Saturday, April 18, 2009

DC voucher program

This piece in Forbes lays out the case against the Obama administration in the matter of the DC voucher program. I have not had a chance to read the study and do not know how good it is, but of course if it is not a good study the correct path would seem to be to commission a good one rather than shutting down the program.

Change you can believe looks a lot like selling out to a powerful interest group at the expense of the poor in this case.

Vouchers are one of a very small set of policy issues - the war on drugs is another - where the correct course seems to me so blindingly obvious that it is hard for me to credit those on the other side with intellectual honesty. This inability is not to my credit, and so as a check on myself I generally avoid writing about vouchers either on the blog or in my academic work, but this case seems egregious enough to make an exception.

Put this one in the negative column of your Obama evaluation scorecard.