President Obama has remained silent, while Democrats in Congress inserted a provision in the $410 billion 2009 omnibus spending bill that would threaten the future of the Washington, D.C., Opportunity Scholarship Program, a voucher program that provides for low-income families to send 1,700 of their children to the private schools of their choice. Because of the sorry state of the D.C. public schools, some Democrats were willing to allow it in 2003 when a Republican-led Congress created the voucher program. Even though scholarship students are performing much better, and the parents want it to continue, the program will only be continued one more year.

The OSP voucher program is the only federal voucher program in the country. Other cities have very successful voucher programs in Milwaukee, Cleveland, Florida, Utah, Arizona and Georgia, but they funded are with state and local taxes. It is more than obvious that, even though there are small voucher programs sprinkled throughout nation, the monopoly lock on public education is as strong as ever, backed by powerful teacher union and education establishment political power and campaign funding.

President Obama said that he is against using public money for private school vouchers. He also said that we need to focus on fixing and improving our public schools, not throwing our hands up and walking away from them. And he said schools need reform, not throwing more money at them. However, the president's $787 billion 2009 rescue bill included pumping $90.9 billion into public education, with little or nothing going toward education reform.

The state of public education in America is a national disgrace. Indeed, little or no progress has been made in the quality of education in our entire country since the scathing 1983 report, "A Nation at Risk." Yet, calls for real reform are ignored, while students continue to be robbed of their education at relentlessly higher costs to taxpayers. Still, the latest study says it will take $1.5 trillion per year, 25 times current extortion costs, to make it better.

Lack of funding is not the problem. The education monopoly is the problem. Fundamental education has been replaced by social and political ideologies, which have nothing to do with the necessary skills students must have function in society. Therefore, most students who graduate from high school are functionally illiterate. Replacing social and political indoctrination with functional education is what our students need. Instead of marching around wearing pink shirts protesting teacher layoffs, as they are doing here in California, teachers should be walking with their heads hung low in shame wearing white shirts bearing the word "Failure."