This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, April 17th, 2009.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The DC voucher program is scheduled to die, and if the program does end, the slights of hand by Congress in the D.C. City Council

will make it hard to lay blame.

And that's all by design, says Neil McCluskey, the Associate Director of the Kito Institute's Center for Educational Freedom.

Well, Congress has decided that they are going to essentially strangle the DC voucher

program in the crib. But just leave it alive enough that they can't be blamed

or found guilty of killing it.

So what they did is, in the beginning of March, they said that they're not going to reauthorize

the DC voucher program and that it's, they're not going to fund it past the 2009-2010 school

year.

They're not really, technically they're not killing it because they've said if Congress

and the DC City Council were to decide they wanted to reauthorize the program, then it could continue to exist.

So for all intents and purposes, they've eliminated the voucher program, but nobody can really

be found guilty of committing a murder.

What's really unfortunate, and that makes one think that the Obama administration,

at least in education, isn't separating politics from policy as they had promised is that throughout

the period that Congress was debating how they were going to handle or be

honest how they were going to eliminate the DC

voucher program. A report was sitting at the Institute of Education Sciences

which is part of the Department of Education and this report was part of an ongoing

longitudinal study of the DC voucher program. And what this report found was that

...