Senators Lieberman and Collins Vow Continued Fight to Save Endangered D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program
Calling the future of the endangered D.C. school voucher program an "urgent cause" that requires immediate action, U.S. Senators Joseph Lieberman and Susan Collins today signaled that they will work to include reauthorization of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program as an amendment to key Senate legislation, possibly the upcoming "jobs" bill championed by President Obama.
At a press conference on Capitol Hill this morning, Lieberman and Collins, flanked by dozens of parents and students who both support and benefit from the Opportunity Scholarship Program, insisted that they would keep fighting to keep the endangered program alive.
The OSP, with a proven five-year record of success, provides vouchers so that low-income parents can send their children to private schools. Despite promising to "fund what works regardless of ideology" President Obama's FY 2011 budget cuts OSP funding and says there will be no further funding requests.
"If we fail to act now, 86 percent of the students who participate in the program--we know--would be forced to attend schools that are failing," Collins said. "We cannot let that happen to children in our nation's capital."
"In terms of creating new jobs, there's nothing more important to jobs than education," Lieberman said, indicating that he's eyeing the jobs stimulus proposal as a potential vehicle for the OSP's reauthorization. "Time and again, we have heard from students and their parents that the OSP has given so many young people opportunities they otherwise would not have been given. We cannot let this program die."
Lieberman, who marched with Dr. Martin Luther King, called education the civil rights issue of the 21st century and said, "if Dr. King were alive today, he would be fighting for the Opportunity Scholarship Program."
LaTasha Bennett's son, Nico, participates in the OSP; her daughter, Nia, saw her scholarship revoked last year by Education Secretary Arne Duncan. She, too, spoke at the press conference, asking legislators opposed to the program to "keep politics out of it" and to put themselves in her shoes, "if you were low-income, what would you do? Empathize with me."
Lieberman and Collins introduced the bipartisan SOAR Act last year which calls for five-year reauthorization of the OSP, allows additional children to enter the program, increases scholarship amounts, and continues a rigorous federal evaluation of the program.
Since inception in 2004, the Opportunity Scholarship Program has allowed more than 3,300 children from low-income D.C. families to attend a private school of their parent's choice. Four consecutive studies from Georgetown University and the University of Arkansas have shown overwhelming parental satisfaction. Studies from the Obama Administration's own Institute for Education Sciences have shown strong academic progress for participating students. According to lead investigator, Dr. Patrick Wolf, "the D.C. voucher program has proven to be the most effective education policy evaluated by the federal government's official education research arm so far."
For more information, visit www.SaveSchoolChoice.com
Contacts:
D.C. Parents for School Choice
Andrew Campanella,
202-276-1303
Andrew@ccgstrategies.com
