If Democrats Cared About 'the Children,' They Would Reinstate the DC Voucher Program

To close out 2009, the Democrats, who supposedly care so much about ‘the children,’ gave the DC children a special gift–they killed the successful voucher program–effectively banishing them back to horrid DC public schools. As I reported on New Year’s Eve 2009:

The Democrats have officially killed a successful private school voucher program banishing more than 3,300 low-income children back to the DC schools they so desperately wanted to escape. The Heartland Institute reports:

The leaders of D.C.’s school choice movement, Kevin P. Chavous (former D.C. Councilman) and Virginia Walden Ford (executive director of D.C. Parents for School Choice), today issued the following statement:

“House and Senate Appropriators this week ignored the wishes of D.C.’s mayor, D.C.’s public schools chancellor, a majority of D.C.’s city council, and more than 70 percent of D.C. residents and have mandated the slow death of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program. This successful school voucher program–for D.C.’s poorest families–has allowed more than 3,300 children to attend the best schools they have ever known.

The decision to end the program, a decision buried in a thousand-page spending bill and announced right before the holidays, destroys the hopes and dreams of thousands of D.C. families. Parents and children have rallied countless times over the past year in support of reauthorization and in favor of strengthening the OSP.

Yet, despite the clearly positive results and the proven success of this program, Sen. Dick Durbin, Rep. Jose Serrano, Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, and Secretary Arne Duncan worked together to kill the OSP. Funding the program only for existing children shrinks the program each year, compromises the federal evaluation of the program, denies entry to the siblings of existing participants, and punishes those children waiting in line by sentencing them to failing and often unsafe schools. [emphasis mine]

The final report on the OSP program was issued in June 2010. An editorial in the Washington Post agrees that ending the program should not have happened and deserves a second chance:

More than 3,700 students — most of them black or Hispanic — have been awarded scholarships, which provide up to $7,500 for private-school tuition, since the program’s start in 2004. Students currently enrolled, an estimated 1,300, will be allowed to continue until they graduate from high school. But for reasons that have more to do with opposition from teachers unions than what’s good for children, no new students are being accepted. Education Secretary Arne Duncan last year signaled the program’s demise by rescinding scholarships already offered, and congressional Democrats refused to reauthorize the program.

Meanwhile, the Democrats, under the guise of caring for the kids, looted the food stamp fund and rescinded significant military and other program funding–all to bailout teachers and stuff union coffers with taxpayer money for the upcoming election. Obama was quoted as well spewing his normal rhetoric:

“If we do nothing, these educators won’t be returning to the classroom this fall, and that won’t just deprive them of a paycheck, it will deprive the children and parents who are counting on them to provide a decent education,” Obama said in the White House Rose Garden shortly before the bill passed on Tuesday.

So, what we have is a crossroads of rhetoric that needs to be continually exposed and understood by voters who think the Democrats are the anointed party of the poor and working class. Obama and his Democrats in Congress tout “it’s for the children, it’s for the children,” and find billions in cuts and redirect appropriated military spending in order to give the illusion this is a deficit neutral teacher bailout emergency state education aid, but they cannot find $50 million over five–count ’em–five years for the DC school children to continue the voucher program even after its success was proven.

Here is the bottom line and challenge (because we know they read Big Government), will the Democrats reinstate and fund the DC school voucher program immediately for the sake of the children–and even expand it? Or, will they continue to only stuff teacher and union pockets with taxpayer money? It’s the Democrats next move or my checkmate.