Obama Circumvents Congress on Education Policy

For the past few decades, the federal government has continuously increased its power over local schools, through funding with strings attached, with depressing results. Since the 1970′s federal spending on education has nearly tripled, yet student achievement has remained flat and graduation rates have not improved. However, that increased spending has had a major impact on the amount of red tape, paperwork and administrative costs imposed on local schools and teachers, taking valuable time away from their core mission – educating children.

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While federal policymakers are busy spending billions to make matters worse for public schools, they’re also busy preventing students from having better choices, at the behest of powerful teachers unions. While charter, parochial and private schools offer better results and graduation results, President Obama and his allies are trying to prevent children from enrolling in them through cost-effective aid for school choice that measurably puts them on a path of success. In many cases, Washington lawmakers who themselves enjoyed school choice opportunities as children are seizing that same opportunity from inner-city kids–as they attempted to do with the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program–in order to place those children back into failing and often dangerous public schools with the odds stacked against them. More...

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