Copyright: Doug Stroud www.lttlphotography.co

Baseball may appear to have a very incongruous relationship to the topic of education reform, but it appeared, at least on August 19, on a muggy evening in Washington, to have more in common with kids most in need of schools than any other piece of popular culture.

Washington, DC was for years without a team.

Children in DC for years were without any access to schools that work.

Baseball used to be a huge phenomenon in Washington.

Many schools used to be phenomenal here as well.

Dunbar High School was a college prep school with a very high percentage of graduates. But at last night’s Nationals game, at least two parents of children who participate in a program of choice said there was no way they’d send their daughters to that school - a school that is now a symbol of miseducation for all but the most motivated and hardened students.

Indeed, programs like the one that allowed these parents and 2,000 others to choose alternatives to their assigned public schools - schools like St. Augustine, Nannie Helen Burroughs, Archbishop Carroll - are giving parents what baseball here, even with its warts, is giving the community. Hope, dreams, and a chance to redevelop their lives.

As the Nats closed in on the Rockies last night, twice (before losing with a close 5-4), hundreds of students attending schools of opportunity cheered on their ailing team, happy to be in a stadium that has helped transform a once-desolate neighborhood, happy to be with others who have also had a second chance at an education.

While they are not winning yet, baseball has helped save this city. The DC Opportunity Scholarship Program is doing the same, but unlike baseball which rests mostly in private sector hands, school choices for DC students rest in government hands - Congress mostly - which has chosen thus far to deny them any more access to their own field of dreams, their chance for a way up, their way to come from behind.

They can still pull out a bottom of the 9th win for these kids when they return from recess. We can hope.

(To learn more about School Opportunity Night, please visit: www.saveopportunity.org)