Juan Williams, Senior Correspondent for NPR as well as a contributor for Fox News, hammers Our Lord and Savior Barack Hussein Obama for gutting the school voucher program for Washington, D.C., as a wet sloppy kiss to the National Extortion Association.
The National Education Association and other teachers’ unions have put millions into Democrats’ congressional campaigns because they oppose Republican efforts to challenge unions on their resistance to school reform and specifically their refusal to support ideas such as performance-based pay for teachers who raise students’ test scores.
By going along with Secretary Duncan’s plan to hollow out the D.C. voucher program this president, who has spoken so passionately about the importance of education, is playing rank politics with the education of poor children. It is an outrage.
Of course, Arne Duncan is only going to do with America’s schools what he did with Chicago’s. You can read our coverage about what a trainwreck he left in the Windy City here and here.
Williams also highlights the hypocrisy of many leading Democrats and liberals in Washington, D.C., who refuse to send their own children to D.C. public schools but block reform of one of the nation’s worst systems.
It is really upsetting to see that the Heritage Foundation has discoverd that 38 percent of the members of Congress made the choice to put their children in private schools. Of course, Secretary Duncan has said he decided not to live in Washington, D.C. because he did not want his children to go to public schools there. And President Obama, who has no choice but to live in the White House, does not send his two daughters to D.C. public schools, either. They attend a private school, Sidwell Friends, along with two students who got there because of the voucher program.
It’s the same all over the place. Government-run education isn’t about education; it’s about maintaining the power for the educational bureaucrats and the teachers union and milking the taxpayers for all they can. Plus, brainwashing the kids to become good wards of the statists.
Says Rachel Abrams of The Weekly Standard:
This unconscionable, indefensible decision to deprive poor minority children of any chance to escape the ghastly conditions and even worse teaching offered up by the District of Columbia public school system–which will not affect Mr. Duncan’s own children, or Mr. Obama’s, or the children of the “38 percent of the members of Congress [who] made the choice to put their children in private schools”–is, as Williams eloquently puts it, a “sin against our children.”
