In a forceful editorial the day after the Zelman decision, The Washington Post hailed the ruling, restated the need for experimentation, and urged choice opponents not to become fixated on blurring of church-state lines. "We don't belittle the dangers. But the dangers of vouchers are hypothetical ones at this stage. The crisis in education is real."
That's the same pragmatic mindset that journalist Matt Miller embraces in an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, in which he revisits the "voucher proposal for liberals" he first broached a few years ago in The Atlantic. Miller suggests that Uncle Sam fund an experiment in 3-4 big cities in which every poor child is offered a hefty voucher that could be redeemed at public or private schools, a voucher large enough to increase per-pupil spending by 20% or 30%. (This way, liberals can't object that the voucher drains cash from schools for poor kids.) When Miller first proposed this idea to conservatives, they liked it, but leaders of the teacher unions refused to even consider it. Miller warns that, if the unions are not open to this kind of experiment, they may soon be in for worse. At some point, he predicts, a Democratic presidential aspirant will be willing to stand up to the unions (and their "Sit tight-we've got a ten year reform plan" message to poor families) on the voucher issue.
While Miller believes that we may be near a tipping point on vouchers, the landscape of American education is already much more fragmented than most choice opponents acknowledge, with increasing numbers of students attending magnet schools, charter schools, privately run public schools, private schools, and even home schools, writes Tamar Lewin in The New York Times. According to Joe Viteritti of NYU, "we're redefining the concept of public education, not seeing it as being synonymous with neighborhood-run public schools but instead as a public obligation to provide every child with a decent education, whether it's through vouchers or charter schools. The basic assumption that the only way to educate children is in locally run, publicly run schools has been punctured." While there's no conclusive evidence that school choice has improved American education (though plenty of suggestive evidence exists), Lewin writes, the trend toward more school choice, both within the public sector and outside it, is probably unstoppable in a consumer society like ours where all kinds of choices abound, even though many people still fear that the splintering of our education system may damage civic life in ways yet unknown.
But while choices may expand, urban children are likely to find that one option continues to be closed to them: nearby suburban schools. In an op-ed in today's Washington Post, law professors Michael Heise and James Ryan argue that the most important opponents of expanded school choice are suburbanites who are satisfied with their schools and want to protect them from change. Suburban parents have largely succeeded in insulating their schools from desegregation decrees and from efforts to equalize school finance equalization, and persuading them to open the doors of their schools to students from urban districts will be a tough sell, Heise and Ryan write.
"Letting Parents Decide," The Washington Post, June 28, 2002
"The Liberal Voucher Opportunity," by Matthew Miller, The Wall Street Journal, July 2, 2002 (available only to subscribers)
"Alternatives to Neighborhood School Are Vaster Than Ever," by Tamar Lewin, The New York Times, June 29, 2002
"Taking School Choice to the Suburbs," by James Ryan and Michael Heise, The Washington Post, July 3, 2002
