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EDITOR’S NOTE

GOOD AFTERNOON TO EVERYONE!

It happened quietly and didn’t draw a lot of Big Media coverage, but Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal won a huge victory against the Obama Administration when a lawsuit against his popular school voucher program was withdrawn. The Justice Department apparently didn’t tell anyone except the judge it was backing down; the judge passed the good news along to a group of concerned parents who wanted to enter the case in support of the voucher program.

The whole case was, to borrow Governor Jindal’s description, absurd from the start. The voucher program gives students a chance to escape from failing schools. Something like 90 percent of the beneficiaries were black and Hispanic. And yet, Eric Holder’s Justice Department tried to kill the program because it supposedly interfered with federal desegregation efforts!

The last straw was probably the release of recent studies that showed the voucher program was in fact improving racial integration in Louisiana schools, among its many other virtues.

There are still fears that the Administration will try to use a seemingly innocuous request for annual data about the program to strangle it with red tape, but there are also encouraging signs that Justice will continue to back away. It was an outrage that federal interference with Jindal’s program was ever contemplated, and difficult to escape the conclusion that it mostly done out of fealty to the most powerful special interest in America, the education establishment.

It would be a mistake to allow the Obama Administration to quietly retreat from such an outrage without paying a political price. Judging by the reactions from congressional leaders, and of course Governor Jindal, that looks like a mistake Republicans will not be making. School choice is a crucial part of educational reform. Entrenched interests should be made fearful of abusing regulatory authority to thwart it.

John Hayward
Senior Writer
On Twitter: Doc_0

Luv, Zen Lill