The Hill Street Blahg

Michelle and Barack Obama have selected a school for their children and unsurprisingly, it isn’t one of Washington, D.C.’s infamous public schools from hell. The Obama’s have chosen the exclusive private school of Sidwell, which happens to be the exclusive academy of choice most Washington, D.C. elites send their privileged children to. The tuition at Sidwell is close to $30,000 per year so it naturally keeps the less fortunate children of the D.C. inhabitants from attending.

With an average family income of $22,000 per year, most D.C. parents lack the financial ability to send their children to better schools and Obama wants to keep it that way. Obama and his fellow Democrats want to kill The Washington Opportunity Scholarship Program which provides $7,500 school vouchers to less fortunate students to attend private schools. His excuse for opposing this school voucher program is this. He says “although it might benefit some kids a the top, what you’re going to do is leave a lot of kids at the bottom.” This sounds seemingly similar to the same reasoning he puts forth for his domestic oil drilling opposition. Actually, the true reason Obama opposes the voucher system is his total devotion and benevolence to the scourge of our society and that is Teachers Unions.

Jonah Goldberg has an excellent article today regarding this subject titled The True School Scandal. Here’s an excerpt from that essay. You can read it in it’s entirety here.

So if Obama and other politicians don’t want to send their kids to schools where even the principals have such views, that’s no scandal. The scandal is that these politicians tolerate such awful schools at all. For anyone.

The main reason politicians adopt a policy of malign neglect: teachers unions, arguably the single worst mainstream institution in our country today. No group has a stronger or better organized stranglehold on a political party than they do. No group is more committed to putting ideological blather and self-interest before the public good.

Rhee has been pushing a new contract that would provide merit pay to successful teachers. The system is voluntary: Individual teachers can stay in the current system that rewards mere seniority or opt to join a parallel system that pays for superior performance. Many talented teachers would love the opportunity.

Alas, the national teachers unions insist that linking pay to results is an outrageous attack on the integrity of public schools. They have insisted that D.C. teachers not even be allowed to vote on the contract.