We seem to be more concerned today with the physical treatment of terrorists than the health and welfare of our most impoverished children. While the president works hard to compensate to our international friends for what he perceives as American arrogance, he is missing the biggest opportunity to show this nation really cares by permitting a small but successful lifeline for 2,000 Washington, DC poor children to die a slow death.

That lifeline is a scholarship program providing children from low-income homes a ticket to attend a private school of their choice, with the cost being borne by the government, in lieu of attending a neighborhood school near drug dens, pollution and barbed wire fences.

We have been talking to real people in Washington, DC about this program. We have gone to the same neighborhoods that produce the appalling statistics paraded daily in the news. Most residents do not know about this program. Those that do, do not understand why Congress — or anyone — would oppose it. There must be something else to it, they say? Why is it only 2,000 kids?

The reality is that they expect their leadership to know what’s good for kids. And most loyal DC citizens believe that, indeed, they have a friend in the White House. That may be the case on some issues, but not with respect to real education reform.

In the last few days alone, Mr. Obama has taken a pretty bad beating from friends and pundits in the news media. NPR/Fox News contributor Juan Williams has taken him to task. Staunch supporter and advisor, Kevin Chavous in partnership with Anthony Williams, former City Councilman and Mayor, respectively, challenged him to accept the program, and the notion of choice, for all needy children. Perhaps a little farther from home but just as sane was George Will’s column pointing out the one-two punch to the program thrown by Duncan. “Not content with seeing the program set to die after the 2009-10 school year, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan (former head of Chicago’s school system, which never enrolled an Obama child) gratuitously dashed even the limited hopes of another 200 children and their parents.”

Bloggers are working overtime on this issue, and parents are out day by day in the city rallying and talking about how best to get Congress’ attention.

Wouldn’t it be great if they could be focused more appropriately on the needs of their families, their jobs or the next big community issue of concern? These people don’t have the hundreds of paid staff that the opponents of this program employ at various education groups, unions, and government offices. The time they spend on this is entirely their own – and on their own dime –  as they are so enormously frustrated and upset that this program is, for all intents and purposes, gone.

Their only hope is that Congress will take it up again in May, and maybe in the fall they will see the fruits of their labor. We will see.

I have many colleagues who insist that deep down, US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is a real education reformer, and is a reflection of an administration that is reform-minded on critical education issues.  Because he hired this or that person, because he talks about charter schools, and because he told the press he thought that children currently in the DC scholarship program should be allowed to finish even if it is discontinued.  There are some who believe he’s “one of us.”

The Denver Post today, like Toto in The Wizard of Oz, pulls back the curtain on the image of Duncan as reformer to reveal some hard truths behind the talking points.  Like many of us, they wanted to know why a Congressionally mandated report on the DC voucher program - providing evidence of success - was released on a Friday, after Congress recessed, and as millions of Americans were leaving for their spring breaks.  Duncan denied knowing about the findings, though senior department officials have had a chance to review them since November.  Even if they deliberately kept it from the Secretary, it still begs the question as to why, knowing the Congress was moving to kill it, did he not ask where the study results were?  As the Denver Post columnist argues, Duncan discards the program as being too small to care about.  He dances around his opposition by advocating that kids already in the program continue — without demanding legislation that would allow that to happen, by the way.  Thus my colleagues’ “hopes” that he’ll come around, that reason will prevail.  They are so blinded by their dreams for this Administration that they find it impossible to believe its people could oppose something so good.

But put choice aside for a moment.  Real education reformers don’t blanket advocate for a longer school day and longer school year without noting that neither will make a difference if the school to which students are assigned lacks all rigor and accountability.  A real reformer would’ve used his clout as superintendent of his state’s largest public school system to demand that his state legislators lift the cap on charter schools before he left that state – perhaps even with the help of a sitting US Senator or two to pressure their state colleagues in return for recognition once they become president (Obama) or Appropriations chair (Durbin).

We all have hopes for our new leaders, but that doesn’t excuse them from making stupid remarks, or mistakes that hurt children.  And it doesn’t excuse us from failing to call them on the carpet.

Talk is cheap. Reformers should know better.

Though often accused of backwards thinking, the U.S. Senate this evening actually took a step backwards, voting 58 - 39 against the Ensign amendment attaching a continuation of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program to the hotly debated Omnibus spending bill. This vote flies in the face of the intent of hundreds of programs in ARRA and the budget, and comes on the very same day that President Obama promised the American people that his Administration “will use only one test when deciding what ideas to support with your precious tax dollars. It’s not whether an idea is liberal or conservative, but whether it works.”

By all accounts, D.C. OSP was working on many levels for the lucky 1,700 kids - among the District’s poorest - benefiting from the educational opportunities offered by their scholarships.

Perhaps more of his colleagues should have been in attendance for Sen. Joe Lieberman’s passionate defense of D.C. OSP (of which he has been a long-suffering champion), though I guess it’s hard to raise campaign funds if you’re working in the Chamber…

(click on the image above to see what they must have missed)

All stimulus—all the time. There is nothing like a raucous action film filled with exploding cars and high-powered weaponry to distract you from your troubles and take your mind off your real obligations back home. Like it or not, this is the net effect of the Stimulus package now furiously hurdling through Congress like some action hero implausibly decimating everything in his way while the world around watches in awe—numb, but invigorated by the spectacle—waiting to be rescued.

Has Obama gone Rambo? Or has Washington become a Hollywood set—a gleaming fasçade, supported by nothing, but intentionally built to allow our superhero to shine?

For those in need of a tonic from so much stimulus—still reeling from the whiplash of the high-speed chase with stolen dollars flying everywhere—read Michael Gerson’s magisterial treatment of how real education reform signaled by the Obama campaign has already been abandoned in exchange for Obama’s empty pragmatism.

No purple pill or action hero bravado for him. Gerson is a real man, a man of principle, who reminds us what is required to effect fundamental reform. Among the remedies are test-based accountability and merit pay to drive improved teacher quality—not payola stolen from children yet born to buy off one’s political supporters.

Gerson writes, “It is still early in the Obama era. But it is already evident that pragmatism without a guiding vision or a fighting faith can become little more than the service of insistent political interests.” It is precisely for this reason that Mandate for Change was recently sent to every state and federal legislator in the land.

Got Mandate?