Ramesh Ponnuru shares with Bloomberg readers this week his assessment of President Obama’s approach to policies that would expand parental choice in education.
One of President Barack Obama’s conceits is that he is a pragmatist who seeks policies that work rather than pursuing a partisan agenda. On school choice, he doesn’t live up to the advertisement. His administration has been relentless in its ideological hostility to the idea, and seized on every possible pretext to express that hostility.
The White House considers any government funding for private or parochial education, even indirect funding, to be a betrayal of the public schools. The D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program — which provides federally funded vouchers for poor kids in Washington to attend private schools — seems to have had some positive results, including higher high-school graduation rates for participants. Yet the Obama administration, not generally known for its tightfistedness, has repeatedly tried to end funding for it.
This position was terribly misguided, but it was at least open and transparent. Twice this year, the White House has gone after local school-choice programs — which involve no federal funding — in a more underhanded way.
In April, the Justice Department announced that private schools that participate in a choice program in Milwaukee will be subject to new regulations under the Americans with Disabilities Act. They will be treated as though they were government contractors. Never mind that the schools have contracts with parents, not with the government that aids the parents. Never mind, either, that in the program’s 22 years of operation no complaint about the treatment of a disabled student has ever been filed. A five-year study of the program found that being disabled had no bearing on a student’s likelihood of getting into a participating school.
The decision will nonetheless raise costs for the private schools. It will also make them think twice about participating, both because they want to avoid those costs and because they don’t want to compromise their independence.
The administration’s latest strike against school choice is a lawsuit against a program in Louisiana, created by Republican Governor Bobby Jindal. The Justice Department is using a 1975 desegregation order to argue that Louisiana should get approval from a federal court before giving scholarships to students in some school districts. Otherwise, the department claims, the scholarships could make Louisiana schools less racially integrated.
The program is open to poor families with kids in public schools that have gotten a C, D or F from the state government. In Louisiana, most of those families are black, not members of the White Citizens’ Council. The Jindal administration says 90 percent of the recipients are black. The state’s department of education reports that so far these students are doing better on math and literacy tests than they were in public schools.
