Washington’s public schools have for decades spent more per student than any other public school system in the country while producing the fewest graduates who have learned the skills essential for college and careers. But five years ago, Congress and the Bush administration threw a lifeline to thousands of D.C. parents and students with the Opportunity Scholarship program. Opportunity Scholarship recipients must be from low-income families and can use the scholarship to attend the school of their choice. The program routinely has many more applicants than available scholarships because so many parents and students are desperate for alternatives. Now along comes the District’s congressional delegate, Eleanor Holmes Norton, who vows to end a program that is a godsend for more than 1,900 economically disadvantaged D.C. students. Norton is putting liberal ideology and the interests of the public school unions ahead of the wishes of parents and the needs of children.

One of the ironies here is that Norton — the former chairwoman of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission — is proposing a course of action that would resegregate children who have successfully moved into more racially integrated environments. A study published by The Manhattan Institute showed that 85 percent of public school students attend “racially homogenous” schools, while only 47 percent of the scholarship students are so segregated.

Studies of the program by the U.S. Department of Education and by Georgetown University found that parents were more engaged in their children’s education, more confident in their safety and more focused on academic performance. Yet unions invested in public school monopolies are so opposed to vouchers, and Norton is in such thrall to their dictates, that she ignores these studies and says the students are “victims” of an experiment that has barely been around long enough for its full benefits to be felt.

Congress authorized the scholarships for five years beginning in 2004. Norton said this week that she and the congressional Democratic leadership will not renew the program. She even acknowledged that participating parents “looked completely befuddled” when told that the program would likely be discontinued. Norton seems to deduce from their befuddlement not that it is unfair to pull the plug, but instead that program officials need to do more to tell parents of the program’s impending doom. If she actually cares about these children, rather than killing the scholarship fund, Norton ought to lead the fight for its renewal and expansion.