Can Arne Duncan Fix All the Schools?

Posted by David Boaz

Education Secretary Arne Duncan, responding to a new study showing that District of Columbia students using vouchers to attend private schools outperformed their peers in public schools — a study that he has been accused of keeping under wraps until after Congress voted to end the D.C. voucher program — told the Washington Post of his concerns:

“Big picture, I don’t see vouchers as being the answer,” Duncan said in a recent meeting with Washington Post editors and reporters. “You can pull two kids out, you can pull three kids out, and you’re leaving 97, 98 percent behind. You need to help all those kids. The way you help them is by challenging the status quo where it’s not working and coming back with dramatically better schools and doing it systemically.”

But why would vouchers only serve two or three percent of the kids? Only because Congress limited the size of the voucher program. Thousands more families have applied for public or private vouchers than there were vouchers available. If the District of Columbia took its mammoth school budget and divided it into equal vouchers or scholarships for each child in the city, Arne Duncan could bet his bottom dollar that a lot more than two percent of the families would head for private or parochial schools. His fear is not that vouchers only serve two percent of the kids, it’s that a full-scale choice program would reveal just how much demand for alternatives there is.

But note also: Duncan says that he wants to “help all those kids . . . by . . . coming back with dramatically better schools.” But he ran the Chicago schools for seven years, and he was not able to make a single school good enough for Barack and Michelle Obama to send their own children there.

Wouldn’t the 97 or 98 percent of the kids in Chicago whose parents couldn’t afford the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools have benefited from having a choice?

D.C. Vouchers: Better Results at a QUARTER the Cost

Posted by Andrew J. Coulson

The latest federal study of the D.C. voucher program finds that voucher students have pulled significantly ahead of their public school peers in reading and perform at least as well as public school students in math. It also reports that the average tuition at the voucher schools is $6,620. That is ONE QUARTER what the District of Columbia spends per pupil on education ($26,555), according to the District’s own fiscal year 2009 budget.

Better results at a quarter the cost. And Democrats in Congress have sunset its funding and are trying to kill it. Shame on them.

If President Obama believes his own rhetoric on the need for greater efficiency in government education spending and for improved educational opportunities, he should work with the members of his own party to continue and grow this program.

Obama First Dem President to Support Vouchers

Posted by Andrew J. Coulson

Through his press secretary Robert Gibbs, president Obama has declared that he will reverse congressional Democrats’ phase-out of the DC Opportunity Scholarships program. The scholarships make private schooling affordable for 1,700 poor DC children, most of whom would be forced back into the District’s broken public school system if it were to end.

However — yes, there’s always a however — there’s every indication that president Obama will do the minimum necessary to keep the program going at its current size, and will not help to expand it.

This is nevertheless a crucial milestone. There is finally a major national Democratic leader who is beginning to catch up to his state-level peers. Democrats all around the country have been supporting and signing small education tax credit programs because they realize that these programs are win-win: good for their constituents and good for their long-term political futures.

The old guard of the Democratic party — typified by congressional leaders — still imagines that school choice is bad for them. They still think that they can roll back time to a period when the public school monopoly was inviolate. That time has passed. Real educational freedom is spreading — slowly — around the country. That is not going to stop.

The last Democrats to be found jamming their fingers into the dike, hoping to stop the flight to educational freedom, will find their political careers swept away when that dike finally crumbles.

Ed Secretary: DC Schools Have ‘More Money than God,’ But They’re Still Lousy

Posted by Adam Schaeffer

You know, I might not agree with federal education secretary Arne Duncan on a lot of things, but I could really get to like this guy if he keeps talking like this:

History has shown that money alone does not drive school improvement, Duncan said, pointing to the District of Columbia, where public school students consistently score near the bottom on national reading and math tests even though the school system spends more per pupil than its suburban counterparts do.

“D.C. has had more money than God for a long time, but the outcomes are still disastrous,” Duncan said in an interview with Washington Post editors and reporters.

No Taxation Without Representation? OK, I’ll Take the No Taxation

Posted by Ilya Shapiro

The Senate is taking up, and looks ready to pass, legislation granting the District of Columbia full representation in the House of Representatives.  And the bill is co-sponsored by Utah’s Orrin Hatch, whose state would also get one additional House member — but only until 2012, when the new census will again reapportion representatives nationwide.

The problem (setting aside the cheap politics of adding one safe seat for each party) is that the DC Voting Rights Act is facially unconstitutional. The plain text of Article I limits representation in Congress to voters residing in “states” — a species of jurisdiction that the District of Columbia is not.

Now, this simple legal fact does not affect the moral argument that the voices of D.C. residents should resound in Congress no less than those of their fellow citizens of the several states. To remedy this historical accident — the Founders did not conceive that anyone would live permanently in the federal district, because the government was not supposed to grow this large — we have two constitutional options:

1) A constitutional amendment — like the 23rd Amendment, which in 1961 (yes, only that recently!) gave D.C. presidential electors, and without which it would be unconstitutional for D.C. residents to cast votes for president; or

2) Retrocession to Maryland — akin to the part of the original District that was returned to Virginia, all but the land under the Congress, White House, and certain other federal buildings could rejoin Maryland, and the people living there would then be counted toward that state’s congressional delegation (and be represented by Maryland’s two senators).

Better yet, if the political rallying cry for the D.C. Voting rights movement is “no taxation without representation,” then I suggest that we focus on the first part of the equation and cease federal taxation of D.C. residents. Regardless of the optimal solution, however, the course that Congress has chosen simply will not fly if we take the Constitution seriously.