Newly empowered Republicans may try to resurrect the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, which pays for low-income children to attend private school in Washington, when they assume control of the House in January.
"It's definitely something that we're working on," said an aide to Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, the ranking member on the House Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee that oversees Washington. "This is a program that will definitely be looked at in the subcommittee in the next Congress."
Ironically, Democrats will attack this program that Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) had axed last year that will help mostly minority students in our Nation's Capitol escape the failing public school system and get into private schools, where studies have shown that these students will fair much better than their public school counterparts, on the basis of not being able to afford it or worrying about taking money out of public schools and redirecting it to private schools.
Public schools aren't failing because of a lack of funding. They are failing because of a lack of discipline in the classroom and little or no accountability on the teachers for individual performances. The teachers' unions are choking the like out of the public schools. We need to give our children and their parents the choice and opportunity to escape such record of failure.
Unfortunately, with a Democratic majority in the Senate and Obama in the White House, it will be a bit of a battle to get this reversed, but I don't believe that it will be impossible. Momentum is heavily on the side of the GOP, and this has been a losing issue for the Democrats in the eyes of the voters for a while now. After all, who would want to be the ones that said no to helping poor minority students get a better education?
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