An idea whose time has gone: conservatives abandon their support for school vouchers.

• Author: Anrig, Greg

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In 1955, the libertarian economist Milton Friedman proposed what was, for its time, a radical idea: that school-children be given government-funded vouchers to enable them to attend private schools. As ubiquitous as the notion of "school choice" has since become, Friedman's suggestion didn't immediately catch on, remaining mostly confined to academia for well over a decade. Then, in the 1970s, Lyndon Johnson-era liberals connected with President Nixon's Office of Economic Opportunity suggested that generous vouchers be provided to low-income students, hoping to increase funds available for poor students and promote racial integration. But a coalition of teachers unions and school administrators strenuously objected, and the idea went nowhere.

It wasn't until Ronald Reagan's election to the presidency in 1980 that the modern school voucher movement took shape. Reagan's own relatively modest voucher proposals were repeatedly rebuffed by Congress. However, his ascent unleashed a torrent of money into conservative think tanks and advocacy groups promoting policies that would advance the movement's agenda of weakening the government, and, by extension, the Democratic Party. Conservative activists like William J. Bennett, Jack Kemp, and Clint Bolick seized on vouchers as a particularly potent example, in part because they struck at the heart of the nation's most deeply established governmental activity--public schooling. If conservatives could show that private schools worked better than public ones, and that the introduction of competition improved entire school systems, that would advance their arguments for welfare rollbacks, Social Security privatization, and other initiatives to replace government programs with the free market.

Based on such thinking, the John M. Olin and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundations led the way in pouring millions of dollars into institutions and activities that promoted vouchers and school choice. By 1987, the notion of vouchers had become sufficiently commonplace that Bennett, who had become Reagan's secretary of education, observed: "When I started talking about choice a couple of years ago, it was still regarded as somewhat heretical. Now it seems to be the conventional wisdom." In 1990, the Wisconsin legislature launched the nation's first publicly financed voucher initiative to include private schools in Milwaukee, backed by Tommy Thompson, the reform-minded Republican governor; Annette "Polly" Williams, a liberal African American state legislator; and the pugnacious Michael S. Joyce, the head of the Milwaukee-based Bradley Foundation. The voucher idea received a further infusion of legitimacy that same year from a hugely influential book called Politics, Markets, & America's Schools, by the scholars John E. Chubb and Terry M. Moe. Although the book was funded by the Olin and Bradley Foundations, it was published by the liberal Brookings Institution, where Chubb was a senior fellow. This affiliation suggested, misleadingly, that their argument wasn't rooted in right-wing ideology.

Throughout the 1990s and the early part of this decade, voucher advocates sustained the offensive, gaining increasing support from African Americans such as Colin Powell and the prominent civil rights activist and mayor of Atlanta, Andrew Young; and Democrats such as Robert Reich, who believed that a radical experiment like vouchers was worth trying after the failure of more traditional reforms to produce functional urban school systems. After a favorable state supreme court ruling in 1998, Milwaukee's voucher experiment was expanded, from about fifteen hundred students attending less than two dozen secular schools to more than five thousand students spread among nearly a hundred mostly parochial schools; this school year, roughly twenty thousand Milwaukee students attend 122 voucher schools. In 1996, Cleveland launched a voucher program for several thousand students, which was approved by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2002. The Florida legislature enacted a school voucher plan in 1999, as did Colorado in 2003, and the U.S. Congress, for Washington, D.C., in 2004. And although the No Child Left Behind Act rankled many conservatives because it extended the federal government's reach into a traditionally state and local realm, the Bush administration attempted to mollify the right by including provisions that allowed failing public schools to be reconstituted by private contractors. By casting liberal opponents of vouchers as defenders of a miserable status quo in America's cities, conservatives were generally successful at portraying...