Senators Joe Lieberman, along with Senators Susan Collins, Dianne Feinstein, and Robert Byrd introduced legislation this morning to reauthorize and strengthen the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program (OSP) for five years.
Via the Alliance for School Choice press release:
Under Senator Lieberman’s bill, the program would be preserved and strengthened significantly. The Lieberman bill would increase scholarship amounts to $9,000 for K-8 students and $11,000 for high school students—indexing the scholarship amounts to inflation. While these amounts remain significantly below the amounts for the D.C. Public Schools, they provide the necessary increases to account for inflation over the past five years.
The bill would also:
–Give scholarship priority to siblings of students who currently participate in the program
–Require participating schools to have a valid certificate of occupancy
–Require teachers of core subject matters to have bachelor’s degrees
–Require an Institute of Education Sciences annual evaluation of the program
–Require students to take nationally norm-referenced tests
I wrote about Democrats for school choice here.
My colleague Shikha Dalmia wrote about President Obama’s hypocrisy for not supporting the successful program in here.