A PRESIDENT AND HIS PRIORITIES

By JASON L. RILEY

Does President Obama care more about black criminals than black
schoolchildren? Before dismissing the question as too cynical,
consider where he is spending his political capital these days.

Last week, Justice Department officials appeared before Congress and
very publicly urged lawmakers to close the gap in prison sentences
given to people convicted of dealing crack versus powdered cocaine.
Because of guidelines enacted during the crack epidemic of the 1980s,
someone convicted of selling five grams of crack is subject to the
same mandatory minimum five-year sentence as someone convicted of
selling 500 grams of powder cocaine.

"Now is the time for us to re-examine federal cocaine sentencing
policy, from the perspective of both fundamental fairness and
safety," said Lanny Breuer, who heads Justice's criminal division.

Blacks are 85% of crack offenders, and sentences for crack offenses
average 24 months longer than those for powder cocaine. Civil-rights
groups and others who equate racial disparities with racism have used
such data to decry the sentencing guidelines as racially unjust,
ignoring the fact that half of the 21 blacks in Congress at the time
voted for the legislation that created the 100-to-1 crack-powder
differential. Nor are these critics overly concerned with whether the
black population is helped or hurt when crack dealers are locked up
longer for pushing a drug that has had an especially devastating
effect on black communities. But never mind.

The reality is that the Obama administration chose to make the
disparate treatment of black and white drug dealers a priority.
Attorney General Eric Holder has set up a task force that will
recommend shorter jail sentences for crimes involving crack. And
Democrats have not ruled out reducing crack sentences retroactively.
But even if the administration achieves its objective, what has been
accomplished? As Bill Cosby once quipped: "OK, we even it up. Let's
have a big cheer for the white man doing as much time as the black
man. Hooray!"

Mr. Cosby's point was that the real travesty is not the treatment of
black criminals; it's their prevalence. According to the Justice
Department, "At midyear 2008, there were 4,777 black male inmates per
100,000 black males held in state and federal prisons and local
jails, compared to . 727 white male inmates per 100,000 white males."
Blacks are 13% of the population but 38% of prison or jail inmates.
And a black male born in 2001 has a 32% chance of being incarcerated
at some point in his life.

One of the more effective ways to address this problem is by
providing black children with decent schooling. Repeated studies have
shown an inverse relationship between educational attainment and the
likelihood of incarceration. Our prisons aren't teeming with
high-school and college graduates, and it's no coincidence that
cities with high crime rates also tend to have low-performing public schools.

Unfortunately, the Obama administration seems more interested in the
sentencing gap than the learning gap. The president pays lip-service
to the need to open pathways to educational achievement, but he and
Education Secretary Arne Duncan have been actively working to shut
down Washington, D.C.'s Opportunity Scholarship Program, which
provides low-income children with $7,500 per year to use toward
tuition at a private school. Mr. Obama can't claim that the program
isn't working. The latest evaluation by his own Education Department
showed scholarship recipients -- 99% of whom are black or Hispanic --
outperforming their public-school peers in reading. That finding
takes on even more significance when you consider that black
12th-graders in this country average lower reading scores than white
8th-graders.

Yesterday, the administration announced that it will support allowing
current students to remain in the program but will oppose letting any
new kids join them. The illogic is exquisite. If the president
believes that school vouchers are effective enough to grandfather
existing participants, the scholarship program deserves to be
expanded, not shuttered.

But then Mr. Obama's position on vouchers has little to do with
whether they help low-income kids get a decent education. Like most
Democrats, he is firmly allied with the teachers unions, which see
school choice as a threat to public education dollars and jobs.
Democrats are self-styled champions of the underprivileged. But their
alliance with teachers unions forces them to put the interests of the
adults who run the system ahead of the children's interests. And
teachers unions have no problem forcing ghetto kids to remain in
schools that aren't educating them.

Like every other president, Mr. Obama says that he will fix the bad
public schools, but that's not very likely to happen before he leaves
office. Besides, why should poor families be forced to wait patiently
for the public education system to get its act together while
better-off families can opt for private schools (like the Obamas) or
live in tony neighborhoods with decent public schools (like the Duncans)?

Virginia Walden-Ford, a school-choice activist in Washington who
played a pivotal role in getting Congress to pass the voucher
legislation in 2004, recently told Reason.tv: "The thing that makes
me the angriest about this -- and I am angry -- is that this has
become about politics and not about children." The mother of a son
who attended private school on a scholarship, she added: "This is a
community that African-American males just don't do well in. Drug
dealers and violence just follows them around. I believe that being
able to choose a school that was safe and a better environment for
William saved his life."

So, does Mr. Obama care more about criminals than kids? Of course
not. He just cares most about not upsetting a hugely important
liberal special interest group that helped elect him and other
Democrats. The raw political calculation is that poor black parents
will forgive him long before the National Education Association does.

Mr. Riley is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board.