D.C. School System Bids Farewell to Vouchers
On March 10, the U.S. Senate voted to terminate the experimental school voucher program in Washington, D.C., which had been implemented in order to help provide poor minority children in failing schools with the same educational opportunities that so many children of senators, congressmen, and presidents within the district have as a result of their advantageous birth.
During his presidential campaign, President Obama indicated that he would put his personal opposition to vouchers aside “if he saw more proof that vouchers are successful.” I would “not allow my predispositions to stand in the way of making sure that our kids can learn,” he told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel in February 2008. “You do what works for the kids.”
Now it appears that the Obama administration and the U.S. Senate purposely kept the results of a congressionally-mandated study showing the benefits of the D.C. voucher program from becoming public until after they had managed to spike the program due to its supposed “lack of effectiveness.”
The executive summary of the report is available here; the full 198-page report can be seen here. Both are buried on the website of the Institute for Educational Sciences (IES), the arm of the Bureau of Education that conducts research and compiles statistics on such programs. The data contained in the report were collected in the spring and fall of 2008, and it was prepared for publication over the winter — then held from the public until April 3, when it was finally made available online.
The result of the Obama administration delaying the release of this report (which showed that participants in the voucher program outperformed those in the district’s public schools by a large margin on reading tests) until after the Senate vote is that the 1,700 low-income, minority children who are currently receiving up to $7,500 in vouchers per year to attend private school instead of their own failing D.C. public schools will be forced to return to those public schools after the 2009-10 school year. T Mayor Adrian Fenty had said, “It would not be productive to disrupt the education of children who are presently enrolled in private schools,” and empirical evidence shows that such a move will consign them to a lower-quality education and a far less optimistic future.
Congress has taught these kids important lessons on not trusting politicians and how the DNC operates.
I spent most of my life in the “lower income minority” bracket, and issues like these are what really resonated with me and turned me to the Right. Conservatives should be taking advantage if this gut-level awareness in minorities to make inroads. But the Republicans have no game, and as a movement we are not much better than the party. Leftists would already have had tear jerk interviews with the two black students who will now be kicked out of the same school President Obama’s girls attend. Those interviews would have been viral all over the internet and then get recylcled come next election cycle. Trust me, nothing will resonate with minorities like seeing fellow lower income minorities kicked out of the same school as our minority president’s children. It is the one issue the Right has that is clear, immediate, and deeply resonate with minorities.
It would also help us begin the necessary fight with the teacher’s unions from a positive position. The unions are corrupt and destroy our children’s education. But because they are “teacher’s” unions, the press and the democrats bury their corruption the same way this report on the voucher success was buried. Defending the vouchers is the best place to position ourselves for both helping minorities and exposing the Unions for what they truly are. http://rebelsk8.blogspot.com/
Change you can believe in:pandering to morally and intellectually corrupt teacher’s unions, while abandoning poor kids to illiteracy ,ignorance and danger, in horrible schools.Meanwhile, his own daughters attend a private academy:OBAMA THE HYPOCRITE!Typical liberal!
How better to keep the poor dependent on government handouts and to keep the poor voting for those handouts. If it works vote it out, if its broken keep it proped up for political gain. I wonder how many teachers voted for this change? Sk8 you hit it right when you said that the right has no game and we are missing our opportunities to prove what works.
Why are people so gullible as to accept separate and unequal education for the children of the rich and powerful?
Public education is all about creating a compliant, get along at all cost citizenry, and it is succeeding. Ask yourself who pays and who benefits.
Why let the fact that we are paying an outrageous amount of money for the indoctrination of our children bother you? For the money we spend on all the dropouts alone, we could buy them new American cars and solve the auto industry’s problems.
It’s your money and they are your children. Don’t you think you should get something for the seven to twelve thousand dollars you spend every year educating them?
Barack Obama is truly a disgusting man. He is among the sleaziest men to ever occupy the White House. Obama is taking advantage of guilt tripped whites. It is time more Americans judged him on the content of his character and not the color of his skin. If this issue does not turn one against Obama—perhaps nothing will. They have obviously swallowed the Kool-Aid and are too far gone.
The Democrat Party knows that the shoe shuffling, high-pitched voice, Chris Rock vote in the African-American community is in the bag. As I noted before on another topic, the Democrat Party could put a dead skunk on their ticket, and that dead skunk would get 95% of the black vote. On the other hand the teachers’ union vote is not in the bag. No, the teachers’ union is not going to support a Republican candidate, but they would bankroll and vote for another more pliant Democrat in a primary contest. So if an incumbent Democrat loses to another Democrat in the primary election, he or she is out of office just as sure as if he or she lost to a Republican in the general election.
Obama, don’t let facts get in the way of your proof that vouchers don’t work.
Little wonder why our rating among the other industrialized nations has slipped so low to where we are now near the bottom of the rankings. Nothing will improve as long as we continue to allow the teachers unions to dictate to our politicians that nothing is allowed to change. Why can’t parents in this country send their children to the schools that they deem best for their childrens needs like other countries can? People wake up. Your country is being destroyed from within.
Let’s push for a voucher of $30,000 to be commensurate with the tuition at Sidwell Friends School, where Malia and Sasha go to school.
I can’t think of any other word but criminal. When my children attended school (public), I recall that during the early to late nineties, reading programs and the books that were purchased by the school were changed in the span of one year, even before there was evidence they were successful or not. That is when I realized that education was becoming more a business partnership with textbook and supply companies than a organization formed to educate our children for the future.
Even “good” teachers with proven successful teaching methods were losing their influence and rarely had input into decision making. They were being dictated to from as little as showing kindergartners how to cut, to the methods of tried and true beginning math skills. I was amazed how the system had become micro-managed by upper-administrators. By the time President Bush took office it was even common for High School student to lack the rudimentary skill of multiplication.
This administration is taking an idea from the Bush Administration and changing it, not because in doesn’t work but for the simple reason it is from the Bush Administration. This alone should warn people, what their priorities are.
Yeah let’s hear the liberals whine about why our kids score poorly compared to other countries. It took them 40 years and $3 trillion to get us to this point. Also, where’s our one-party media on this story?
It is sad to witness the amount of pull that the unions have with this admin. and congress. A concise report Mr. Emanuel and thank you for your service to our country.
And yet the masses still adore their chosen ONE…I am appalled how people refuse to see what is right before their eyes. Oh that’s right. Most of this stuff has no effect on them. Yet…
The masses who voted these dishonest, non-American people into Office think they are immune to all the damage that is being done to our once wonderful USA.
What until THEY get slammed with all this ‘change’. Buyer’s remorse BIG TIME!!!
If you know the condition of DC schools then you know what a staggering moral failure this is. It’s taking children out of positive environments and putting them in places where <50% of students graduate, gang violence rules and shooting deaths are common, facilities are ancient and decrepit, etc.
#8:E Don’t let the facts that public schools don’t work, get in the way of your leaving poor kids to rot in government schools.
15 Realist: Dysfunctional, hellhole schools are the most successful for democrats:they keep people,poor,ignorant,welfare-dependent:the typical Obama inner city voter.
Suborning the US education system was the first goal achieved by the extreme left. They are not about to let it go without a fight, because it is from their vise grip on education that their power truly flows. They indoctrinate instead of educate and they control the meaning of many varieties of truth : historical, scientific and social. From this everful cup does their agenda get power, like global warming. US teachers should be individually shamed, they have done more damage to the country than all the traitors and enemies we’ve had, combined.
An issue that the GOP ought to fly as big and wide as it can for all parents with kids trapped in schools of unionized indifference, mediocrity and disorder.
And as usual the Apostles of Conspicuous Compassion remain silent. Here in DC, the usual squawkers show no concern: Howard Univ., DC Council, NAACP, Ward 7&8 “activists”, churches, Washington Post, etc.
Didn’t DC go 93-7% in favor of Obama. I guess the people of DC got what they asked for.
Seriously though, the Democratic Party has wooed the less fortunate to their party by Welfare System and give away type of inducements. The African Americans at least have a lot of conservative values and should be able to brought back to the republican party if only they can hear (and see) what these Democrats (Socialists) really stand for.
I’ve been wondering since at least the late Sixties why black Americans vote for democrats. I still haven’t figured it out, or at least not why their voting bloc is monolithic.
From the cotton plantation to the ghetto plantation to the liberal plantation, all courtesy of democrats.
Wake up folks. You’re not getting anywhere. Robert Byrd was a Klansman. No republican ever has been, even back in the day. George Wallace was a democrat.
How obvious is this, especially now with this latest insult coming out of DC?
This is a wonderful decision on the part of the Obama administration and the Democrats in the Senate, because it shows that their priorities are in the right place. Everyone focuses on the children, who of course don’t want to learn, and don’t really need educations anyway. The important constituency here is the teachers’ unions, which would be devastated by the impact of a voucher program that worked, especially an expanded one. Remember, Obama’s children don’t go to public school; someone else’s children do. The union is much more important to the Democratic party than some nameless poor minority person. It makes perfect sense for the Democratic party to support the constituency who supported them in the last election, and will support them again in the next. Quit whining about the children! We’ll waste more money on the public education system, and blame everything bad that happens on the Bush administration and the voucher program itself! The parents of these kids are going to vote Democrat regardless–we can do with them whatever we wish, and they’ll still vote Democrat. Who cares?
Dr T: Yes! Skip the NAACP and go to PTA meetings, union meetings, high schools, colleges and appeal to blacks over the heads of the filters. On a majority of issues blacks ought to be voting republican.
Why is it that the only ones who seemed to be concerned about this are conservative whites? Why don’t we see any outcry from liberal blacks about this anywhere? The answer is pretty simple. Liberals don’t care about the outcome, they care about the intention. They care about power more then they do about their own children. Residents of DC keep voting in these scumbags, so I frankly don’t care if their children get vouchers or not at this point. They can all just live in the swill that they have created for themselves.
22. James: And MLK was a republican.
2. Sk8: Glenn Beck interviewed a little girl and her mother, two nights. It was heartbreaking, because the girl looked like she had a lot of potential.
25. Rocketeer: I know how you feel, but I can’t also help but feeling there’s an opportunity here for some change of our own.
Geez, who cares? D.C. is 90%+ black anyway. They got their candidate, their very own HNIC. Now, he helps keep them enslaved. That’s what he’s supposed to do, isn’t it?
You go, Dems! Keep promoting that slavery. Oops, that ended, so they put in Jim Crow slavery-lite. That, too, ended, so they invented victimhood and destroyed the black family/marriage. Then, they got abortion, which is also just more slavery. (You are either a person, or you are chattel. You are either a baby with rights, or a fetus with none.) Now, let’s just take away any opportunity to break out of the bonds of victimhood, by consigning them to ignorance.
Sheesh, this was so predictable. Anyone really surprised? Seriously?
Sk8 Punk: @2 That is dead on.
Until we bring the wood to the left punks we will be punked.
It is way past time to fight the worthless left. In the street if need be.
For any who are interested here’s my personal story. I think it is instructive in this matter. I went to my Baptist Church for kindergarten. It was a good preschool. I then was enrolled by my parents in St. Camillus Academy for first grade. This was a catholic school run by nuns and suchlike. It was a private school. Discipline was extremely strict (don’t ask about the punishments for misbehavior: let’s just say corporal understates the truth by a long shot.) I proceeded from first through third grades at St. C. During Summer break between third and fourth grade, I found out that all of the neighborhood kids went to Corbin Independent School. I wanted to be around the neighborhood kids as they were my friends, so I talked my parents into enrolling me there. C.I.S. were not exactly private schools, but they weren’t county schools either. (The county schools were and remain some of the worst in the entire country.) As it stands, they were much better than the county schools in all aspects.
So, the fourth grade year started and I started at C.I.S. On the first day or so, the administrators at my new school gave me a test. I’m not exactly positive if it was an IQ test or what. But, after seeing the results, the administration put me into fifth grade. This being exactly the opposite of what I wanted (to be around my friends), I rebelled. (They even had to call my Mother in from work to calm me down.) Needless to say, they put me back in fourth grade. (Full disclosure: I’m not the fastest shooting star in the galaxy, but the superior education and discipline had advanced me at least one grade level above my peers.)
I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I had wanted to attend the county school instead. Would they have tried to advance me TWO grade levels? I guess not considering that the primary goals of teachers at those schools was to pass everybody and draw a paycheck regardless of the abilities of the students.
Just from my personal experience, I can attest to the difference that can be made by a good school with strict behavior standards and a rigorous curriculum. And here’s the thing: At St. C., I wasn’t even considered to be one of the smart students. Barely average if I remember correctly.
Here’s the bottom line, folks: A good education requires two things: Good schools and good parenting. I was very fortunate to have both. My parents cared about my education. So did my teachers. If either of those things are missing during the formative years, then the child has a much lesser chance of becoming a productive member of our society. Unfortunately, Washington, DC has just lost one half of that formula. The parenting in DC may be questionable at times, but the schooling definately isn’t. At least now it isn’t. It’s bad for the kids as anyone can see. Those kids that have been removed fron the good schools are now relegated to the underclass for life unless they have exceptionally dedicated parents.
regards
27. Marc Malone: said, “Geez, who cares? D.C. is 90%+ black anyway. They got their candidate, their very own HNIC. Now, he helps keep them enslaved. That’s what he’s supposed to do, isn’t it?”
NOT A NICE STATEMENT! I know you’re just kidding, but “HNIC?” I know the black leftists called Colin Powell a HN, but come on! And not only did they get their candidate but we got him too!
You said, “Now, let’s just take away any opportunity to break out of the bonds of victimhood, by consigning them to ignorance.”
Well, that’s not exactly accurate. Everybody, especially in the US, has choices between right and wrong that they can make regardless of their upbringing. Make the wrong choice and you’re relegated to asking if your customer would like fries with that burger. The social decay that is the norm in inner cities also affects the possibilities of the education of the youth thereof. A lot of the time, if you were raised in a morally bankrupt household, no matter the value of the schools you attend, you’re going to come up short in a competitive society.
regards
Where are all the Libs? I would think at least a few of those “brave” souls would be here arguing their side. All I hear are crickets… Come on guys, there has to be some good reasons why you think this is a good idea.
16. deguello:#8:E Don’t let the facts that public schools don’t work, get in the way of your leaving poor kids to rot in government schools.
That’s the entire point of school vouchers. Provide funds so poor kids CAN attend private schools.
The Libs are in favor of this for two reasons. First, the Teachers’ Union is their church. They never violate its doctrines and shun those who do. Second, white liberals never – and I mean never – allow their kids to attend public schools with more than a handful of blacks. In DC itself, where this abomination occurred, knock on any door in the NW and ask about what school the kids attend. You’ll be shocked! Shocked!
Are you still glad you voted for Obama?
Wow- Not one single brave liberal who will chime in to explain why they think this was a good idea. That speaks volumes!
I’m really shocked at the out rage about this. I’m a a big fan of Glenn Beck. We watch his show regularly but we were especially disappointed in Glenn Beck carring on about how the goverenment is so wrong for not paying for these poor families to go to better schools. This seems so contradictory from what he has said before. The poor/low income familes should have the same privileges as more wealth families, right? This is ridiculous!!! Going to a private school is not your right, it is a PRIVILEGE. You can get an education from a public school. Many poeple have went on from public schools to college and became very sucessful.
I have three young children that may husband and I are putting through private schools. We don’t make a lot of money. With the hurting economy my husband has had to take a pay cut just to keep his job. Our house isn’t great but it keeps us warm and dry and its a place to sleep. We are by no means wealthy but we work hard, just as I’m sure these parents that are getting the DC Voucher. However, the difference is WE DON’T EXCEPT THE GOVERENMENT TO GIVE ME HANDOUTS!!!!!!!!!! I think our founding fathers are rolling over in their graves on how lazy and gready people have become. If you don’t like the schools in your district then move or see if you can have your child transfered to another distrists public school. Or get another job, a side job, or cut back on your spending to have some extra money to pay for the extra privileges in life…Such as sending your kids to better, private schools. This is what is wrong with this country. Working hard and sacrifice is almost not existent. If the goverenment never started this program, no one would be whining that they are trying to take it away. Shouldn’t these people be happy that these kids got a free education for as long as they did? Of course, I would rather see my tax dollars going to children getting a better education rather than in the pockets of the politians. However, these parents should not “expect” that the goverenment should use tax dollar to send your kids to a private school.
good work on this interesting blog. keep it up. thanks