With the school choice and parental-involvement movements bearing fruit nationwide, they are testament to the power of good ideas backed by tireless efforts to overcome horribly entrenched opposition.
Allow, please, this first-hand account as a dabbler in the movement for 40 years to bear witness to how far the parental rights cause has come.
As a high school senior in early 1982 searching for college scholarship money, I applied for one program that would be determined by how much its sponsors liked an essay we were asked to write on any public policy initiative of our choice. I wrote an impassioned advocacy of school vouchers but was told by my high school principal, who personally approved of the idea, that it would probably be seen as too “radical” to earn me the scholarship. Alas, he was right.
Five years later, as research director for Republican Rep. Bob Livingston’s campaign for governor of Louisiana, I was asked to prepare a file for Livingston’s joint appearance with other candidates at a state school superintendents’ forum. Knowing Livingston wisely favored school choice, I wrote a separate memo on the subject outlining all the reasons it was a good idea — but also all the reasons why, if we were going to make it part of our campaign, we needed to lay a lot more political groundwork for it to overcome an environment reflexively hostile to it. In sum, I said he should temporarily punt, just for a month or two, saying it was an idea “worthy studying” but not embraceable unless he got some further questions answered.
Being the straight shooter he is, though, Livingston got angry when all his opponents trashed the idea, so he bravely barreled ahead with a full-on espousal of vouchers. Livingston was absolutely right on the policy, but elite opinion then was so suspicious of new ideas that every major paper in the state, all of which were otherwise looking for a reformist candidate to defeat corrupt incumbent Edwin Edwards, trashed Livingston for “threatening” public education and began looking elsewhere for a white knight to endorse. (Months later, they decided then-Democratic Rep. Buddy Roemer was the knight, and their joint endorsements pushed him to victory.) More’s the pity: Livingston would have been a superb governor.
I mention all this as a reminder of the major obstacles school choice advocates had to overcome. The elites, the supposed cognoscenti, considered the notion not just impractical but actually anathema.
Two key developments began, very slowly, to turn the tide. The first was the embrace of vouchers by Polly Williams, a black, Democratic state legislator in Wisconsin. In 1989, she authored and passed the nation’s first school voucher law, making the case that it would be good for her constituents and for education as a whole. The second was the surprising, if tentative, late-1980s embrace by Al Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers, of the idea (originated but not in widespread discussion in the 1970s in New England) of public charter schools — and their adoption into law in Minnesota in 1991. Even though school choice then, as now, enjoyed most of its passionate advocacy among conservatives, it was again a liberal Democrat, state Sen. Ember Reichgott Junge, who pushed charters into law in Minnesota.
One of the earliest people in Minnesota to take up the challenge happened to be a good college friend of mine, Jon Bacal, and I was able to watch from afar as Jon in a quarter-century founded or helped establish more than 30 charter schools, including some in notably underprivileged communities. Jon was one of the New York Times’s boots on the ground to show that school choice could indeed work.
Eventually, I was able to see firsthand the difference a somewhat voucherlike state “scholarship” plan in Alabama could have on needy communities. As a nine-year board member of a private, largely donation-and-grant-backed school serving a largely impoverished community, I found it tremendously gratifying to see how Alabama’s new program, which gave parents the ability to direct the funding for their children’s education, stabilized the finances of a remarkable school, allowing its board to focus on educational improvements and accreditation rather than on hand-to-mouth survival.
In sum, school choice, in many different forms, really, truly works.
All of which makes it so encouraging to see school choice and parental rights efforts blossom so abundantly in the past year or so. Jim Blew, former assistant secretary of education under Betsy DeVos and co-founder of the Defense of Freedom Institute, notes the following signal successes, among numerous others he said could be named.
Earlier this week, Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey signed a law vastly expanding a program for Empowerment Scholarship Accounts. Also this week, Tennessee began implementing a statewide Educational Savings Account Program after overcoming two years of litigation from the entrenched education establishment. Florida, long a leader in successful implementation of school choice, is seeing agitation to expand its own program even more. Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin is reexpanding funding for that state’s choice programs, and in Iowa, Gov. Kim Reynolds backed successful Republican primary challenges by school choice supporters against incumbent legislators who oppose educational savings accounts.
Again, that’s just a partial list. Nationwide, there has been precipitous growth in families taking advantage of both private school choice programs and of charter schools.
All of which is to show just how far school choice has come, and how popular and beneficial it has been, since the early efforts in the 1980s met such harsh resistance and such snooty recalcitrance from elites. It took bipartisan and cross-ideological efforts to do so, proving both that parental concerns transcend politics and that coalition-building remains an essential skill even in an otherwise polarized political world.
If we can just get the Biden administration to stop fighting choice’s progress, the rewards for children could be extraordinary.
