Joe Biden’s Scholarship Choice He’d kill a program that helps 86% of graduates, mostly black and Hispanic, go to college.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/joe-bidens-scholarship-choice-11595630807?mod=opinion_lead_pos2
Amid all of the money Washington wastes, here’s some good news: Education Secretary Betsy DeVos announced this week that her department will award at least $85 million over five years for the Washington, D.C., Opportunity Scholarship Program.
The scholarships let lower-income parents of children trapped in failing public schools attend the charter or private schools of their choice. According to the Education Department, nearly 98% of students with Opportunity Scholarships graduate from high school, compared with 69% of D.C. public school students. Some 86% go onto college, while more than 90% of scholarship recipients are black or Hispanic, and the average family income is less than $27,000 a year.
This is money well spent on upward mobility and opportunity, yet Democrats have been trying to kill the scholarships since they began in 2004. In 2009 Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin succeeded in passing a prohibition on any new scholarships unless the program was fully reauthorized, though Republicans reversed that in April 2011 during budget negotiations with Barack Obama. In subsequent years President Obama consistently sought to reduce or zero out funding.
Enter Joe Biden, whose own children benefitted from private schools. But in his recent unity platform with Sen. Bernie Sanders, Mr. Biden specifically calls for eliminating the D.C. scholarships. It takes a special political animus to kill scholarships for poor minorities while proposing literally trillions of dollars in new spending on countless other programs.
There’s no moral or fiscal justification for killing the scholarships. Either Mr. Biden doesn’t realize this is in his platform, or he’s decided he must sacrifice the children to the demands of the teachers unions and the political left. This is a scandal in plain sight.
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