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

Congress Debates

Throughout the summer of 2003, voucher opponents were mobilizing. As a September showdown neared, their coalition included the major teacher unions and public education associations, People for the American Way, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, and several Jewish organizations, among others. Opponents hammered at the theme that vouchers would divert taxpayers' money from public schools, weaken public education, and leave tens of thousands of children behind. Teacher union officials began calling in chits with swing members; local school board members flooded Capitol Hill switch-boards; and party-whipping organizations went to battle stations.

The White House turned up its pressure. For the first time in recent memory, a president sent emissaries to meet with appropriations committee members to press them to include funding for a single initiative. President Bush's senior congressional lobbyist, David W. Hobbs, called the voucher program as high a priority for the administration as passage of No Child Left Behind in 2001. He portrayed the vote as a test of Republicans' loyalty to their president and said Bush himself lobbied lawmakers.

The floor debate was familiar. While opponents said that vouchers had no track record of improving student performance, supporters countered that no alternative could be worse than Washington's public schools, which in any case were in line to receive more federal aid. Critics also said that private schools receiving taxpayer aid would be less accountable to voters and would operate free of some antidiscrimination laws.

Meanwhile, advocates invoked the "hypocrisy" of voucher critics in Congress who were rich enough to send their own children to private schools but would deny that option to the city's poorer families. Finally, they said accountability would be ensured by the U.S. secretary of education and Mayor Williams and by rigorous research studies supported by the department. The result was one of the closest votes of the year. On September 9, 2003, the full House approved a District of Columbia voucher bill by a single vote, 209-208.

Meanwhile, the Senate was waging its own pitched fight. Both sides focused on the Senate Appropriations Committee and a handful of centrist members who held the balance of power. Under Senate rules, the committee's vote would be crucial to the bill's fate. If the measure reached the floor, the Republican majority would have the upper hand in parliamentary maneuvering to force final passage. However, in July, one of the committee's Republican senators, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, had made clear his opposition, citing concern that the voucher program would lead to religious discrimination and scuttling hopes for a quick committee vote.

Feinstein's Conversion

From the logjam emerged Democratic senator Dianne Feinstein of California. Like Williams, Feinstein had served as a big-city mayor, in her case nine years in San Francisco. Like him she had spent her career, 30 years in elective office, opposing vouchers. But like Williams, she credited her family's decision to enroll her in a Catholic school, as one of a few Jewish students, with setting her on her life's course, from Stanford University into public life and to the U.S. Senate. In an abrupt break with California's powerful teacher unions, Feinstein reversed course and embraced the D.C. choice legislation on July 22.