A Chequer-Board of Nights and Days

Those familiar with the policy details and appeal of school vouchers have stated quite often that vouchers and school choice would find their greatest appeal among lower income families. Now, with Mayor Anthony Williams having started a significant voucher experiment in the nation's capital, we see that vouchers are appealing to the anticipated demographic and leaving few disappointed:

When the time came for April Walton's daughter, Breanna, to enter elementary school, Ms. Walton didn't know what to do. The prospect of turning her daughter over to a public school was frightening.

"I didn't feel that was a good environment," Ms. Walton, a single mother of two, said. "But I couldn't afford to send her anywhere else."

Ms. Walton found the solution to her problem, one shared by thousands of parents in the District of Columbia, in Washington's Opportunity Scholarship program. The $13 million, federally funded, five-year pilot program - created by an act of Congress in January 2004 - provides a voucher of up to $7,500 for low-income families in the District of Columbia to send their children to private schools. Now in its second year, the voucher program is generating positive reviews, both formal and anecdotal.

Washington's mayor, Anthony Williams, a Democrat who bucked his party to push for the program, said he was pleased with the results so far - including the vouchers' effect on the public school system, one of the worst-performing in the nation.

"I think the good schools have gotten better, and the mediocre schools are getting on track because, I believe, we've had a charter school movement that's been very robust, and because of the vouchers," Mr. Williams told The New York Sun.

Mr. Williams said he didn't know whether the District's experience meant that voucher programs should spread across the country. "But I do believe we ought to be more open about experimenting all over the country," the mayor said, "and I do believe that where you've got low-performing schools in bad situations, you ought to give parents that choice, wherever that happens to be."

As for those receiving vouchers in D.C., Mr. Williams added: "We're finding that the lowest-income parents from some of the lowest-performing schools are taking advantage of this program, and they're excited about it."

Those excited participants include families like the Waltons. Breanna, for example, is now a 6-year-old first-grade student at the private Rock Creek International School, where the average class size is 12 and the student-teacher ratio is 7-to-1. She has as classmates the children of international corporate executives and foreign ambassadors. Breanna's curriculum is the International Baccalaureate program, and she is taught regularly in English, French, Spanish, and Arabic. Trips abroad - to Europe, Africa, South America, the Middle East - are part of the curriculum, and Breanna will participate. The school's facilities are bright, colorful, and clean, on a quiet, tree-lined street in Georgetown.

According to Ms. Walton, it's a far cry from what awaited Breanna at her local public school. The Waltons live in the RFK Stadium-Armory neighborhood in southeast Washington, an economically depressed, crime-ridden area of the District. By sending Breanna across town to Rock Creek International, Ms. Walton said, her daughter doesn't "have to come into a building where there's broken windows, and glass, and litter, and drug paraphernalia laying around.

"I know that when I go to work that day, she's safe," Ms. Walton said. "I don't have to worry about the crime."

I continue to be amazed by the fact that some people want to deny parents the kind of peace of mind that April Walton and other parents have gained by having school choice available to them. I continue to be amazed by the fact that some people would rather see kids run the gauntlet of bad and unsafe schools than to have the opportunity to learn in safety and in a superior educational setting. I continue to be amazed that those who oppose school vouchers--and who as a result hoist an inferior school system on too many parents and families--don't seem to see that the fostering of an excellent educational system through school choice will pay for itself many times over.  

And with all of that having been said, I continue to be amazed that so many advocates of school choice are shy about promoting it in the face of the determined opposition of teachers' unions and those in thrall to them. I recognize that the unions wield great political power. But they are also on the unpopular side of the issue and the policy arguments are quite clearly against them. The only thing they have going for them is the unwillingness of some school choice advocates to call the public education system what it is and to demand better and demand it loudly. So long as the advocates of school choice are shy about their advocacy, all of the effective policy arguments, all of the evidence favoring school choice, all of the stories about families benefiting from choice won't amount to a thing.

Programs don't sell themselves. People have to sell them. So what are we waiting for?

(Cross posted on Red State.)