Rich White Senator Wants Poor Black Kids Out of Private School

How in bed with the teacher's unions is Senator Dick Durbin? Enough to kick two of the Obama girls' friends out of their private school:

Dick Durbin has a nasty surprise for two of Sasha and Malia Obama's new schoolmates. And it puts the president in an awkward position.

The children are Sarah and James Parker. Like the Obama girls, Sarah and James attend the Sidwell Friends School in our nation's capital. Unlike the Obama girls, they could not afford the school without the $7,500 voucher they receive from the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program. Unfortunately, a spending bill the Senate takes up this week includes a poison pill that would kill this program -- and with it perhaps the Parker children's hopes for a Sidwell diploma.


Deborah Parker
Sarah and James Parker attend Sidwell Friends School with the president's daughters, thanks to a voucher program Sen. Dick Durbin wants to end.
Known as the "Durbin language" after the Illinois Democrat who came up with it last year, the provision mandates that the scholarship program ends after the next school year unless Congress reauthorizes it and the District of Columbia approves. The beauty of this language is that it allows opponents to kill the program simply by doing nothing. Just the sort of sneaky maneuver that's so handy when you don't want inner-city moms and dads to catch on that you are cutting one of their lifelines.

Deborah Parker says such a move would be devastating for her kids. "I once took Sarah to Roosevelt High School to see its metal detectors and security guards," she says. "I wanted to scare her into appreciation for what she has at Sidwell." It's not just safety, either. According to the latest test scores, fewer than half of Roosevelt's students are proficient in reading or math.

That's the reality that the Parkers and 1,700 other low-income students face if Sen. Durbin and his allies get their way. And it points to perhaps the most odious of double standards in American life today: the way some of our loudest champions of public education vote to keep other people's children -- mostly inner-city blacks and Latinos -- trapped in schools where they'd never let their own kids set foot.

This double standard is largely unchallenged by either the teachers' unions or the press corps. For the teachers' unions, it's a fairly cold-blooded calculation. They're willing to look the other way at lawmakers who chose private or parochial schools for their own kids -- so long as these lawmakers vote in ways that keep the union grip on the public schools intact and an escape hatch like vouchers bolted.

Part of me wants to ask the Parkers who they voted for, because if they voted for Democrats they're just getting what they voted for. Dems hate school vouchers and school choice, and yet vouchers poll very well among the very same minority groups that keep electing Democrats. Somebody isn't paying attention.

These two kids may end up saving the entire D.C. voucher program, and that would be good. However, I hope Durbin's slavishness to the teacher's unions will cause some of the minority parents to think about who they're voting for.