When President Obama took office, one of his first orders of business was to end Washington D.C.\’s Opportunity Scholarship program., which gave children – the vast majority of them Black – an opportunity to escape public schools that were not teaching them…and in which academically motivated children were targeted for being, among other things “too White”.
The program was restored when Republicans took back the House of Representatives in 201l…and Mr. Obama has been attempting to shut it down ever since.
This, of course, did not affect Mr. Obama\’s own children, Sasha and Malia, both of whom went to Sidwell Friends School and got the best possible education available.
Hey, nothing was too good for the Obamas…but those other kids? Send \’em back to educational hell.
Why did he do this? Because school voucher programs are a thorn in the side of the teachers\’ unions. They demonstrate that Black inner city children can be motivated, can learn and can succeed – which, horror of horrors, that might give some folks the damaging opinion that public schools could be doing a far better job.
Why, information like this might even result in demands that public schools get serious about removing nonperforming teachers. and isolating troublemaking students so classrooms would not be disrupted and the rest of the children could learn.
We can\’t have that, can we?
And in case you think the Obama administration\’s effort to appease teachers\’ unions at the cost of children\’s educatation was restricted entirely to D.C., read this excerpt from George Will\’s latest column and you\’ll know better:
Itis as remarkable as it is repulsive, the ingenuity with which theObama administration uses the regulatory state\’s intricacies toadvance progressivism\’s project of breaking nongovernmentalinstitutions to government\’s saddle. Eager to sacrifice low-incomechildren to please teachers unions, the JusticeDepartment wants to destroy Wisconsin’sschool choice program. Feigning concern about access for disabledchildren, the department aims to handicap all disadvantaged childrenby denying their parents access to school choices of the sortaffluent government lawyers enjoy.
Wisconsin\’sschool choice program was pioneered by an American hero,Mississippi-born AnnettePolly Williams, who died Nov. 9 at age 77. During her threedecades in Wisconsin\’s legislature, she overcame the opposition offellow Democrats to offering education choices to low-income parents.At the end of her life, however, she saw an African American attorneygeneral, serving an African American president, employing torturedlegal reasoning in an attempt to bankrupt private schools thatenlarge the education options of disadvantaged children.
Closingthe voucher program is the obvious objective of the teachers unionsand hence of the Obama administration. Herding children from thechoice schools back into government schools would swell the ranks ofunionized teachers, whose union dues fund the Democratic Party as itprofesses devotion to “diversity” and the downtrodden.
This is nothing short of a war on Black children. And the war is being waged by Barack Obama, eric holder, and their henchmen – on behalf of the teachers\’ unions……with all their money and all their organizational capabilities on election day.
The logic seems to be “Who cares if some Black kids get screwed. Almost all of their parents vote Democrat anyway, so where\’s the benefit to us?”
I have been writing about this sickening policy for years. I thank you, Mr. Wills, for writing about it as well.
And thanks a lump, mainstream media, for telling as little about this to the general public, all these years.
Keep \’em ignorant, and you own \’em.
