Obama's DOE Hid News of School Voucher Success

President Barack Obama’s Department of Education sat on a report chronicling the success of a school vouchers program until after Congress had voted not to continue the program.

That’s the report from Deroy Murdock, a media fellow with the Hoover Institution, who exposes the subterfuge in an article published by National Review Online.

The D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program allows 1,714 children — 90 percent of them black and 9 percent Hispanic — to receive up to $7,500 to attend a private or parochial school instead of a public school in the District of Columbia, which is widely believed to have one of the nation’s most troubled school districts.

Since the program’s launch in 2004, 7,852 students have applied for these grants, and participants have been chosen by lottery.

Obama — who said last year that “you do what works for the kids” — did not intervene as Congress scheduled the program’s end after the 2009-2010 academic year.

“Now it emerges that Obama’s Department of Education  possessed peer-reviewed, congressionally mandated, federally financed research proving this program’s success,” Murdock writes.

“Though it demonstrates ‘what works for the kids,’ DOE hid this study until Congress squelched these children’s dreams.”

An amendment in the Senate to rescue the vouchers program failed on March 10 by a vote of 39 to 58. The DOE finally released the report on April 3. Even then, DOE researchers were reportedly barred from discussing their findings.

“You’d think we were talking about nuclear secrets, not about a taxpayer-funded pilot program,” An April 5 editorial in The Wall Street Journal reported.

During the March 10 vote, 57 Democrats voted and 54 of them opposed the vouchers program.

Why? Murdock suggested, “Follow the money,” and he pointed out that teachers’ unions shelled out $55,794,000 in political donations between 1999 and 2008, with 96 percent of the funds going to Democrats.

The “winners” in the Senate vote, he added, are “the teachers’ unions, who hate school choice, hate vouchers, and don’t give a damn about school kids when they threaten union pay, benefits, and control of classrooms.”