Earlier this week the Department of Education hosted an event at a local high school in Washington, DC. The purpose of the event, which featured Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, Senator Jack Reed (D-RI) and the second lady of the United States, Dr. Jill Biden was to promote the new FAFSA application. The Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) has been compulsory for any students wishing to receive financial aide or subsidized loans.

The event was well scripted, except for a Biden gaffe. But, in this case, it was not the Vice President who opened his mouth and inserted his foot, it was his wife, Dr. Jill Biden.

Jill Biden has been in the academic circles for close to three decades. She has been an educator for over 29 years. She currently teaches at Northern Virginia Community college, and she has made education one of her focal points in this administration.  In fact, Jill Biden regularly travels on behalf of the administration and to visit schools and universities across the nation.

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This is big government at its finest hour. The Democrats have officially killed a successful private school voucher program banishing more than 3,300 low-income children back to the DC schools they so desperately wanted to escape. The Heartland Institute reports:

The leaders of D.C.’s school choice movement, Kevin P. Chavous (former D.C. Councilman) and Virginia Walden Ford (executive director of D.C. Parents for School Choice), today issued the following statement:

“House and Senate Appropriators this week ignored the wishes of D.C.’s mayor, D.C.’s public schools chancellor, a majority of D.C.’s city council, and more than 70 percent of D.C. residents and have mandated the slow death of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program. This successful school voucher program—for D.C.’s poorest families—has allowed more than 3,300 children to attend the best schools they have ever known.

The decision to end the program, a decision buried in a thousand-page spending bill and announced right before the holidays, destroys the hopes and dreams of thousands of D.C. families. Parents and children have rallied countless times over the past year in support of reauthorization and in favor of strengthening the OSP.

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