How vouchers came to D.C.: the inside story of the Bush administration's successful effort to bring school choice to the nation's capital

Education Next, Fall, 2004 by Spencer S. Hsu

"We walk away from these kids in every regard. We never fix these schools," said a disgusted Rep. Richard K. Armey (R-Texas). The date was May 23, 2001, and the Republican-controlled House of Representatives had rejected a proposal to fund a pilot school voucher program that would have provided a token voucher of $1,500 to students in five schools nationwide. "Where is the heart?" Armey, then the House majority leader, asked his own members.

Less than three years later, President George W. Bush delivered a far different message to voucher supporters--a declaration of victory. In January 2004, Bush signed legislation providing grants worth as much as $7,500 each to children from dozens of public schools in the District of Columbia for their use at private or religious schools in a five-year experiment. The recipients of the first federal "opportunity scholarships," as advocates named them, were announced in June.

After the vote, in a speech at the Heritage Foundation, a Washington-based conservative think tank, Secretary of Education Roderick R. Paige predicted that Washington's example would trigger campaigns in state legislatures across the country. "We have turned a corner," the secretary said. "This is just the beginning. We can't just sit and wait five years to see what happens here."

The D.C. program is a landmark, representing the first federally funded school voucher program. Moreover, by design the D.C. vouchers are more generous than those approved in Milwaukee, Cleveland, Florida, and Colorado, although they are generally limited to fewer children (see Table 1). How school voucher advocates engineered the breakthrough is the story of a complex alignment of interests among conseryative education activists, the Republicans who control Washington, and the local leaders of a majority African-American city. The legislation's passage, the culmination of a nine-year fight in Congress, attested to the school choice movement's persistence, deep pockets, and ability to capitalize on Washington residents' frustration with their struggling public schools.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

To opponents, the creation of a federal program that pays for children to attend private schools can only foster the spread of vouchers. But Tanya Clay, legislative director of People for the American Way, a liberal advocacy group, said it is not clear if state legislatures will follow suit or if other black urban politicians will join them. The Washington fight was unique in many regards, not least in that the legislators who approved the voucher program are unaccountable to the voters whose lives it will affect, since the District of Columbia has no vote in Congress.

The latter is a chief bone of contention among some critics. In the words of Eleanor Holmes Norton (D), Washington's elected, nonvoting delegate to the House of Representatives, "[Republicans] used our denial of representation in the Senate, where vouchers would have been disposed of as a matter of senatorial courtesy, to force vouchers on the city."

A Ripe Target

The D.C. School Choice Incentive Act of 2003 provides $65 million (plus $5 million for administrative costs) over five years to send as many as 1,700 low-income D.C. students to private and parochial schools starting in the fall of 2004. The grants are limited to those households earning up to 185 percent of the poverty level, about $34,873 for a family of four in 2004. Scholarships are aimed at students from low-performing D.C. public schools.

The victory came at a price. To win the support of local officials, the Bush administration and Congress had to pledge $2 in additional aid to the District's regular and charter public school systems for every $1 in new tuition grants for private schooling. The concessions confounded some voucher purists, who say the deal undermined the competitive incentive for public schools to improve.

Voucher advocates who supported the deal calculated that, whatever the concessions, the movement would benefit in the long term from a pilot program. The outcome provided advocates with not only a high-profile laboratory for the idea, but also fresh evidence that a political strategy aimed at fusing support from African-American urban leaders to a coalition of Republican groups can work under certain circumstances. As one example, participants cited the cultivation of D.C. mayor Anthony A. Williams, whose backing proved decisive. "We had never had a locally elected black official, a Democrat from a city like D.C., asking for something like this before," said Nina Shokraii Rees, director of the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Innovation and Improvement, which is implementing the program. "That's the single strongest factor that got people's attention."

Rees, a veteran of the school choice movement, said Washington was a ripe target. Movement strategists consider five factors when selecting battle-grounds, she said, and the District met each condition: a legislative and an executive branch controlled by supporters, local political champions for education or urban renewal, local business support, a weakened teacher union, and grassroots backing.