U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings has an op-ed in today’s Washington Post exhorting Congress to save the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, the voucher initiative for the nation’s capital that last year gave 1,900 children a chance to go to better schools. As far as the Fordham Foundation’s Mike Petrilli is concerned, it’s close to wasted ink. Instead of worrying about school choice, Spellings should be complaining that Congress is going to kill Reading First, a federal program that may or may not give an extra boost to reading ability, but that Congressional Democrats have had a field day demonizing as corrupt, one suspects not because they think Reading First doesn’t work, but because doing so plays to their NCLB- and phonics-despising teacher-union base.

As an optimist, I prefer not to think that Spellings wrote her piece because she forgot that somehow what’s of absolutely overriding importance is saving Reading First. I prefer to think that she might have actually learned from the Reading First saga and finally become convinced that politics tends to destroy programs she thinks are absolutely tremendous. I prefer to think that she is accepting clear reality: If we want real reform, we have to let kids out of a system in which political concerns always trump educational.

Of course, she probably hasn’t had any such epiphany, but at least there’s slim reason for hope. When it comes to Fordham, in contrast, the priorities they lay out for Spellings strongly suggest that there’s almost no hope at all.