According to Pajamas Media, the Obama administration and the U.S. Senate purposely sat on the results of a congressionally mandated school voucher program in Washington D.C. until after they could terminate it.
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.
This should really come as little surprise given what we have learned about Obama in his first 100 days. Obama is an unwavering ideologist and facts be damned. Here is what he said about public schools and vouchers at the 99th NAACP Convention in July 2008 :
We’ll make sure that every child in this country gets a world-class education from the day they’re born until the day they graduate from college. What McCain is offering amounts to little more than the same tired rhetoric about vouchers. We need to move beyond the same debate we’ve been having for the past 30 years when we haven’t gotten anything done. We need to fix & improve our public schools, not throw our hands up and walk away from them. We need to uphold the ideal of public education, but we also need reform. That’s why I’ve introduced a comprehensive strategy to recruit an army of new quality teachers to our communities–and to pay them more & give them more support. We’ll invest in early childhood education programs so that our kids don’t begin the race of life behind the starting line and offer a $4,000 tax credit to make college affordable for anyone who wants to go. Because as the NAACP knows better than anyone, the fight for social justice and economic justice begins in the classroom.
The fact that Obama and Democratic senators willfully killed a successful voucher program that held real hope and change for some disadvantaged children should come as no surprise from the only Ill. senator who spoke against a bill that would have protected babies who survived late term labor-induced abortions.
