Cato’s Neal McCluskey explains:

So U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan invited every Education Department employee to attend Rev. Al Sharpton’s Glenn Beck counter-rally. As David Boaz explained in the Examiner, it was a ”highly inappropriate” thing to do, pushing people who are supposed to serve all Americans to support one side of a “political debate.” But that’s just the most obvious problem with Duncan’s weekend doings.

Perhaps just as troubling as his rally-prodding is that Duncan declared education “the civil rights issue of our generation” at Sharpton’s event. This only about a year after helping to kill an education program widely supported by many of the people he and Sharpton insist they want to empower. I’m talking, of course, about Washington, DC’s, Opportunity Scholarship Program, a voucher program that was proven effective. But the heck with success — Duncan and President Obama let the union-hated program die.

I’m a huge fan of the DC OSP — I’ve visited the neighborhoods it affects, met families with kids in the program, talked with the kids themselves, seen the life-changing impact the scholarships are having, and witnessed the despair brought about by Congress’ decision to cease funding–and so kill–the program. The folks who benefit from the program are, demographically, strong Obama supporters. The betrayal they felt when he presided over the decision to pander to the unions is not to be described.

I do appreciate that the Obama administration, led by Duncan, has taken some necessary and controversial steps in the right direction. The stands they have taken for charter schools and merit pay for teachers have flown in the face of the teachers unions’ self-interest–and that was courageous. And say what you will about whether the federal government has any business getting involved in pouring money into states for public education via the Race to the Top competition–that process motivated states to stand up to unions and to commence a much-needed reassessment of whether the K-12 system serves teachers or students. Colorado–which sadly did not get any of the funding–actually passed a bill tying teacher tenure to student performance. That’s major stuff in the world of ed reform.

Still, Duncan should not be politicizing the work of ed reform–he should be working to de-politicize it. And if he’s serious that education is the civil rights issue of our era–and I think he’s right about that–he’s got to start taking seriously the idea that kids in failing schools need alternatives now, and that charter schools alone are not enough. They don’t have time to wait for the system to reform itself–particularly when, in the absence of strong competition, it is not likely to do so.