Education: Obama's First Crashing Pillar

Obama’s agenda is now labeled the “New Foundation.” "New" Deal, "New" Frontier, "New" Foundation, get it? Upon a new, rock foundation, Obama says he’ll build his economic house with “five pillars”, one of which is education. (Obama loves pillars; see here, and recall the columns that last summer festooned his Denver acceptance speech stage [picture].) But Obama’s education “pillar” increasingly looks anything but “new,” more like some cardboard prop left over from a teachers’ union convention. This is tragedy.

The Denver Post’s David Harsanyi is following the story. He writes that while Obama’s Education secretary Arne Duncan argues we have an obligation to disregard politics to do whatever is "good for the kids," his department has buried “a politically inconvenient study” that showed “unquestionable and pervasive improvement” among District of Columbia students who won vouchers, compared with the kids who didn't. The department not only disregarded the report but also “issued a gag order on any discussion about it.”

According to Harsanyi, Duncan's “feeble argument” against the D.C. voucher program he and congressional Democrats killed is that

because only 1% of children were able to "escape" (and boy, that's some admission) from D.C. public schools through this program, it was not worth saving. So, you may ask, why not allow the 1% to turn into 2% or 10% instead of scrapping the program? . . . Duncan can't be honest, of course. Not when it's about politics and payback to unions who are about as interested in reforming education as teenagers are in calculus. . . Democrats who killed this scholarship program, specifically designed for disadvantaged kids, are . . . deeply hypocritical and dishonest.

Now that the unions have killed D.C.’s voucher program, their next stop, according to University of Arkansas education professor Jay Greene, is charter schools. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Green notes

Many proponents of school choice, especially Democrats, have tried to appease teachers unions by limiting their support to charter schools while opposing private school vouchers. They hope that by sacrificing vouchers, the unions will spare charter schools from political destruction.

But these reformers are starting to learn that appeasement on vouchers only whets unions appetites for eliminating all meaningful types of choice. . . In New York, for example, the unions have backed a new budget that effectively cuts $51.5 million from charter-school funding, even as district-school spending can continue to increase . . .

New York charters already receive less money per pupil than [regular schools, and u]nions are also seeking to strangle charter schools with red tape. . .Eva Moskowitz, former chair of the New York City Council education committee and now a charter school operator, has characterized this new push against charters as a "backlash" led by "a union-political-educational complex that is trying to halt progress and put the interests of adults above the interests of children." She is right.

As with vouchers, the studies of charter schools, according to Greene, “have consistently shown that students learn more in charter schools.” In New York City, students accepted by lottery to charter schools were significantly outpacing the academic progress of their peers who lost the lottery and had to return to regular schools. And middle-school students at charters in Florida and Chicago who continued into charter high schools were significantly more likely to graduate and go on to college than those forced to return to regular high schools because charter high schools were unavailable.

Greene fears that “vouchers made the world safe for charters by drawing union fire. But now that the unions have the voucher threat under control, charters are in trouble.”