D.C. Public Schools See INCREASE In Enrollment For First Time In 39 Years

[Kludge]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/05/AR2010100505484.html

Not necessarily great news from a purist libertarian perspective, but hopefully this news will help convince new Teachers'-Union-backed DC mayor Gray to keep radical anti-Union pro-education reformer Michelle Rhee in her current position.

[Kludge]

Related to the article is another talking about Rhee's chances and criticisms of blind increases of education funding without significant reform.

Speak Up on D.C. Schools, Mr. President
The president remains silent about the fate of Michelle Rhee, the successful chancellor of public schools in the nation's capital.



"That deafening roar you hear—that's the sound of Barack Obama's silence on the future of school reform in the District of Columbia. And if he doesn't break it soon, he may become the first president in two decades to have left Washington's children with fewer chances for a good school than when he started.

This week President Obama will be out campaigning on the differences between the Republicans and Democrats on education. The primary thrust of his argument—which he repeated yesterday—is that Republicans want to cut education spending. Which may be a harder sell coming on the heels of his admission last week on NBC's "Today" show that "the fact is that our per-pupil spending has gone up during the last couple of decades even as results have gone down."

This debate over education is now coming to a head in Washington. In the first months after he took office, Mr. Obama kept quiet when Sen. Dick Durbin (D., Ill.) killed off a popular voucher program that allowed low-income D.C. moms and dads to send their kids to the same kind of schools where the president sends his own daughters (Sidwell Friends). This was followed by the president's silence last month during the D.C. Democratic primary, in which the mayor who appointed the district's reform-minded schools chancellor, Michelle Rhee, went down to defeat.

Even now, when Ms. Rhee's fate—and that of D.C. school reform—hangs in the balance, Mr. Obama remains mute. This from the same president who shows no such shyness when interjecting himself into, say, a complaint about Boston police, a dispute over an Islamic Center in Manhattan, or the mass firing of teachers at a troubled high school in Central Falls, R.I. Why so reticent about an issue affecting the future of thousands of African-American children?"


More @ [/URL][URL]http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704631504575532293014870442.html? (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704631504575532293014870442.html?)

[Kludge]

bump

[teacherone]

bad economy forcing people to move their kids out of private schools and into public?

[kahless]

The voucher program expiration also increased the public school numbers. Obama, the Democrats and teachers unions, hate private schools and the success they had in DC and will do everything in their power to destroy them since they worship at the altar of the public school system.