If you’re rich or politically well-connected (or if you’re like President Obama, both), you can send kids to any school you please. Even if you aren’t very wealthy, but make just enough to be able to sacrifice certain luxuries, you can choose to send your kids to the school of your preference. But if you’re poor, most likely the State mandates where you must go to school, and gives you little to no opportunity to choose otherwise.
This isn’t about voucher programs, or other alternatives to government schools (aka “public” schools). This is about freedom and opportunity, a principle and idea our nation upon which our nation was founded. Many parents are given absolutely no choice which school they can send their children to. And those who fight for this enslavement are teachers unions and politicians who have much to gain by keeping children these children in poorly run educational systems.
For those of you who favor government schools, I really want to ask you: Why should only the wealthy and well-connected be permitted to send their children to a better school? (If you’re for government-run universal health care, I really want to know your answer, because presumably this is exactly the question you ask free marketers when they want more free market health care.)
But we don’t have to ask president Obama where he sends his kids to school, do we? We already know he sends them to the prestigious private Sidwell Friends school also attended by several of the poor DC voucher students. But those voucher students will only remain classmates of Sasha and Malia for another year or so. After that, they’re out… because Barack Obama lacks the courage, the wisdom, or both to get his own party behind this program — a program that his own education department has shown is a success.
Just so you know, this particular program is successful at one-quarter the costs. Imagine that, giving a child a better education, the education that the President’s children enjoy, at one-fourth the cost of doing so in a government school.
