While he has his own children educated in private schools, Obama wants all other children to have collectivist education. Especially in the joys of collectivism as propounded by his terrorist associate, William Ayres?

This from the Investor’s Business Daily:

 

When Barack Obama collected the endorsement of the American Federation of Teachers, he told the teachers that support for alternatives to the education monopoly amounted to "tired rhetoric about vouchers and school choice."

He recently told an interviewer that he opposes school choice because "although it might benefit some kids at the top, what you’re going to do is leave a lot of kids at the bottom."

Not being left behind are Obama’s daughters, who attend the private University of Chicago Laboratory Schools. There, tuition ranges from $15,528 for kindergarten to $20,445 for high school. When asked about it during last year’s YouTube debate, Sen. Obama responded that it was "the best option" for his children. They had a choice Obama would deny others.

Obama has been completely silent about the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program.

The D.C. School Choice Act of 2003 established the federally funded voucher program that provides vouchers of up to $7,500 for students in kindergarten through 12th grade. It lets students attend one of 60 participating nonpublic schools.

But it was funded only through the 2008-09 school year. Democrats such as D.C.’s delegate to Congress, Eleanor Holmes Norton, want to kill the successful program, which shows that money is not the root of a good education.

Norton and Obama seem oblivious to the fact that District school spending is at $13,400 per student — third-highest in the nation. Yet in 2007, D.C. public schools ranked last in math scores and second-to-last in reading scores for all urban public school systems in the U.S., according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

Norton is leading the charge to block a mere $18 million in funding for the 2009-10 school year. This demonstration program serves some 1,900 students. A recent Education Department report found that nearly 90% of Opportunity scholarship students had higher reading scores than peers who didn’t receive a scholarship.

Not surprisingly, there are five applicants for every opening.

April Cole-Walton’s daughter attends St. Peter’s Interparish School thanks to an Opportunity Scholarship. "If I could talk to Sen. Obama," she says, "I would say, ‘Give me a choice and give my daughter a chance.’ "

Fat chance. Obama instead offers support for things like universal preschool, based on the idea that the earlier the government gets its hands on our children, the better off they will be. The nanny state will spend more money and pay for more teachers.

Obama also wants to create something called the American Opportunity Tax Credit to provide a "free" college education by ensuring that the first $4,000 of college tuition is covered for students from lower-income families. Each student will be required to put in 100 hours of "voluntary" national service a year to get the money.

Obama’s buddy, former Weatherman terrorist William Ayers, has plans for the same captive student audiences Obama wants to keep captive. Now a tenured Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois, Chicago, Ayers works to educate teachers in socialist revolutionary ideology, urging that it be passed on to impressionable students.

One of Ayers’ descriptions for a course called "Improving Learning Environments" says a prospective K-12 teacher needs to "be aware of the social and moral universe we inhabit and … be a teacher capable of hope and struggle, outrage and action, teaching for social justice and liberation."

For his course "Urban Education," Ayers writes: "In a truly just society, there would be a greater sharing of the burden, a fairer distribution of material and human resources."

All of this sounds like Obama’s plans for "economic justice" and redistribution of the nation’s wealth.

Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley has employed Ayers as a teacher trainer for the city’s public schools. On his Web site, Obama describes Ayers as a "tenured professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a ‘respected advisor to Mayor Daley on school reform.’ "

And a future secretary of education, perhaps?