After hiding the data and dumping the successful DC voucher program, the only thing Obama should tell students today is "I'm sorry"
“The Department of Education should not be producing paid political advertising for the president, it should be helping us to produce smarter students.” “the president should be doing more about education than saying, ‘Lights, camera, action.’ ” -House Majority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.), 1991
I'm wondering if the D.C. school system will be televising Obama's campaign speech to schoolchildren today. Obama will reference himself more times in the speech than school, education, responsibility, county/nation, parents and teachers - combined!
What The One will not even mention, as the MSM has done its best to lose down the memory hole, is the utterly shameful act by Obama and Congressional Democrats to deep-six the successful voucher program in D.C., dooming 1,800 low-income mostly black students to one of the worst educational systems in the country (the worst is DPS -Detroit Public Schools, which I have bogged about ad infinitum here).
Education secretary Arne Duncan referred to DC public schools as a district with “more money than God.” More than $28,000 per student. Failing miserably. The only success in that district was a voucher program that Obama attacked, even though vouchers cost a quarter (that's right - 25%) of the $28,000 number and helped the students. Should Obama get his head screwed on straight (good luck with that one), he will announce today to all students that since vouchers have been a smashing success in D.C., proved by concrete educational data, they should be a smashing success elsewhere. I mean -wouldn't that be a move to "restore scientific integrity in governmental decision making?" Especially since vouchers are proven to help students and drive down costs?
But that is not what anyone will hear. That's because Obama and his administration hid data indicating the program's successful educational results as they pushed Congressional Democrats to scrap the program. After all, they have the teachers unions to protect. The WSJ published an article a while back about the shenanigans:
It's bad enough that Democrats are killing a program that parents love and is closing the achievement gap between poor minorities and whites. But as scandalous is that the Education Department almost certainly knew the results of this evaluation for months.
Voucher recipients were tested last spring. The scores were analyzed in the late summer and early fall, and in November preliminary results were presented to a team of advisers who work with the Education Department to produce the annual evaluation. Since Education officials are intimately involved in this process, they had to know what was in this evaluation even as Democrats passed (and Mr. Obama signed) language that ends the program after next year.
Opponents of school choice for poor children have long claimed they'd support vouchers if there was evidence that they work. While running for President last year, Mr. Obama told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel that if he saw more proof that they were successful, he would "not allow my predisposition to stand in the way of making sure that our kids can learn . . . You do what works for the kids." Except, apparently, when what works is opposed by unions.
Mr. Duncan's office spurned our repeated calls and emails asking what and when he and his aides knew about these results. We do know the Administration prohibited anyone involved with the evaluation from discussing it publicly. You'd think we were talking about nuclear secrets, not about a taxpayer-funded pilot program. A reasonable conclusion is that Mr. Duncan's department didn't want proof of voucher success to interfere with Senator Dick Durbin's campaign to kill vouchers at the behest of the teachers unions.
The decision to let 1,700 poor kids get tossed from private schools is a moral disgrace. It also exposes the ugly politics that lies beneath union and liberal efforts across the country to undermine mayoral control, charter schools, vouchers or any reform that threatens their monopoly over public education dollars and jobs. The Sheldon Silver-Dick Durbin Democrats aren't worried that school choice doesn't work. They're worried that it does, and if Messrs. Obama and Duncan want to succeed as reformers they need to say so consistently.
Ouch. What an absolutely devastating piece. Read the whole thing as it is a very worthy read. There's more and it is equally devastating. So instead, Obama will take to the airwaves today (again), to tell students to stay in their failing public schools and just "work hard." I'm assuming this one speech will motivate Detroit students so much that it will significantly impact a graduation rate of 1 in 4. I'm not holding my breath.
UPDATE: Adrienne beat me to the punch on this issue. She asks Obama: "remind me again why you're dumping the voucher program in DC, a program which allows hundreds of poor, mostly black students, to escape lousy rat-infested schools? Is that how you practice the fairness you're so fond of, while your own daughters attend Sidwell Friends School to the tune of $40,000.00 per year?" A good question indeed.
UPDATE #2: Glenn Reynolds points this out over at Instapundit:
ANN ALTHOUSE: Obama’s Speech to Kids Is Nearly 10x As Long As The Gettysburg Address (which was given to adults). Not ten times as good, though.
Plus this: ‘It’s not a discussion. He’s on television.”
Of course it's not a discussion. Has Obama even had one of those yet since being sworn in?
Previously regarding vouchers and the D.C. program:
Freep: Public Schools Are Crap - Let's Remold It!
Detroit News: DPS FAIL!!!
Detroit Politician Pitching School Choice - Kind Of
Obama on Education - huh?
Vouchers vs. D.C. public schools
Video that you will likely never see in the MSM
WaPo: Voucher Subterfuge
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