(CNSNews.com) – U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan says no more low-income, mostly minority children will get taxpayer-funded scholarships to attend private or parochial schools in the District of Columbia.
 
Duncan told CNSNews.com that school vouchers are “not the solution” to fixing D.C.’s failing public schools.
 
Duncan made the comments just days after concerned parents made another trip to Capitol Hill to press U.S. lawmakers to continue funding the city’s Opportunity Scholarship Program (OSP).
 
“I appreciate the desire of every family to have the best possible education for their child,” Duncan told CNSNews.com in a statement. “I also understand that our role is to support children, parents and educators. That is why this Administration is devoting more resources and supports more ambitious reform of our public school systems than any administration in history.”

Duncan said taking a small percentage of children out of the public school system and putting them in private schools is not the answer: “We need to be more ambitious. We need to fix all of our schools,” he said.
 
President Barack Obama dropped funding for the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program in his 2010 fiscal year budget, dashing the hopes of 216 children who already had been notified that they would receive a $7,500 voucher to attend one of the 55 private or parochial schools in the District. 
 
Obama’s decision sparked outrage from the families of the 1,700 students enrolled in the program as well as those on waiting lists. A protest at the Capitol in September drew thousands of people.
 
Obama said children who were already enrolled in the voucher program would be funded until they graduated from high school, but he also said new children would not be admitted to the program – a fact Duncan noted in his remarks to CNSNews.com.
 
Duncan said he “worked hard to protect the students who have been receiving vouchers, so that they can continue to receive them through high school.” But the program will not be reauthorized, he said.

“In the meantime, I will continue to advocate for reforms to our public school system so that these children, and every child, have the opportunity to attend schools as good as they deserve.”
 
Failing public schools
 
“I believe (parents) have a right to make a choice on the educational environment that best suits their children’s needs,” Virginia Walden Ford, the founder of D.C. Parents for School Choice, told CNSNews.com.
 
The school choice group, founded in 1998, is known for its bright yellow T-shirts emblazoned with “Put Kids First.”
 
Although her own children are now grown, Walden Ford advocates on behalf of other parents who are facing what she faced – sending their children to inner-city schools labeled the “worst performing” in the nation.
 
In addition to concerns about performance and violence, the D.C. public schools also are the most expensive in the United States. The Education Department’s 2008 Digest of Education Statistics shows that for the 2005-2006 school year, $18,339 was spent per pupil per year for average daily attendance – more than double what it costs a child to attend a private school through the OSP.
 
“For the Congress not to support a program that has benefited children so greatly is a shame,” Walden Ford said. “They should be ashamed of themselves.
 
“To me, this is government at its worst and I am very angry,” she said.
 
Finger pointing
 
On a recent trip to Capitol Hill, Walden Ford and other parents visited Rep. Jose Serrano’s office. The New York Democrat heads the appropriations subcommittee that would reauthorize OSP.
 
During a 30-minute meeting with the congressman, the parents were told that children already in the voucher program would continue to receive scholarships but that it was up to Washington officials, including D.C.’s mayor and city council, to fund expansion of the program.
 
A spokesman for the District, however, told CNSNews.com that Congress has complete authority over the D.C. government, and even if local legislation is passed to fund OSP, the law would have to be approved by Congress.
 
“I felt like he was incredibly condescending,” Walden Ford told CNSNews.com about the meeting with Serrano. “I felt like he treated us in a way like we didn’t know what’s going on.”
 
Walden Ford says politics certainly entered into the decision to defund OSP:  “The Democrats don’t want this program,” she said. “They are in bed with the teachers’ unions and special interest groups.”
 
Scholarship support
 
The OSP does have its supporters on Capitol Hill and inside the Beltway.
 
In May, Republican Reps. Darrell Issa and Robert McKeon of California and John Boehner of Ohio introduced legislation to reauthorize the District’s Opportunity Scholarship Program.
 
“To the thousands of low-income students who are trapped in dead-end DC schools, the ‘Yes we can’ president has defiantly said ‘No you can’t,’” the lawmakers said in introducing the legislation.
 
Sen. Joe Lieberman (I –Conn.) has led the effort in the Senate to reauthorize D.C.’s school voucher program. At a May hearing of Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, which he chairs, Lieberman expressed his support for the program and the fundamental right of American children to have a good education.
 
“Those who can afford to send their children to private schools when they are dissatisfied with the public schools their children would otherwise go to, do so for obvious reasons: to provide their children with the best education available,” Lieberman said in his opening statement at the hearing. “They do so as good parents who care about their children’s future. Why should we deny that opportunity to lower income parents who also want the best future for their children?”
 
Lieberman said a first-rate education should be a right, not a privilege: “Without an equal education for all, there cannot be equality for all, the kind of equality that our founding documents promised.”
 
The conservative Heritage Foundation has produced a 30-minute video on the OSP. It includes emotional testimony from parents and students who want a better education than the District’s public schools provide.
 
“The people who don’t support this program need to come face to face, look into our eyes and tell us why,” one student says in the video.
 
Students rejected
 
In June, seven members of the D.C. City Council wrote a letter to Education Secretary Duncan and D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty expressing their support for the voucher program, particularly for the 216 children whose scholarships were canceled when OPS was defunded.
 
Latasha Bennett was one of the parents who received a letter in the spring, saying her kindergarten-age daughter Nia Thomas had been admitted to the scholarship program, then received a second letter a few weeks later, telling her that the program would not add new students after all.
 
“I was appalled,” Bennett told CNSNews.com. “It felt like I’d been slapped in the face.” Bennett’s 8-year-old son Nico was already enrolled in the program and attends Naylor Private School.
 
Bennett said she’s disappointed in the stand taken by the first African-American president, who himself got a scholarship to attend an elite private school in Hawaii when he was 10 and whose two daughters attend one of the top private schools in Washington, D.C.
 
“I was even appalled by Obama,” Bennett said. “How could he go back on his word concerning our children? All through the campaign he was going to change things; he was not going to let any child be left behind,” Bennett said. “It was a real heartbreak.
 
“My children have dreams just as much as Obama’s or Duncan’s children,” Bennett said. “Why take my children’s dream away because I can’t afford the elite and better schools they go to?”
 
Grassroots Support
 
On most days, Carmen Holassie and Patricia Williams stay busy juggling the responsibilities of raising children on their own.
 
In recent months, however, these single moms have spent as much time as possible on Capitol Hill trying to convince Democrats to support the school voucher program they say has changed their children’s lives.
 
Holassie said OSP has made a significant difference for her son Ronald, who will graduate from a Catholic school next year after six years in the voucher program.
 
“(OSP) has made a very important impact on his life based on he knows where he wants to go in life,” Holassie said. “He can foresee his future ahead of him in a positive way.”
 
Williams said her son had “issues” when he was in public school and that school officials did not respond to her requests for help.
 
“They said he would grow out of it,” said Williams, who has two children in the OSP program. ‘They said he’d be O.K.”
 
Walden Ford said the scholarship that allowed her son to attend a private school “saved his life.”
 
Even though Holassie and Williams children are allowed to continue in the voucher program and Walden Ford’s children are grown, they say they are dedicated to making sure other children have the same benefits their children have had.
 
“We’ve been fighting this fight for a long time and we will continue to fight,” Walden Ford said.