Priorities: Obama Won't Spend 1/30th of 1% of Bloated Dept. of 'Education' Budget on Inner-City DC Kids

Thursday, April 12, 2012
Priorities: Obama Won't Spend 1/30th of 1% of Bloated Dept. of 'Education' Budget on Inner-City DC Kids

If you needed additional confirmation that President Obama doesn't give a damn about urban youth, please consider "President Obama’s Budget Priority: Eliminate the D.C. Voucher Program:

“Budgets are about choices,” stated President Obama in recent remarks to governors about his massive fiscal year (FY) 2013 budget request. Nothing more clearly demonstrates the Administration’s priorities than Obama’s decision to once again place the successful D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program (DCOSP) on the chopping block while simultaneously growing the Department of Education’s (DOE) budget more than any other federal agency.

In so doing, President Obama is showing low-income D.C. families that his priority is maintaining the unacceptable status quo—at least when it comes to other programs—while bowing to special interest groups like the education unions to eliminate the DCOSP. The Washington Post editorialized yesterday:

Surely, it shouldn’t be among the president’s priorities to single out for attack a tiny federal program that not only works—in the judgment of federal evaluators—but also enjoys bipartisan support. If it is, we trust that [House Speaker John] Boehner [R–OH] would step in, as he did last year, to save a program that D.C.’s poorest families value for their children.

Boehner did in fact save the voucher program last year. The Speaker leveraged last year’s heated budget negotiations to secure a five-year reauthorization of the DCOSP. And as the Post notes today, families “welcomed the certainty.” But once again, poor families in the nation’s capital, home to some of the lowest-performing and least safe public schools in the country, are left to wonder why President Obama has singled out this small, yet effective, school choice program.

And the program actually saves money: "...at between $8,000 and $12,000, the vouchers are a fraction of the more than $18,000 spent per-pupil in D.C. public schools."

Barack Obama cares about one thing: votes.

He will throw anyone -- kids included -- under the bus in order to retain his white-knuckled grip on the reins of power. Teachers' unions send millions to his campaign coffers. Kids send nothing. Easy choice for a demagogue.

Which is why Obama won't even spend $20 million -- out of total of $69,800 million (or 1/30th of 1%) that goes to the bloated, unconstitutional, and irrationally named Department of "Education".