I’m back from the beach, and thankfully didn’t get sunburned too badly. A lot went on while I was gone. And though I sometimes have to pick and choose what to write about when I’m blogging almost every day, trying to catch up on a week’s worth of news is — well, it’s like trying to build a tall sand castle just a few feet from the water’s edge. You get the picture.

What you really don’t want to miss though is a great op-ed written by U.S. Senator Joseph Lieberman for yesterday’s Washington Post. The good senator from Connecticut notes that vouchers must remain part of the solution to help kids with educational needs in our nation’s capital:

There are low-income children in the District [of Columbia] who can’t wait for their local schools to turn around. Without programs such as this one, their opportunity will be lost forever.

What a tragedy it would be to let petty politics needlessly stamp out opportunity for some kids. And let’s be clear: when I say ‘petty politics’, I mostly mean (as the Wall Street Journal reports) the outright lies of the National Education Association (H/T Jay Greene):

Public school teachers are supposed to teach kids to read, so it would be nice if their unions could master the same skill. In a recent letter to Senators, the National Education Association claims Washington, D.C.’s Opportunity Scholarships aren’t working, ignoring a recent evaluation showing the opposite.

“The DC voucher pilot program, which is set to expire this year, has been a failure,” the NEA’s letter fibs. “Over its five year span, the pilot program has yielded no evidence of positive impact on student achievement.”

I went to the thesaurus to find some more words to describe the NEA’s remark: Falsehood. Dishonesty. Mendacity. Prevarication. Those are just a few.

Or how about plain old “outrageous”? My stomach is turning. Maybe I need to go on vacation again.