Rampaging Toward Choice - vouchers and charter schools in Washington, D.C

Reason, Jan, 2000 by Michael W. Lynch

Walden decided to be the same kind of good neighbor to other D.C. parents in need. "If I have an education and parents who can support me, and I feel backed up against a wall," she says, "then what about other parents?" She is an education broker for low-income D.C. parents, matching families to schools. "We have become a one-stop issue shop for poor parents," says Walden, a warm woman whose deep laugh serves her well in her work with the public.

Having served more than 1,000 parents since 1998, she says the issues are simple: quality of education, safety, and responsiveness. "The biggest complaint we get is that traditional public education doesn't encourage parents to be part of their kids' education--and they don't say it that nicely," says Walden.

In 1997, about the time Bernice Gates was beginning her "rampage," the Republican-led Congress was attempting to assist her. It eventually passed the District of Columbia Student Opportunity Scholarship Act, which dedicated $7 million in new government money for D.C., to be used for $3,200 scholarships for 1,800 students. Democrats argued that the vouchers were unconstitutional, that the money wouldn't help enough children, and that it would build a new bureaucracy. Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.), who led a filibuster, derided the bill as a "foolish ideological experiment." D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, the city's nonvoting representative in Congress, provided cover for the anti-scholarship forces, assuring her colleagues that the people of D.C. didn't want "vouchers imposed on the District of Columbia." President Clinton agreed and vetoed the bill in May 1998.

At the same time that Democrats were working to block federal funds for low-income children, private philanthropists were focusing on scholarships as a means to provide parents with opportunity. Private scholarship programs, which typically fund about half the tuition of low-cost private schools, were already operating in 30 cities, serving 23,625 kids with more than 300,000 on waiting lists. At the time, the Washington Scholarship Fund was supporting 239 D.C. students.

In 1997, financier Theodore Forstmann and Wal-Mart heir John Walton decided to pump some liquidity into the D.C. private school market. Each promised to contribute $1 million a year for three years to the scholarship fund, enabling it to provide 1,000 more scholarships, each worth 30 percent to 60 percent of tuition, up to a cap of $1,700. More than 7,600 D.C. families applied.

Shocked, then heartened, by the demand, Forstmann and Walton decided to take the program national. They set up the Children's Scholarship Fund, donating $50 million each and announcing their intention to raise more. The demand was overwhelming. In 1998, more than 1.25 million families applied for 40,000 scholarships. In Baltimore, 44 percent of eligible students applied. One-third of the eligible students in Washington, New York, Philadelphia, Newark, and New Orleans also wanted in.

Charter schools are essentially deregulated government schools that receive the per-pupil allotment of money so long as they stick to their mission. Minnesota was the first state to allow charter schools, in 1991; there are now 1,800 such schools serving 350,000 children in 36 states, D.C., and Puerto Rico.