Sound of Silence from The One...on DC's Kids

This debate over education is now coming to a head in Washington. In the first months after he took office, Mr. Obama kept quiet when Sen. Dick Durbin (D., Ill.) killed off a popular voucher program that allowed low-income D.C. moms and dads to send their kids to the same kind of schools where the president sends his own daughters (Sidwell Friends). This was followed by the president's silence last month during the D.C. Democratic primary, in which the mayor who appointed the district's reform-minded schools chancellor, Michelle Rhee, went down to defeat.

Even now, when Ms. Rhee's fate—and that of D.C. school reform—hangs in the balance, Mr. Obama remains mute. This from the same president who shows no such shyness when interjecting himself into, say, a complaint about Boston police, a dispute over an Islamic Center in Manhattan, or the mass firing of teachers at a troubled high school in Central Falls, R.I. Why so reticent about an issue affecting the future of thousands of African-American children?

Let these children go. In Chicago, across America.

Let these children go.