EDITOR’S NOTE: This column is available exclusively through United Media. For permission to reprint or excerpt this copyrighted material, please contact Carmen Puello at [email protected]. The D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program saves lives. Yet the fate of the nonprofit program, which takes poor children out of failing schools and gives them scholarships to private institutions, is currently up in the air, in the hands of Congress and, ultimately, the president.

Supporters of the program cite its strong record of fostering academic improvement, but the value of the program goes beyond grades. It quite literally saves lives. Children enrolled in the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, now in its fifth year, are physically safer than they were in District public schools, which are some of the most violent in the nation.

The president was recently shamed into agreeing that the 1,700 students from low-income families who are currently enrolled in private schools, courtesy of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, should be allowed to graduate with the program’s support. (Two of these students attend the elite Sidwell Friends School with Malia and Sasha Obama.) D.C. Opportunity (to coin an appropriate nickname) is an $18 million federally funded program that has garnered support from a diverse crew of Beltway insiders: George W. Bush, for one, along with current and former D.C. mayors Adrian Fenty, Anthony Williams, and Marion Barry. School choice, a longtime conservative policy staple, has bipartisan support — even the liberal Washington Post editorial page has blasted a D.C. Opportunity opponent, District of Columbia delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, for disingenuousness in her attacks on the program.

In making his case against extending the program, Senate majority whip Dick Durbin claimed earlier this year that: “Many benefiting from this program want no questions asked about its efficacy. I think the taxpayers deserve better.” I haven’t surveyed everyone benefiting from this program, but I do know that we have answers to questions about how well it works. The D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program is moving children in the right direction. Unlike other programs under which students backslide when they switch schools, some children enrolled in D.C. Opportunity have improved, according to the Department of Education’s own evaluation, which reports that “achievement trends are moving in the right direction.” For example, “after 3 years, there was a statistically significant positive impact on reading test scores.” Moreover, the program spends far less per pupil than the D.C. public schools do. The Obama administration buried the evaluation, though, in a Friday-afternoon release during the appropriations debate over the fate of the program earlier this spring. But a recent Heritage Foundation report offers an even fuller picture of the significance of the scholarship program: The D.C. public-school system is among the most dangerous in the country. A 2007 Education Department study shows that in 2005, 12.1 percent of D.C. students in grades 9 through 12 “reported being threatened or injured with a weapon on school property during the previous 12 months.” That’s higher than the rate for any state in the Union; the national average is 7.9 percent. During the 2007–08 school year, there were 1,828 criminal incidents reported at D.C. public schools, almost half of them involving violence. Crime is such a reality in the lives of D.C. schoolchildren that 17 percent of the charter group of parents who signed up for the scholarship program considered safety their top reason for doing so. That elected officials in Washington refuse to fully consider these readily accessible numbers, choosing instead to turn their backs on the children whose lives could be transformed and even saved by this program, is a true shame. They’re surrendering an opportunity to join the last great civil-rights battle. Sometime before it adjourns for the summer, Congress will hold hearings on D.C. Opportunity’s future. Dan Lips, co-author of the Heritage report, offers a message to members: “The Obama administration has said that they will prioritize funding for education initiatives by supporting programs that work. If that’s the case, they should strongly favor continuing and expanding the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program. The evidence is clear: students in the program are improving academically compared to their peers who remain in public school. And they evidence also shows that they are in a safer learning environment, which is really important to D.C. parents given the problems in the public school system.” It is important, too, for Congress to pay attention to what’s going on in its backyard. Lives depend on it. — Kathryn Jean Lopez is the editor of National Review Online. © 2009, Kathryn Jean Lopez. Distributed by Newspaper Enterprise Assn.