Obama & Education

or perhaps this should be called Obama Sacrifices Schoolchildren's Futures to pay political debts to teachers unions:

Not 'for the children' [Andrew Stuttaford]

Over at Reason, Shikha Dalmia takes a look at Barack '"no you can't" Obama's assault on school choice in D.C., and doesn't like what she sees:
...one would have thought an administration that ran on the theme of hope would do anything to nurture a program that offers a way out of D.C.'s hope-killing factories and into other schools.
Instead, the Obama administration has done everything in its power to strangle it. Obama cheerfully signed a spending bill that gratuitously included a provision phasing out the program next year unless Congress expressly reauthorizes it. Of course, making water flow uphill will be easier than winning approval from a Democrat-controlled Congress with strong ties to the teachers' unions who contribute tens of millions of dollars to Democratic campaigns.

As if that wasn't a big enough obstacle, no sooner had the ink dried on the law than Education Secretary Arne Duncan rescinded the scholarship offer to children admitted for next year, making the program's shuttering a fait accompli.

And now it turns out that, while the program's fate was being sealed in Congress, the administration deliberately sat on a study its own Department of Education completed weeks earlier. Why? Because the study found not that the program was failing, but that it was succeeding.

[snip]

President Obama has promised to lead the most ethical administration, one immune from the corruption of special-interest politics. Yet he offered not even a pretense of resistance to the biggest Democratic interest group: teachers unions—even though it is evident that what's driving their opposition to this program is not principle but naked self-interest.

And then there's this:

. . . among the children who will have to return to public school once this program is scrapped are two of his daughter's schoolmates, who were using their vouchers to attend Sidwell. It's sad that Obama's message of hope and change doesn't include children like them.

Ouch.