Posted by
John R. LaPlante on Friday, October 06, 2006 11:09:23 AM
Note: This is one of a series of observations from the Education Reform Summit / Annual Meeting of the State Policy Network, being held in Milwaukee.
The cliché that politics makes for strange bedfellows has been proven several times this week, in which the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program has been highlighted. Under the program, families who live in the jurisdiction of the Milwaukee Public Schools and fall below a certain income level can get a school voucher. In other words, parents, not bureaucrats or politicians, decide where their children attend school. The program has been around in some form or another since 1990, now lets parents take control of $6,500 for use at an array of schools, including over 120 private schools.
The program has faced numerous challenges from the teachers unions, the rest of the education bureaucracy, and elected officials of both major political parties.
The first major legislative supporter was Polly Williams, an African-American Democratic lawmaker from Milwaukee. Of late, the leading legislative advocates have been white Republicans from outstate Wisconsin. When the lawsuits came along, libertarian-minded public interest firms provided significant support in the legal defense. And of course the people with the greatest interest in the program are the families involved in it.
If you assemble a representative group of the program’s defenders, you may find that they may not agree on much of anything else. In fact, they each may have several reasons for supporting school choice, and those reasons may not be compatible. But there is one thing that they hold in common, and that’s a belief in the principle that children matter over systems.