The Wall Street Journal recently provided an editorial summary of the “school choice for me but not you” mentality guiding Obama’s administration.

Photos of DC pro-choice education rally at The Weekly Standard here:

At least 1,300 school kids and several hundred adults (many of them single parents who had to get off work) gathered at Freedom Plaza to rally for the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program in Washington Wednesday. Funding for the program was cut by Congress this spring, and it must now be reauthorized by the D.C. Council and a heavily Democratic Senate to continue. The political road looks very rough, but these kids and their supporters are prepared to “fight, fight” to “put children first,” as the chants of the day indicated.

Former Washington, D.C. Mayor Anthony Williams, recording artists Ginuwine and Mya, council member Marion Barry, parents, students, and activist Virginia Walden-Ford were on hand to testify to what the program means to the District’s underprivileged children.

Deroy Murdock:

Despite being “a skeptic of vouchers,” candidate Barack Obama promised this would not prevent him from “making sure that our kids can learn.” As he told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, “You do what works for the kids.”

Last January 21, his first full day in office, President Obama declared, “My Administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government.”

Just 10 weeks later, Obama has broken both these promises. And poor-but-promising minority kids suffer the consequences.

These 1,714 children — 90 percent black and 9 percent Hispanic — enjoy the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program. They each receive up to $7,500 for private or parochial schools outside Washington, D.C.’s dismal government-education system. Since its 2004 launch, 7,852 students have applied for these grants, or more than four children per voucher.

DC mis-named “public” schools spend $25,000 of tax money per student.  The average voucher recipient receives about $6,000; NEA-backed Obama wants these students to fail.

The Washington Post:

The D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, the first federal initiative to spend taxpayer dollars on private school tuition, was created by a Republican-led Congress in 2004 to help students from low-income families. Congress has cut off federal funding after the 2009-10 school year unless lawmakers vote to reauthorize it.

Overall, the study found that students who used the vouchers received reading scores that placed them nearly four months ahead of peers who remained in public school. However, as a group, students who had been in the lowest-performing public schools did not show those gains. There was no difference in math performance between the groups.
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Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in a statement that the Obama administration does not want to pull participating students out of the program but does not support its continuation.