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

Advocates enjoyed important institutional advantages in swaying D.C.'s local government. Even though residents of the nation's capital elect their own local leaders to oversee most city and state functions, the District has no vote in Congress, and final oversight remains the province of the president and Congress. Consequently, Republicans have made regular attempts to enact a voucher program for the District--despite fierce opposition from local politicians--ever since they took control of Congress in 1994. Congress narrowly approved one such bill in 1998, knowing that President Clinton would veto it. George W. Bush's election in 2000 removed that obstacle, and the transition to unified Republican control of the federal government led some District officials to calculate that voucher legislation for the city would eventually come to pass.

One other factor unique to local Washington politics would shape events: the most powerful force opposing vouchers in D.C. politics, the local teachers union, had fallen into disarray. Responding to teachers' complaints of unusually high deductions for union dues from their paychecks in the summer of 2002, the American Federation of Teachers launched a financial audit and found at least $4.6 million missing from the treasury of its local affiliate, the Washington Teachers Union. Over the next two years, a federal investigation revealed that top union leaders had siphoned away dues to fund their lavish lifestyles. The episode neutralized the union's clout just as its political influence would be tested most.

The Mayor Signs On

It was in this unsettled environment in 2002 that Williams--together with a small group of other black Washington Democrats previously opposed to school vouchers--began back-channel talks with supporters close to White House and congressional leaders. In Williams, the school choice movement discovered an unexpected ally, motivated by a combination of personal biography, pragmatism, and political survival.

The adopted son of two postal workers, Williams, 52, graduated from Loyola, a Catholic, mostly white high school in Los Angeles, before serving in the Air Force and earning undergraduate, law, and public policy degrees from Yale and Harvard. Running for mayor in 1998, Williams called the parents who scraped together the money to send him to private school the greatest influence in his life. Nonetheless, as a candidate and officeholder, Williams called vouchers a divisive distraction benefiting the few at the expense of the many in public schools. "While the District's public school system ... must be reformed, school vouchers are not the answer," he said at the time. "Rather than using taxpayer dollars to provide vouchers to a few, we must focus our resources and efforts on concrete reforms that make our public schools better for all of the District's schoolchildren."

By 2002, a reelection year, the mayor had found the problems of the D.C. public school system intractable and a growing political weight. Williams routinely promised quality schools as the linchpin of a vision to lure middle-class residents back to the city. His failure to deliver on this promise had worried his base of business supporters and made him appear feckless to skeptics.