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Obamas Have A Choice For School

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By CAL THOMAS Tribune Media Services

The Tampa Tribune

Published: November 15, 2008

President-elect Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle, came to Washington and did what people with young children usually do before moving. They looked at their new house, and then Mrs. Obama checked out the school choices for their daughters.

The schools Mrs. Obama visited were private, not public. Although no decision has been made, it seems obvious the girls enjoy their private school in Chicago and have flourished in it. Would the Obamas, in order to pander to the teachers unions, place their two daughters in one of Washington's miserable public schools? Let's hope not.

Should they choose either Sidwell Friends School (where Chelsea Clinton attended) or Georgetown Day School - Mrs. Obama visited both - or a public school, the Obamas have the ability to make a choice for their children, a choice the president-elect would deny to every other American who cannot afford to pay private school tuition. This is not the vaunted fairness for which Obama campaigned. This is not spreading the educational and intellectual wealth around.

Parents who put their children first are to be admired and emulated. Politicians who are parents and who have the power to let others make inferior educational choices, but refuse to do so, are inconsistent at best and hypocrites at worst.

Throughout the campaign, Obama presented himself as a champion of the poor and middle class. Poor and middle-class parents do not love their children any less than the Obamas love their daughters. They want their kids to have a good education, realizing it is their ticket to a better life. But liberal politicians deny them that right. Is that fair?

This year, 1,900 D.C. schoolchildren were allowed to attend private schools, thanks to congressional vouchers. Will Obama and his fellow Democrats - about to be in charge of all three branches of government - send them back to failed schools? D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton has suggested as much.

If Obama and his fellow Democrats won't "let our people go," the rest of us have options. We can send our children and grandchildren to private schools - or home school them - and act compassionately toward the less fortunate by contributing to the Children's Scholarship Fund (8 West 38th St., ninth floor, New York NY 10018).

This will offer children trapped in bad schools the brighter future they deserve, and the country will get the better educated citizenry it desperately needs.

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