Imagine a poor black teenager surrounded by crime and poverty.  Imagine his single-parent household, the constant peer pressure to succumb to a culture where power is defined by violence and the lack of role models.  Imagine that despite all these obstacles he has found the strength of character to aspire to greatness – and the endurance to succeed.  What would you have thought if amid the gauzy rhetoric of last year’s election someone had told you that a young man like this would be abandoned by President Obama?

This teenager’s story is not unique.  Throughout the District of Columbia, 1,700 mostly black and Hispanic students are being robbed of an escape from destitution and despair.  In the omnibus spending bill passed by Congress last month, a school voucher program that had allowed those students to attend high-performing private schools rather than Washington D.C.’s notoriously poor (and dangerous) public institutions was killed.  The murderer was a Democratic Congress eager to do the biddings of teachers’ unions, aided and abetted by a President unwilling to stand up to them.

Since voucher programs began, unions have perceived them as a threat.  By giving students and parents a portable education budget and allowing them to choose their own schools, vouchers threaten the monopoly that bad teachers have over children who are too poor to walk away from institutions that are failing them.  Of course, concern for the future of the students in question never factors into the discussion.  Though Obama has waxed poetic about the virtues of merit pay, his decision to let the D.C. program be terminated amounts to a bailout for some of America’s worst teachers – at the expense of the children that they are supposed to be serving.

When the budget passed last month, the vouchers controversy was front and center in the nation’s editorial pages, with advocates of school choice even finding unlikely allies in the likes of the Washington Post and CNN’s reliably liberal commentator Roland Martin.  The Obama Administration endured the criticism and pressed on, knowing full well that their comprehensive agenda for curtailing individual freedom would provide other controversies to push the vouchers issue off of the front pages in short order.  With the AIG bonus dispute, the government takeover of the auto industry, the push for nationalized health care and the prospect of a new global financial regulatory system, the administration seems to have accomplished just that.  But those who care about the future of those 1,700 children in our nation’s capital owe it to them not to forget their plight.

Thus, advocates for school choice should take two steps to ensure that the end of the D.C. vouchers program is only a temporary setback rather than a permanent defeat.

First, they must recognize that the vouchers model is an innovation whose potential reaches far beyond education. Seventy-five years of a rapidly expanding federal government have clearly demonstrated that bloated bureaucracies are essentially incapable of efficiency.   In the end, these institutions are always captured by public employees’ unions more concerned with their own benefits than with the service they are supposed to be rendering to their fellow man – even if that service is an education that could make the difference between a life on the streets and a life in the Ivy League.

Vouchers crack this code by allowing the government to provide opportunity to individuals while letting private sector mechanisms generate the services in question.  If believers in limited government can persuasively make the case for this “pay, don’t provide” model, they will have finally found a compelling alternative to the traditional welfare state.  The broader that consensus grows, the less likely that programs like Washington’s will find themselves on the chopping block in the future.

Second, it is imperative to remember the human cost of special-interest activism.  The D.C. voucher controversy wasn’t simply a political victory for the unions. It was also a tragedy for the students who have seen their futures put in jeopardy.  

In response, believers in school choice and advocates for inner-city youth should launch a national campaign to raise the $13 million it would take to continue the program as a private-sector endeavor.  This would shield the students in the voucher program from having their educations upended by the whims of politicians. It would send a powerful message that patriotic citizens won’t tolerate cynical gamesmanship in Washington.  And it would prove that Americans truly are committed to hope and change for the least-privileged among us – at least Americans who don’t live in the White House, that is.