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"Of the 1,700 students, starting in kindergarten, in this private-school voucher program, 90 percent are black and 9 percent are Hispanic. First the House and then the Senate inserted into the $410 billion omnibus spending bill language that will eliminate the $7,500 annual scholarships for these poor children after the next school year. It could only be reauthorized by the same Democrat-controlled Congress and the anti-voucher District of Columbia Council.
"Fat chance!
"A key executioner in the Senate of the OSP was Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois. I have written admiringly of Durbin's concern for human rights abroad and his trenchant criticism of the CIA's rendition-to-torture history. How about education rights in the nation's capital?
"Andre J. Coulson, director of the Cato Institute's Center for Educational Freedom, supplies the answer. (I am a senior fellow, specializing in civil liberties and education at Cato.) Wrote Coulson in the Feb. 26 New York Post:
"'Because they saw it as a threat to their political power, Democrats in Washington appear willing to extinguish the dreams of a few thousand poor kids to protect their political base.' Teachers' unions are a vital part of that base, many of whose members fear competition. Not all of them. Randi Weingarten, who is also head of New York's United Federation of Teachers, has started UFT charter schools in that state. But, like Obama, she is silent about stripping these OSP kids of their alternatives. And the largest teachers union, the National Education Association, urged Congress to kill the D.C. program.
"Two of these children, Sarah and James Parker, attend Washington's prestigious Sidwell Friends School. At the end of the next school year and the end of their scholarships, among the classmates they'll be leaving are Sasha and Malia Obama – who, of course, do not need voucher money."
