"You can no longer dismiss this as Catholic or right-wing"

Great news on the common sense approach to educational reform known as school vouchers. I blogged on this before. Obama has got to pay his union buddies, but the public is unconvinced. Maybe it's because he can afford to send his kids HERE?

Here are some excerpts:

"You can no longer dismiss this as Catholic or right-wing," says Jeanne Allen of the Center on Education Reform, a Washington think tank.

Allen has pushed for vouchers and charter schools for decades. She originally thought the shift was generational. "But I actually think it has more to do with more-principled people who understand and have seen how badly the existing system has hurt minority kids."

While Chavous and others say vouchers are far from the perfect solution, they're worth offering to students in the nation's bleakest public schools. Urban Democrats, he says, "see that what's happening to our kids in these schools just is unacceptable — we need to look at all options."

It's the kids, stupid.

The party split will be on display Wednesday when former Democratic Sen. Joseph Lieberman, now an independent, chairs a hearing on Washington, D.C.'s federally funded Opportunity Scholarship Program. It's perhaps the most high-profile voucher hearing of the past five years, coming a few days after two prominent Democrats, Dianne Feinstein and Robert Byrd, joined a handful of Republicans to criticize President Obama for letting funding for D.C.'s program lapse.

Lieberman's Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee is scheduled to hear testimony from families whose children attend private schools through the program. He'll also hear from Williams and Bruce Stewart, head of Sidwell Friends School, where Obama's two daughters are enrolled.

I was thinking: if Bill Clinton was the first black president, maybe Barack Obama is the first Uncle Tom president? Just a thought.

Mary Lord, a member of the D.C. State Board of Education, says the statistics may be misleading because many of the voucher kids attend the city's worst schools. She says the voucher, which provides up to $7,500 a year, gives "enormous bang for the buck," considering that the city's per-pupil budget for year is, by one estimate, nearly $17,000 per student.

"It's a no-brainer to me," she says.

The difference is $9,500.00 per kid. I did that in my head, aren't you impressed. It's a no-brainer for both Ms. Lord and me, but for the tired old NEA-whipped politicians, math is hard.

Don't blame me, I voted for Bartlet

Good piece on vouchers in DC and Barack Obama's latest opportunity to really be different.

The most honest, decent, and thoughtful Democratic president of modern times, Jed Bartlet, was surprised to find himself supporting vouchers on an episode of NBC’s “The West Wing.” Bartlet’s staff summoned the mayor of Washington, D.C., to the White House to plot strategy for his veto of a Republican-backed bill to provide vouchers for a few students in D.C. schools–and was stunned to discover that the mayor and the D.C. school board president both supported the program, as indeed Mayor Anthony Williams and School Board President Peggy Cooper Cafritz did in real life. Why? the president asked the mayor. “After six years of us promising to make schools better next year,” the mayor replied, “we’re ready to give vouchers a try….We spend over $13,000 per student — that’s more than anywhere else in the country — and we don’t have a lot to show for it.” (As Andrew Coulson wrote recently in the Washington Post, the real cost is actually much higher than that.)

The piece contains the West Wing clip and ends with the question of whether or not the real congress and President will care about the people enough to keep the voucher program intact. My guess is that the Democrats in congress and Barack Obama will once again play the "let 'em eat cake" card. Vouchers just ain't politically correct.