(AP Photo/Steven Senne)

A federally funded program offering D.C. public school students vouchers for private school tuition has long been a flashpoint between many Republicans and Democrats, and now it has become an issue in the 2012 presidential contest between Mitt Romney and President Obama.

The Post reports that Romney jumped on the side of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program during a speech on education policy, using Obama’s recent refusal to fund it for another year as an example of how Democrats are failing on education reform.

“In the Opportunity Scholarships, the Democrats finally found the one federal program they are willing to cut. Why? Because success anywhere in our public schools is a rebuke to failure everywhere else. That’s why the unions oppose even the most common-sense improvements,” Romney said in a speech at the Latino Coalition’s Annual Economic Summit.

The D.C. voucher program was created in 2004 by Congress, the first of its kind to provide federal dollars for low-income children to attend private schools. It functioned until 2009, providing some 1,600 students with $8,000 a year that could be used towards private school tuition. Democrats threatened to cut funding, but it was restored by the new Republican majority in 2010. Obama included no funds for the program in his 2013 budget; House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) have led the charge in asking that it be saved.

The scholarship program has always been something of a political football. Some local officials and national public school advocates have argued that it takes necessary funding away from public schools, while proponents, both locally and nationally, have said that it provides a vital alternative to poor families in a city with notoriously bad schools. During a hearing on the Hill last year on the program, Mayor Vince Gray came out against it while D.C. Council Chair Kwame Brown testified in favor of it.

A 2010 Department of Education study of the program’s first years found no statistical difference in test scores between students that took the tuition and those that remained in public schools, but parents’ satisfaction, perception of school safety and graduation rates improved. Still, as one advocate pointed out last year, some 9,000 parents signed up for the 3,300 slots available in the first five years of the program.