Why We Should Be Talking About Education Pt I

There’s been a lot of conservative ink spilled on things like whose hand Obama shook, whether or not he bowed, and even his taking a book while we let a major issue, a real issue slip away: that issue is education.

Obama is extremely vulnerable on education right now because of his hypocritical abandonment of the Washington D.C. voucher program and because this is the rarest of issues: one where conservatives can make common cause with inner city minority groups. Consider this from Reason TV

You couldn’t imagine a better issue for conservatives:

• Obama is openly hypocritical: he said he would pragmatically support what works and then turned around and abandoned a highly successful program
• Arne Duncan buried a study on the effectiveness of the voucher program because it ran against what he wanted to hear (exactly what Obama and others have repeatedly cited as a sin when done by the Bush administration)
• Obama is kicking voucher kids out of the same school he sends his kids to! Talk about good TV!
• The Obama-Duncan anti-voucher crusade confounds the stereotypes the MSM loves so much: here we have inner city minorities siding with conservative philosophy against Obama and the Democrats. Talk about even better TV!

And most of all this is an area where conservatives might actually get something done. We’re going to lose a lot of fights in the next few years: we need to be looking for any “W” for free market, smaller government principles we can find instead of jousting at windmills.

Education is a fortress of the big government philosophy of unlimited growth without accountability and the rejection of private sector solutions simply because we must trust and believe in the government’s good intentions. Anything that shakes the blind acceptance of government doing a better job than the private sector in education is going to have profound implications as people begin to question the efficiency and effectiveness of other government-run solutions.

We should be doing everything we can to keep this issue front and center in the media and to get the word out about things like the rallies in DC to keep the voucher program ( CATO reports on the most recent one here )