Obama on Education: Not What Ruby Expected

As Pejman Yousefzadeh succinctly points out, the Obama administration "is doing immense damage to the educational environment in D.C." through their botched handling of the school voucher issue. The President sends his children to a prestigious private school which, through his Administration's callousness, will soon see the exile of voucher students; disadvantaged students who will be shuffled off to the public school system. I guess you could could say Obama thinks they should be with their own kind. It goes without saying that if a Republican were kicking poor kids out of his own children's private school the reaction would be somewhat more ... agitated than that which greets Obama's disregard.

As Andrew Coulson notes, the voucher program in DC is actually successful and cost-effective, contrary to union-provided standard issue Democrat objections. I would add that fear of the inability of the state to indoctrinate children plays a role for the overtly statist modern Democratic party. But perhaps no one has made a more stirring illustration of the tragedy in DC than Redstate.com's favorite political cartoonist, Toby Dials:


Ruby Bridges is a figure from the Civil Rights Movement. As a little girl, she was one of the first African-American children to attend an all-white school in the south. The court-ordered integration and subsequent unrest and controversy was illustrated in a painting by Norman Rockwell: