Schools talk: Ugly windup, fine delivery Now, let's travel elsewhere in D.C., where students just got shortchanged. September 10, 2009 Mitch Pearlstein

Now that the chalk dust has settled, I would hope that just about everyone might agree that the problem with President Obama's speech to students on Tuesday had exclusively to do with its bungled initial staging and not with its eventual message -- which was terrific.

Given current and severe contentions both across and deep within the nation, what in the ether did Department of Education officials think would be the response in various quarters when they proposed lesson plans in which boys and girls were urged to write letters to the president, offering to help out with his not exactly Burkean or Buckleyesque agenda?  As myopic screwups go, it was a Washington classic.

Yet, in fairness, officials wound up rescinding the impolitic-to-the-point-of-obtuse guidelines, which ought to prompt critics, once again in fairness, to judge the speech strictly on its merits rather than on its preliminaries.  And on that score, it is hard to the point of impossible to see how anyone could be anything but impressed and thankful for it.

Suffice it to say that if a leader on the right had given the identical speech, give or take a few words, other conservatives would be ecstatic, as it celebrated virtually every virtue revered by them (and not just by them) when it comes to education.

At the end of the day, the president accurately said, "we can have the most dedicated teachers, the most supportive parents and the best schools in the world, and none will matter unless all of you fulfill your responsibilities -- unless you show up to those schools; pay attention to those teachers; listen to your parents, grandparents and other adults, and put in the hard work it takes to succeed."

And: Don't ever give up on yourself, because when you do, "you give up on your country.”  The only thing missing was a Sousa march as students recessed from auditoriums.

It's always a good day when a politician suggests that educational success has substantially more to do with personal responsibility than bigger budgets.  And where Obama is concerned specifically, for reasons of his race alone, he's in a decidedly better position than any of his predecessors when it comes to exploiting the bully pulpit in exactly the way he did when talking to millions of young people.  One can only hope he made a tangible and lasting impression on more than a handful of kids.

Nevertheless, the president's very good speech was not the only news about education and exploitation -- albeit of a far different kind -- coming out of Washington on Tuesday.  Earlier in the day, a handful of activists protested outside of the U.S. Department of Education headquarters, angered by the administration's decision to remove about 215 low-income District of Columbia students from a voucher program, thereby effectively exploiting and shortchanging them in embarrassing obedience to the National Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers and their partisans in Congress -- none of whom, needless to say, send their own children to a Washington public school.

Never mind that parents with children in the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program support the program strongly.  Never mind that large number of local Democratic politicians (the only kind in the District) do the same.  Never mind that research shows that kids attending private schools in the program have done modestly better than their counterparts in Washington's public schools, which often are described as some of the worst in the nation.

Never mind any of that.  Simply recognize, sadly but unsurprisingly, that for someone who declared hundreds, perhaps thousands of times during the campaign that he had no truck whatsoever for all those dreaded "special interests," Obama does seem to be carrying a lot of water for the NEA, AFT and the rest of what former education secretary Bill Bennett keenly described as "The Blob" -- education's cutting edge of unchange.

Inconsistency, sometime correctly viewed as hypocrisy, is a staple of politics and other corners of life.  But that doesn't ease the loss suffered in its name by D.C. students and their families.

Irony likewise is a staple of politics and other corners of life.  Too bad that Tuesday's demonstration of it in Washington was especially perverse.