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Dayton Daily News education reporter Scott Elliott writes about schools, kids, teaching and learning.
Home > Blogs > Get on the Bus > Archives > 2009 > May > 11 > Entry
Will Obama walk the walk on DC vouchers?
it looked last week like President Obama wriggled loose from a potentially sticky controversy when he announced support for the District of Columbia’s voucher program. The program had been conspicuously left out of earlier budget plans, with deafening silence from Democrats who appeared to be hoping the program — reviled by some in their coalition — would die quietly.
It didn’t. Voucher supporters raised alarms, pointing out that the program’s demise might actually result in some classmates of the president’s children at their private school being tossed back into the city school district. An awkward potential image, to say the least.
But Obama’s support of the program is both weak and conditional. He supports adding $12 million to the budget to keep kids currently in the program at private school until they graduate but he opposes allowing new kids in. Also, there is no guarantee voucher opponents in congress won’t still kill funding. Whether Obama actually fights for the vouchers in the budget process remains to be seen.
And either way, he has set in motion a process that will slowly kill the program at a time when even the reform-minded head of the school system, the blunt-talking Michelle Rhee, would likely admit that many of the city’s schools are at the moment failing to educate kids. Even if change comes and big improvements are made, they will take time.
This debate is heavily political, with lots of baggage on both sides of the aisle. But Obama may not be able to dance around it, as it is very easy for voucher supporters to challenge the disconnect between his rhetoric and his actions if he does.
Many hardcore liberals hate the DC voucher program. First, a committed group simply believes vouchers are morally wrong. They view them as taking money from poor public schools and giving it to wealthy private schools, dooming the vast majority of public school kids to ever shrinking funds for reform while rewarding just a lucky few. They believe the money is better spent improving public schools. Others on the left are allied to teachers unions, who both oppose vouchers on the moral grounds and out of self-interest — they want money for public education kept in the system.
In the case of the DC voucher program, there is also the political reality. Many on the left chafed when Republicans pushed what they viewed as a “conservative” program through and “forced” it on DC, one of America’s most liberal cities. For some, the political winds have changed and it’s payback time.
All of these considerations, of course, miss just the point that Obama has said he is all about on education — ignoring politics and focusing on what works. Just last month the administration released a study that found modest gains in reading for DC voucher kids (no gain in math) and suggested the benefits of private school may grow the longer the student attends. What did the Obama administration do with that information? It released it late on a Friday afternoon, a favorite Washington trick for burying bad news on a slow news day.
And even Obama’s solution — keeping kids who are in the program but blocking new kids from entering — fails to address his own core principle of asking “does it work?” If so, why keep kids out?
Here’s my idea for a better solution. Allow new kids into the program, but only if they are assigned to the very worst performing DC public schools. That way, the opportunity remains to close down the voucher program — as schools improve, there will be fewer desperately poor performers and, thus, fewer voucher slots. At the same time, keep monitoring voucher student performance in private school so we can see if the program is actually raising achievement.
This approach keeps the kids and their needs in the equation. The other ideas, so far, have left the kids out.
Permalink | Comments (3) | Post your comment | Categories: Charter Schools and School Choice
Comments
By tom
May 12, 2009 9:29 AM | Link to this
Vouchers are educating children but they do not support a union so Obama can not support vouchers.By Oldprof
May 12, 2009 8:34 AM | Link to this
Once again the mantra of “lowest-performing schools”, Scott? We’ve found again and again that little or no improvement is made by moving those students to other places—or by firing and replacing the entire school staff. Those “lowest performing schools” are burdened with the lowest performing students—mired deeply in poverty and a subculture that despises education and prizes violence. There are ways to improve those schools, but legislators want to go for feel-good legislation and bad-mouthing teachers rather than educating themselves and implementing workable solutions. Vouchers are NOT worth the turmoil.By TRS
May 11, 2009 8:38 PM | Link to this
This is where the rubber hits the road. Does the NEA hold more sway than educating the kids?