Utterly unfair. Downright cruel. Only strong words do justice to the way the Obama administration, the Democratic congressional leadership, and Mayor Adrian Fenty broke official promises of education financial assistance made years ago to nearly 2,000 poor families in D.C. What these officials have done is worse than merely pulling the rug out from under the affected families; it’s more like pulling a ladder out from under them with nothing below to cushion their fall.
With President Obama’s obvious blessing, Congress effectively voted in February to kill the District’s Opportunity Scholarship program as of spring, 2010, despite preliminary, data-driven analyses by experts at Georgetown University, the Manhattan Institute, and the U.S. Department of Education. Those analyses showed the program to be overwhelmingly popular with parents and a boon to the academic progress of their children. The Senate’s anti-school choice leader, Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said Congress could always reauthorize the program if later studies showed conclusively it was helping the children’s educational performance. As it turns out, such a study had already been completed by the Department of Education last November. But the public did not know about it because the Obama administration sat on the results for months, then buried them in a larger report released late in the afternoon of April 3, a Friday. The report showed that scholarship recipients are reading at a significantly higher level t an their public school counterparts.
It’s worth noting that Obama has made an absolute fetish of claiming to let facts drive public policy – but when it comes to the scholarships, not even the federal government’s own peer-reviewed, data-driven, apolitical study moved Obama to stop the political interference with the program. Even worse, Obama’s Education Secretary, Arne Duncan, decided to revoke “new” scholarships for 200 incoming students who already had been told the award was theirs.
As for Fenty, he is not only failing to defend the D.C. Opportunity Scholarships, he is also hobbling the even-more popular District charter school program. Fenty proposes to cut the charters’ “facilities” budget by 26 percent (from $90 million to $66 million), while increasing funding for the chronically failing conventional public schools by 5 percent ($13 million) – despite the fact charter school enrollment is up 17 percent and down 9 percent in the failing schools. Once again, the politicians opted to reward failure instead of encouraging success.