In a very useful overview of customer — that is, parental — dissatisfaction with an increasingly politicized “education” curriculum in many public schools, my AEI colleague Robert Pondiscio makes the point, straightforward but in need of constant reiteration, that many parents are unhappy with the insertion of leftist “culture war” propaganda into public school education. Such parents, therefore, represent a constituency increasingly receptive to variants of school “choice” systems, whether through a voucher program similar to the Pell Grant system available to college students, or some other mechanism designed to subject the public school system to competition, and thus to nontrivial constraints upon the ability of the education bureaucracy and the teachers unions to ignore the preferences of parents.

So far, so good. But Robert, I believe, really is missing the larger political dynamic, one that became obvious to me many years ago when I was one of the volunteer state spokesmen for the campaign in favor of California Proposition 174 in 1993, the original school choice or “voucher” initiative.