the nation’s underprivileged children. This trend showed up early in his presidency, when he attempted to bleed Washington D.C.’s school voucher program by prohibiting new entrants. Apparently, hope and change wasn’t an offer for poor, overwhelmingly minority students in some of the nation’s worst schools.

Thanks to the efforts of Republicans in Congress, the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program is back in action. But under President Obama’s new budget proposal released yesterday, it would be zeroed out. What makes clear that this is a shameless gift to special interests is how decisively the facts weigh in favor of the program. Consider this, from the Heritage Foundation’s Lindsey Burke:

The D.C. OSP has been highly successful. According to federally-mandated evaluations of the program, student achievement has increased, and graduation rates of voucher students have increased significantly. While graduation rates in D.C. Public Schools hover around 55 percent, students who used a voucher to attend private school had a 91 percent graduation rate.

And at $8,000, the vouchers are a bargain compared to the estimated $18,000 spent per child by D.C. Public Schools.

Better outcomes at lower costs. A new generation of young minority students who don’t believe that life ends at 18. And the first reaction of the President of the United States is to see how fast this innovation can be smothered. Many of Obama’s positions can be challenged on the grounds of incorrectness or imprudence. This one, however, deserves disdain for its rank inhumanity.