OBAMA’S LITTLE RED SCHOOLHOUSE

While Barack Obama's own children enjoy the best education money can buy, he wants to deny inner-city children the option of school choice, says Investor's Business Daily (IBD). Obama has been completely silent about the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program:

• The D.C. School Choice Act of 2003 established the federally funded voucher program that provides vouchers of up to $7,500 for students in kindergarten through 12th grade.
• It lets students attend one of 60 participating nonpublic schools.

But it was funded only through the 2008-09 school year. Democrats such as D.C.'s delegate to Congress, Eleanor Holmes Norton, want to kill the successful program, which shows that money is not the root of a good education:

• Norton and Obama seem oblivious to the fact that District school spending is at $13,400 per student -- third-highest in the nation.
• Yet in 2007, D.C. public schools ranked last in math scores and second-to-last in reading scores for all urban public school systems in the United States, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

Norton is leading the charge to block a mere $18 million in funding for the 2009-10 school year. This demonstration program serves some 1,900 students. A recent Education Department report found that nearly 90 percent of Opportunity scholarship students had higher reading scores than peers who didn't receive a scholarship. Not surprisingly, there are five applicants for every opening.

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