Obama's Children

Obama’s children do not go to government schools. Obama’s children go to expensive private school at “prestigious Washington Sidwell Friends School”. Until now students from poor homes in Washington could receive vouchers and also go to school at Sidwell Friends School.

No more. The Democrats have cancelled the voucher program, meaning that students previously attending Sidwell Friends School using voucher will now have to go back to the government schools.

Obama’s children will not have to go to government schools, ever.

Nat Hentoff writes,

Of the 1,700 students starting in kindergarten, in this private-school voucher program, 90 percent are black and 9 percent are Hispanic. First the House and then the Senate inserted into the $410 billion omnibus spending bill language that will eliminate the $7,500 annual scholarships for these poor children after the next school year. It could only be reauthorized by the same Democrat-controlled Congress and the anti-voucher District of Columbia Council.

Fat chance!

Andre J. Coulson, director of the Cato Institute's Center for Educational Freedom, supplies the answer. (I [Hentoff] am a senior fellow, specializing in civil liberties and education at Cato.) Wrote Coulson in the Feb. 26 New York Post:

"Because they saw it as a threat to their political power, Democrats in Washington appear willing to extinguish the dreams of a few thousand poor kids to protect their political base." Teachers' unions are a vital part of that base, many of whose members fear competition. Not all of them. Randi Weingarten, who is also head of New York's United Federation of Teachers, has started UFT charter schools in that state. But, like Obama, she is silent about stripping these OSP kids of their alternatives. And the largest teachers union, the National Education Association, urged Congress to kill the D.C. program.

I suggest that there is slightly more to it than that. The Left is jealous of its control of the schooling agenda and the educational contraction for the masses. It is fully part of the “equal outcome” egalitarianism of the socialist Left. Only the elites escape this; how many children of the Democratic majority attend government schools? Certainly Obama’s don’t. But if you are a poor black in D.C., yours will be forced to.

Egalitarianism is always a push downwards. It is the opposite of liberty and the opportunity and encouragement to rise above. Despite the Left’s avowed love of the poor, the programs are always designed to restrain any desire to rise above.

In education this has been the case since John Dewey redefined education as a Pavlovian training technique for producing workers. The government schools now consider the child which might be “left behind” to be more important than the best and brightest, who are merely trained to pass “the test”.

But Congress has now conquered the poor in D.C. Children of the poor in D.C. will be maleducated just the same as all the rest who are subjected to government schooling. And the teachers unions will get more money.