Redstate

By Pejman Yousefzadeh Posted in Barack Obama | Policy | School Choice — Comments (5) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

If "Change You Can Believe In" is meant to be more than just a slogan, Barack Obama will not hesitate to stand up to people like Eleanor Holmes Norton, who proposes to utterly and callously shut down school choice in Washington, DC:

Barack and Michelle Obama send their children to an upscale private school. When asked about it during last year's YouTube debate, Sen. Obama responded that it was "the best option" for his children.

Several hundred low-income parents in our nation's capital have also sent their children to private and parochial schools, with the help of a federal program that provides Opportunity Scholarships. Like Mr. and Mrs. Obama, most of these parents are African-American. And like Mr. and Mrs. Obama, they too believe the schools they've chosen represent the "best option" for their children.

Now these parents have a question for Mr. Obama. Is Mr. Change-You-Can-Believe-In going to let his fellow Democrats take away the one change that is working for them?

Just a few days ago, Democrat Eleanor Holmes Norton (D.C.'s congressional delegate) told the Washington Post that "the Democratic Congress is not about to extend this program." Today that program will come under the congressional spotlight, when a House subcommittee takes up the annual appropriations bill for the District of Columbia that includes funding for Opportunity Scholarships for the 2009-10 school year. If Mrs. Norton and her allies in the teachers unions have their way, hundreds of African-American children with these scholarships will be forced back into one of the most miserable public school systems in the United States.

There is ample evidence that school choice is the best policy to implement. And since Barack Obama assures us that he wants to help us turn a page in our politics, it would be great to see him lead by example and take members of his own party to task for hanging on to an outdated, unworkable, intellectually and morally cruel education policy while advocating the utter and complete ditching of a policy that can significantly enhance the state of education in the United States by leaps and bounds and which is craved by lower-income families as a way of helping get their kids out of poverty.

Of course, if Obama doesn't follow through on his promises of change and decides to back the educational antediluvians in his party, then I guess we will know what to make of his slogan, won't we?