Schooling the capital: the uphill struggle for school choice in D.C

National Review, June 30, 2008 by John J. Miller

TIFFANY DUNSTON may come from a poverty-line background, but she appears to have a bright future. On May 22, this African-American scholarship student graduated as valedictorian from Archbishop Carroll High School in Washington, D.C. Her class-topping grade-point average of 4.1 earned her a spot at Syracuse University, which she plans to attend in the fall. She'd like to major in biochemistry.

Yet if congressional liberals have their way, there won't be another Tiffany Dunston. That's because she's the beneficiary of something called the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program--a federally funded school-choice initiative that lets a small number of poor kids opt out of public schools and attend private ones instead. "It is a wonderful program because I was able to choose a great school," said Dunston in a recent interview with the Catholic Standard, a newspaper published by the Archdiocese of Washington.

What's a wonder for Dunston, however, is a heresy for the powerful teachers' unions that hold so much sway in the Democratic party. At a hearing on April 30, D.C. delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton reiterated her longstanding opposition to the school-choice scholarships, which are funded through the 2008-09 school year but not beyond. "This is scary for us," says Virginia Walden Ford, who leads D.C. Parents for School Choice, a grassroots group. "The children of single mothers and working-class parents deserve to have this program renewed."

For at least a generation, many conservatives and libertarians have sympathized. Although they've launched limited programs in Milwaukee and Cleveland and have won an important legal victory before the Supreme Court, they've also seen their broader ambitions blocked time and again. Today, fewer than 25,000 students--out of a potential 50 million--take part in school-choice programs that involve private schools. The latest setback came in November, when more than 62 percent of voters in Utah rejected a bill that the legislature and governor had approved. The defeat has forced some school-choice proponents to doubt their political goals. "If vouchers can't pass voter scrutiny in conservative Utah," asked Sol Stern of the Manhattan Institute, "how probable is it that they will do so anywhere else?"

That's a good question. Yet today in Washington, D.C., even former mayor and current city-council member Marion Barry is an advocate of school choice. "I know it may surprise some that I would support a school voucher program, but I am proud to do so," he recently wrote. This unlikely conversion and a few similar ones may suggest that it's too soon to sell school choice short. In the last decade, the nation's capital has become a laboratory of school reform. About one-third of all public-school students now attend charter schools, which receive taxpayer funding but don't have to follow all of the rules and regulations that hobble their more conventional counterparts. What's more, an authentic school-choice program has taken root. The result is a small success story of Republican governance, at a time when many Americans have questioned the ability of Republicans to govern.

The GOP doesn't run Washington--Democrats dominate the District of Columbia. But Congress has a strong voice in the city's affairs, and the story of school reform in Washington begins shortly after the historic GOP congressional victories of 1994. Speaker Newt Gingrich tapped Wisconsin congressman Steve Gunderson to head an effort on improving education in Washington. It was a shrewd choice. Gunderson was a moderate who possessed the ability to work with Democrats more effectively than many other Republicans could. He started out as a school-choice skeptic, but became open to the idea and eventually pushed for it. The roadblock came during negotiations with the Senate, when Jim Jeffords of Vermont--then a Republican, but later an "independent" who caucused with the Democrats--insisted on removing a school-choice pilot project from a D.C. funding bill. Although Gunderson was ready to make lots of potential compromises, such as restricting school choice to elementary-school kids, Jeffords wouldn't budge.

"I remember one meeting in Bob Dole's office with Gingrich and Jeffords," says Theodor Rebarber, a former Gunderson staffer. "When Jeffords said he would prefer no reform to a reform that includes vouchers, Gingrich just blew up at him. He scolded Jeffords for caring more about bureaucrats and unions than about children."

Talks dragged on but didn't get far. They were finally overwhelmed by the budget deadlock between the Republican Congress and President Clinton that had caused the federal government to shut down its nonessential services. When the two sides agreed to a massive funding bill, Gingrich and Gunderson slipped in a provision for charter schools in Washington. By pushing hard for school choice, they had created the political space for a less-radical reform that was nevertheless dramatic in its own right. Today, the District of Columbia is widely seen as having one of the country's most robust charter-school laws. Gunderson didn't seek re-election in 1996; two years later, the Republican Congress actually sent a D.C. school-choice bill to the president's desk, but Clinton vetoed it.