Choice Under Fire, Yet Again

Florida's Supreme Court last week was the latest venue for the movable feast of meretricious arguments by which public-school teachers unions wage war in any city or state where families of poor children try to escape from failing public schools. The attack on Florida's school-choice program relied on 19th-century bigotry and 21st-century obscurantism.

Florida's Opportunity Scholarships, the nation's first statewide school-choice program, was enacted in 1999 to ameliorate a gross civil-rights injustice--the fact that poor families whose children are trapped in terrible schools are helpless to prevent their children's life chances from being blighted. The program empowers students to transfer from failing schools, as defined by set criteria, to the public or private school of their choice.

Teachers unions immediately filed suit to block this escape route--this underground railroad, if you will--from the public-school plantation. The suit cited ...