As the Associated Press reports:
President Barack Obama wants to keep paying for private-school vouchers for students receiving them in the District of Columbia, an administration official said Wednesday.
Obama is proposing to spend $12.2 million for the 2010-2011 school year to continue the program for about 1,700 kids. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the proposal has not been made public.
The president would like to continue the funding until all the students participating in the program graduate from high school. He would not let new students into the program, the official said.
See Reason.tv on Obama and the DC Voucher program and how Obama promised to support programs based on evidence and not politics. This makes it clear that for Obama teacher union politics will always win.
As Jay Greene points out:
On the one hand, this is a victory for the voucher advocates and shows that their efforts have been effective. On the other hand, this is a clever political move for Obama that allows him to kill the DC voucher program without paying the political price of denying low-income kids access to a program that the official evaluation has deemed beneficial. Just because he’s not ripping this opportunity out of the hands of the existing 1,700 students doesn’t mean that he’s not ripping it out of the hands of every future student who could benefit from it.
And my favorite picture from yesterday’s rally (also from Dr. Greene) from the hundreds of kids that are not grandfathered in to the successful voucher program:
