“Choice and Competition” – But Not For Education

28 Oct, 2009 by McQ

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The White House tell us that the government public option in health care insurance reform will introduce “choice and competition” into the insurance market. But when it comes to education, which already “enjoys” a government monopoly, “choice and competition” are not at all something White House has any desire to introduce.

And, in fact, it gets down right upset if you point that out:

President Obama isn’t taking kindly to a television ad that criticizes his opposition to a popular scholarship program for poor children, and his administration wants the ad pulled.

Former D.C. Council member Kevin Chavous of D.C. Children First said October 16 that U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder had recently approached him and told him to kill the ad.

The 30-second ad, which has been airing on FOX News, CNN, MSNBC, and News Channel 8 to viewers in D.C., Maryland, and Virginia, urges the president to reauthorize the federally-funded D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program that provides vouchers of up to $7,500 for D.C. students to attend private schools.

The ad features Chavous and a young boy–one of 216 students whose scholarships were rescinded by the Department of Education earlier this year when the agency announced no new students would be allowed into the program. The ad also includes an excerpt taken from one of Obama’s campaign statements.

Of course what is being discussed is a voucher program which allows students to have actual “choice” in schools and does introduce competition in a system that could use it badly. And it is a program that is very popular among African-Americans because it allows them to put their children in other schools besides some of the nation’s worst-performing schools.

But:

After embracing the teachers unions’ anti-voucher stance, the president now finds himself in the uncomfortable and awkward position of denying students access to a program that has strong bipartisan, local support, and that multiple studies say is helping poor African-American children succeed.

Little wonder then that the president and powerful allies like Holder–many of whom have benefited from school choice and are currently sending their children to expensive private schools–want the ad to go away.

Of course they want the ad to go away. It exposes the fact that the only choice this ideological administration will make is in favor of the special interest groups that can help it politically, even if it means children are stuck in bad schools. Politics over people.

The same holds true in the health care insurance reform legislation. There is no real “choice and competition” involved. Those are instead words focus groups have approved and Democrats use to pull the wool over the eyes of the gullible. And, in the end, we’ll most likely end up with a government monopoly in the same shape as our education system and “choice and competition” will only be a faint echo of another in a long line of false promises used to gather power to the government to the detriment of our real freedom to choose.

[Crossposted at QandO]