Will Obama Stand Up for These Kids?

The District of Columbia's school voucher program is under assault.   Sen. Dick Durban has created a provision that will remove the voucher program unless Congress takes action.  Thus, no one has to actually stand up and declare that they do not like vouchers, they can just let it fade away.

"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."

The article also quotes Obama (but doesn't give the specific citation):

"The biggest source of resistance [to reform]," he said, "was rarely talked about . . . namely, the uncomfortable fact that every one of our churches was filled with teachers, principals, and district superintendents. Few of these educators sent their own children to public schools; they knew too much for that. But they would defend the status quo with the same skill and vigor as their white counterparts of two decades before."

When I first began to research homeschooling I joined a very large and eclectic homeschooling group.  Early on I realized that well over half the homeschoolers had been or still were teachers.  They had chosen to homeschool their own kids based on personal experiences in the classroom.  This observation was crucial to my own decision to teach my children at home.

Full article: The Wall Street Journal