Enough talk.

• Author: Kaelble, Steve
• Position: The school choice program of J. Patrick Rooney, chairman of Golden Rule Insurance Co. - Cover Story

After Indiana lawmakers failed to enact a school choice program, insurance executive J. Patrick Rooney set up his own choice program to help Indianapolis schoolchildren afford a private education. It's all part of Rooney's guest to live up to his company's name, Golden Rule.

The name of J. Patrick Rooney's company couldn't be more fitting.

Rooney, chairman of Golden Rule Insurance Co. in Indianapolis, spends his days trying to live up to the biblical creed: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." He has a vision of a world free of racial barriers and discrimination, a world where children of all backgrounds can get the education they need to prosper, a world where fairness and equality prevail--in personal lives as well as in business dealings. But unlike many idealists, Rooney is both a dreamer and a doer.

As a dreamer of educational excellence, he became a doer by setting up a tuition fund to help low-income Indianapolis families send their children to private schools. As a dreamer of racial harmony and integration, he became a doer by joining a predominantly black church. As a dreamer of business fairness, he became a doer by taking state insurance departments to court to get them to treat all insurance companies equally.

"I'm old enough to remember that when you got on the train in Chicago and were going south, there would be certain cars marked 'colored people' and other cars for white people; they would be separate, and the fact is, it wasn't equal. Today, our society has progressed. We have decided that today, we should have equal treatment for all of the children of God, whether they're white children or black children or Hispanic children.

"The same thing applies to insurance, by gosh," adds Rooney, son of the founder of Golden Rule, which with premium income of more than $400 million is the nation's largest writer of individual major-medical insurance. "We ought to have standards, the standards ought to be published, and they ought to apply the same to everybody. We have taken one insurance department after the other to court on this subject, and we have won every time. We're in the business of teaching them about due process of law."

Most recently, Rooney and Golden Rule have been in the spotlight for getting into the business of education reform. Like many Americans, Rooney is frustrated that school reforms undertaken in recent years haven't borne much fruit. School choice is an approach that Rooney thinks might make all the difference. The theory is that if schools must compete for enrollment, they will be forced to improve.

School choice is gaining momentum, but not quickly enough for Rooney. When the Indiana General Assembly failed to enact a choice program, Rooney went into action with his own. Known as the Choice Charitable Trust, it offers to pay half the cost of...