So, in case you weren't aware, President Bush is a huge fan of school vouchers and created the first federally funded education voucher program. In DC, 1900 students were able to escape the torment of their every day lives and the horrible, terrifying DC public education system.....by way of $7500 vouchers to the private or religious school of their choice. [WaPo]
Not that I don't appreciate how terrible the state of DC's public education system is. I know I wouldn't want to have to rely on Michelle Rhee to provide me with a sound education. And I fully support providing students with access to a good education, but seriously, Spellings herself writes in the article that the problem is "institutionalized failure." So clearly, we should be paying kids to go to religious schools instead of using that money to, you know, fix the system.
Spellings even lays out the statistics: more than 7000 students have applied for the federal scholarships. The federal program costs $74mn; money that, according to Spellings, we might as well use to pull kids out of the DC public school system because, hey, if it weren't for the federal program, the District wouldn't receive it anyway! So what they hey! Let's drain the DC public school system of its impetus to reform.
Spellings even states that 86% of the students receiving federal vouchers would otherwise be in schools that "did not meet 'adequate yearly progress' goals in reading and math for 2006-07." This means that an atrociously high percentage of DC schools are undoubtedly sub-par and unable to provide their students with a comprehensive education.
So where does the $74mn come into the picture? Here's my hypothesis: sending a tiny percentage of DC public school students to private and religious schools costs a similarly tiny fraction of what it would cost to reform the school system that continues to fail the thousands of students who do not receive federal vouchers.
The silver lining, however, may come in the form of increased attention paid to the state of DC's public school system. Hopefully, while the parents of 1900 students are lauding the greatness of the federal voucher program, the parents of all of the other students in the system will take the opportunity to remind Mayor Fenty and Chancellor Rhee just who they're here to serve.
Money is the mother's milk of politics, and that, my friends, is the name of the game.
