Obama Makes Case For School Vouchers, w/o Knowing It

June 11, 2015

Obama Makes Case For School Vouchers But Doesn't Know It

By LARRY ELDER
INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY

Barack Obama, for his own education, never set foot in a public school.
When he was 10, his mother shipped him from Indonesia to his grandparents in Hawaii so that he could get a first-class American education. He entered Punahou, the expensive and most prestigious prep school in the islands.
From there, despite his admittedly indifferent grades, Obama was admitted to Occidental, an elite private college in Los Angeles. He spent two years there, after which he transferred to Columbia University, one of the private Ivy League schools. After Columbia, Obama attended Harvard Law, another private Ivy League school.
What about Michelle, then Michelle Robinson? Doesn't she often brag that she attended public schools? But her cheerleading requires an asterisk. True, Michelle attended a public high school. But it was Chicago's first magnet school. Admission was a selective and highly competitive process.
Michelle spent close to three hours a day on a bus to escape her subpar local public school. So she, in essence, attended an exclusive high school, an option available to her because of her proactive, pro-education parents and her willingness to sacrifice the time to go to and from this superior school.
What about Obama's own children? Surely the kids of a pro-public school politician would attend public schools as a seal of approval. On the contrary, the children of then-Sen. Obama attended a private school operated by the University of Chicago, where Obama taught as a law school instructor. This job enabled his girls to go at little or no cost to him.
After Obama was elected president and preparing to move to Washington, Michelle engaged in a public search for an appropriate school for their children. She considered public schools in D.C. and Obama said "there are some terrific individual schools in the D.C. system."
But, come time for enrollment, the Obamas chose Sidwell Friends, a private Quaker school whose most famous recent grad is Chelsea Clinton. Annual tuition? Almost $40,000 a year, and this excludes books and other material.
Democrats, of course, argue that we need to "invest" more in education. We already spend more on education, K-12, than any other country with the exception of Switzerland, Norway and Luxembourg.
Back in 1985, a federal judge decided that instead of mandating cross-town busing in Kansas City, urban schools should be so attractive that all students, no matter race, would want to attend them. He ordered the district to build what many called "world-class public schools." And spend they did.
The district built 15 new schools. Then it equipped dozens of magnet schools with equipment and personnel for state-of-the-art academic, athletic and arts programs. One elementary school offered private Suzuki violin lessons for every student. A middle school hired 10 "resource teachers" to develop projects in specialty subjects. Some teachers got raises, while others received reduced workloads.
At a time when few Americans had a PC or a Mac, one Kansas City high school had 900 top-flight computers. Others had an Olympic-sized swimming pool with six diving boards, a padded wrestling room, a classical Greek theater, an indoor track and a professionally equipped gymnastics center.
Instead of using buses to bring white kids to the inner-city schools, the district hired 120 taxis.
After 15 years and $2 billion dollars, the district failed all of Missouri's 11 academic performance standards and became the first big-city district to lose its academic accreditation. All that spending managed to attract several hundred white suburban students in the early 1990s, but many later left.
This brings us to vouchers, where the money follows the student — rather than the other way around.
Urban parents want the option to remove their kid from an underperforming local government school to a better school. Polls show 80% of inner-city parents want vouchers. In Philadelphia, 44% of public-school teachers with school-age children send their kids to a private school. In Chicago, it's 39%. Nationwide, about 11% of all parents enroll their children in private schools; only 6% of black parents do so.
A year and a half after the Obama girls settled into their new school, Obama was asked whether any D.C. public schools offered his daughters the same quality of education as a private school. "I'll be blunt with you" said Obama. "The answer is 'no' right now."
But he added, "Given my position, if I wanted to find a great public school for Malia and Sasha to be in, we could probably maneuver to do it. But the broader problem is for a mom or a dad who are working hard but don't have a bunch of connections." So it's who you know, how much clout you have.
Obama does not realize it, but he made an open-and-shut case for vouchers.