The Education President

Apparently when Barack Obama says he wants to be the "education president" he doesn't mean that he actually wants to provide a quality education to children. What he means is that his administration is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the National Education Association (i.e., the teachers' unions).

Juan Williams has an excellent (and infuriating) column on how the Obama administration is dismantling a very popular and clearly successful school voucher program in the District of Columbia. This is a program that helps get poor kids out of failing D.C. schools and into private schools where they have a much better chance at a real education, all without taking a dime out of the D.C. public schools' budgets. Win-win, right? Wrong.

The teachers' unions and the N.E.A. don't like private schools, and they don't like voucher programs, because they are a threat to the growth of their membership rolls and to their members' pay raises. And because the N.E.A. doesn't like these programs, the Democrats and Obama don't like them either - poor black kids in D.C. be damned.

What makes this even more annoying in the current political climate is that Obama's decision isn't about money. I mean, it isn't about money in the usual sense of "we don't have the money to pay for this." Congress just passed a gazillion dollar stimulus package intended to fund things a lot less important than the education of poor kids. But no vouchers for you! However, this decision is about money in the modern political sense. The N.E.A. and their fellow union travelers give a lot of money every election cycle to elect and keep in power Democrat politicians who agree with their views of education policy. Obama and congressional Democrats are unwilling to risk losing any of that campaign money, and the direct result is more poor kids in D.C. needlessly trapped in bad schools.

Remember that the next time you hear Obama or any other Democrat preaching from their soap box about those greedy, selfish, mean, evil, racist Republicans. You know, those same Republicans who believe poor black kids in D.C. deserve a chance at the same quality education as the rich kids living in the White House.

Stay classy Obama.