Victims of Duplicitous Demagogues

Since the making of this video, unfortunately, President Obama signed the $410 billion Omnibus Spending Bill dealing the death blow to the District of Columbia Opportunity Scholarship Program, although his spokesman says he will work to reverse the provision in the Bill that terminates the program. I'm not holding my breath.

There are 209 public schools in the District of Columbia. A total of 78,057 students attend (or are registered in) those 209 schools. Sixty-six thousand and eighty-two (66,082) of those 78,057 students are black. It is undisputed that the public schools in the District of Columbia are, to put it mildly, inferior. If you think that sounds like fertile ground for an experiment in a school choice program, you would agree with the Republican congress of 2004 that enacted the District of Columbia Opportunity Scholarship Program, and approved its funding for five years. Here are some interesting facts about this groundbreaking program:

1. It provided scholarships of up to $7,500 for about 2,000 students each year to attend the private school of their choice.
2. At the start of the 2007-08 school year, there were 1,903 K-12 students using about $12 million in scholarship funds in 54 District of Columbia private schools.
3. The average income of the families participating in the program was $22,736 – just barely above the federal poverty level for a family of four.
4. After three years, the students in the program scored 3.7 months higher on reading than students who remained in the D.C. public schools.
5. Students who came into the program when it first started had a 19-month advantage in reading after three years in private schools.

Such a program, according to the current Democratic congress, has to be scrapped. The Delegate for the District of Columbia, Eleanor Holmes Norton, when explaining why this highly successful program had to be shut down proclaimed: “We have to protect the children, who are the truly innocent victims here, but I can tell you that the Democratic congress is not about to extend this program.” One gets used to disingenuous statements from Washington politicians, but this one has to make the most egregious list for this year. She is blaming the Republicans for creating a program that has been giving poor black kids a chance at a better education, because now the Democrats have to close it down to please their major constituents. She’s right about the victims; she’s wrong about the perpetrators. She went so far as to label the program, “controversial.”

Let's see, “controversy” is defined as a dispute between sides holding opposing views. We know that on one side of this “controversy” we have the students and their parents who want the program continued because it is showing great results. Who could possibly be on the other side of this “controversy” and thereby against affording the opportunity to young students to better themselves? It has to be someone or some group who holds sway over the Democratic majority in Congress and is looking out for themselves.

The National Education Association (NEA) is one of two national teachers unions. The other is the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). The following statistics for the NEA are from the Education Policy Center.

1. The NEA has 2.7 million dues paying members.
2. From September 2004 to August 2005, it received $341 million dollars, $295 million of which came from membership dues.
3. In the same year, the union spent $25 million on “political activities and lobbying.”
4. In the same year, the union spent $65.5 million on “contributions, gifts and grants.”
5. In the same year, the union spent $56.8 million on union administration.
6. Since 1990, the NEA has given between 88 and 99 percent of its political contributions to the Democrats.

Why are these statistics important? Because they show what those poor, mostly black, students (and their parents) are up against when they try to better themselves by going to better schools.

Here are a few additional interesting facts:

1. According to statistics provided by the District of Columbia Public Schools, the average cost per year to educate a student is $8,322.
2. According to the Washington Post, that average cost is closer to $25,000 per student when all costs are taken into account.
3. The average cost per student for the approximately 2,000 students receiving an Opportunity Scholarship is $7,500.

So, if all 78,057 students in the District of Columbia public schools were allowed to enroll in the Opportunity Scholarship Program, and chose to do so, it would save the D. C. tax payers more than $64 million per year – and that’s using the dubious lowball figure of $8,322 per student provided by District of Columbia Public Schools. The budget submitted for school year 2010 by the District of Columbia Public Schools totals $782,530,186. I know what Mark Twain said about statistics, and wouldn’t argue with him, but it is undeniable that the public schools in the District of Columbia (with the help of the Democrats in Congress) are not only depriving the students of a decent chance at an education, they are also spending a lot of taxpayer money doing that.

This post cannot end without laying the blame for the demise of this outstanding program where it belongs: at the feet of Richard Durbin, the Democrat Senator from Illinois, who submitted the language in the spending bill that effectively ends the program next year. You might remember him as the guy who likened our military troops at Guantanamo to “Nazis, Soviets in their gulag, and Pol Pot.”