The April/May 2003 issue of American Enterprise, organized around the theme Race, Broken Schools, and Affirmative Action, contains several interesting articles on school choice. In one, AEI scholar Rick Hess notes that suburban resistance to school choice is entirely rational: families in suburbs have no reason to welcome measures that--as they see them--undercut the educational security they have struggled to achieve for their children. Suburban opposition to vouchers is unlikely to go away, Hess says, unless efforts are made to provides such families with incentives, compensation, or limits on the ill-effects of choice. Among his suggestions: convince suburban voters that their schools are worse than they think; confine choice to urban districts; encourage new schools to provide options heretofore unavailable to suburban parents, like advanced courses or different school schedules or calendars; or offer homeowners a tax deduction for the amount of value their homes lose in the aftermath of choice-based reform.
"Sweeten the pot for middle America," by Frederick Hess, The American Enterprise, April/May 2003, and other articles in the same issue. Some are available at http://www.theamericanenterprise.org/taeam03.htm (but not the Hess article). Instructions for ordering a copy of the magazine are at http://www.theamericanenterprise.org/taeback.htm.