I'm in Scottsdale, Arizona today (projected high: 99 degrees) for an education reform summit hosted by the State Policy Network, the Alliance for School Choice, and the Friedman Foundation. Savvy readers will surmise that at such an event, "school reform" equals "private school choice," and that no keynoter would be appropriate other than the 60's-radical-turned-school-choice-godfather Howard Fuller. (They'd be right.)
Fuller is not known for dry oratory, and he gave a real stem winder of an address today. He took some shots at Barack Obama, whom he supports for president, for calling for change and yet not being willing to break with the teachers unions over choice. But he saved most of his fire for none other than my good friends Rick Hess and Sol Stern. (He went out of his way to say that he "likes Rick." Sorry, Sol.)
He argued that both think tankers quoted him selectively in recent articles (this one by Sol ; Rick's is listed here but not yet available online). For instance, in the current issue of The American , Rick writes:
Howard Fuller, patron saint of the voucher program, has wryly acknowledged, "I think that any honest assessment would have to say that there hasn't been the deep, wholesale improvement in Milwaukee Public Schools that we would have thought."
Fuller, after thanking Rick for "elevating me to sainthood while I'm still alive," said that he had left out the next sentence he said. Which was something to the effect of: But school choice is still worth fighting for because we are literally saving children's lives.
Fuller went on to describe a small Christian school in Milwaukee whose board he chairs, and which is sending 35 of 37 graduating seniors to college. He asked if he should tell his younger students, sorry, the voucher program isn't fixing the system, so it should end, and you should have to go back to MPS?
"Did Harriet Tubman want to end the system of slavery? Of course she did. 
But until that happened, she woke up every day to try to save every single slave that she could."
And with that, Fuller wholly embraced the "lifeboat"??rationale for school choice: It may not transform the system, but it transforms the lives of students who ??participate, and that's reason enough to support it.
This is important. And honest. And, for me, compelling. It's why I supported the DC voucher program even though there was no chance it would do anything to improve the other schools in DC. (It's tiny compared to the charter school sector and DC's public schools were "held harmless" financially.) But it had the potential to dramatically improve the lives of 2,000 impoverished youngsters without appreciably reducing the quality of education of their peers. So for me, that's a no-brainer.
But this is a big shift from the early days of the school choice movement. As Hess writes in his piece,
In 1990, scholars John Chubb and Terry Moe argued in their seminal volume Politics, Markets, and America's Schools , "Without being too literal about it, we think reformers would do well to entertain the notion that choice is a panacea...It has the capacity all by itself to bring about the kind of transformation that, for years, reformers have been seeking to engineer in myriad other ways."
I'm with Fuller, as I suspect Stern and Hess would be too: Let's save as many kids as we can through school choice programs. But let's also admit, as both Stern and Hess have argued, that school choice is not enough if we want to transform the system too.
