A post on National Review's The Corner blog arouses a months-dormant education topic: vouchers in Washington, D.C.
An overlooked group of winners from Tuesday's landslide election is low-income children living in Washington, D.C.? Speaker Boehner is likely to make reviving the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program a priority in the next Congress, setting the stage for an interesting confrontation with President Obama.
The post's author, Carrie Lukas, writes about Boehner's exhibited passion for education, and especially for improving schooling for low-income kids (e.g., co-sponsoring charity events with the late Senator Kennedy, being a force for passage of the No Child Left Behind act). ?He's known for his tendency to choke up when talking about the need to give poor children a chance to attend better schools,? Lukas notes. She continues:
After President Obama's election, Boehner led the Republican effort in Congress to save the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program, which was helping thousands of low-income children attend private schools in the nation's capital.? But Democrats and the Obama administration followed the teachers union's orders ? killing the D.C. voucher program in 2009. Reviving this symbolic program will now be a priority for conservatives.
A priority for conservatives such symbolic revivification will be. It is unfortunate, though, that this ideological battle on Capitol Hill will actually be fought in the classrooms of Washington, D.C., and that poor, black children are the pawns on this chessboard. The voucher program, let us not forget, is more than a ?symbol.?
?Liam Julian, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow