Sheryl Blunt writes in the Weekly Standard about the continued efforts to keep local kids in failing schools.

Last week the Washington Scholarship Fund (WSF), the nonprofit organization that administers the program, announced that Congress’s failure to act and the Obama administration’s unwillingness to let new students participate, means that the WSF will be forced to end its oversight of the program this summer, when the school year ends.

“[E]xisting children and families in the OSP do not know whether they will have access to an Opportunity Scholarship next year, and children and families not now in the program do not know whether they will have the opportunity to participate next year,” the organization’s board of directors and president wrote in a December 3 letter to U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan. “This makes it virtually impossible for children, families, schools, and WSF to prepare for the time-intensive application and renewal processes so critical to the OSP’s sound administration for the 2010-2011 school year. Moreover, it denies these families any educational choice because more often than not, charters are not an option.”

Board members predict that the likely fallout will be private school closures that will force many scholarship recipients and other students back into the city’s troubled public schools next fall, “requiring the District to absorb the additional fiscal costs of educating both groups of students.”

I’m not sure the article supports the headline. It only makes sense to blame the NEA for Congress’s failure to act if you believe that some leading members of Congress simply do the union’s bidding rather than exercising independent judgment about what is best for DC school kids. You should read the whole thing to decide for yourself.