Deal or no deal? When it comes to the District of Columbia voucher program, the Obama administration says there’s no deal—or at least not the one described on Capitol Hill.
Republican House Speaker John Boehner, an Ohio Republican, and U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman, a Connecticut Independent, both backers of the District of Columbia voucher program, issued a statement this week saying that they had reached an agreement with the Obama administration to “fully implement” the program, the funding for which the administration has proposed cutting in its fiscal 2013 budget.
But U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan says there’s no such accord. The only agreement, his department said, is to allow for an incremental increase in the number of voucher recipients—from 1,615 to about 1,700 students—so that the program can continue to be studied. On Tuesday, Duncan put out another statement, saying flatly “there has been absolutely no change” in the adminstration’s position on D.C. vouchers.
More details on these machinations can be found in my above-linked posts on Politics K-12.