Despite the best efforts of its opponents in the educational establishment, the cause of school choice continues to gain steam. This week, the investment banker Ted Forstmann and Wal-Mart executive John Walton will announce plans to expand their privately funded initiative to restore competition to the country's innercity schools.
Last year in Washington, D.C., Forstmann and Walton offered more than 1,000 scholarships to poor parents to send their children to schools of their own choosing. Not surprisingly, the program was overwhelmed with applications. Now they are taking the cause nationwide. Forstmann and Walton are each putting up $ 50 million, and have raised another $ 70 million in matching contributions. This will allow about 40,000 poor kids to attend private schools in cities across the country. This week, when they announce the winners of those scholarships, Forstmann and Walton will also reveal that hundreds of thousands of students applied for fellowships, despite little in the way of a major publicity campaign. What makes this even more remarkable is that the fellowship requires a matching contribution averaging about $ 1,000 from these lower income parents. So, as Forstmann puts it, hard up parents who currently get something -- public education -- for free, are lining up to pay to get a chance for their kids to escape the system.
Just as significant for the long-term prospects of school choice is the roster of supporters the two have signed up. The national board of advisers for the Children's Scholarship Fund includes Hollywood mogul Michael Ovitz, Joseph Califano, Henry Cisneros, Andrew Young, Martin Luther King III -- all certified liberal Democrats. Their presence testifies to the bipartisan, and increasingly trans-ideological, appeal, of school choice. The establishment should be worried -- and it is. How worried? Earlier this month, the teachers' unions poured more than $ 500,000 into a single school board race in Milwaukee -- where an independent-minded coalition of parents, teachers, and politicians has struggled to make the school district a showcase of charter school and choice programs. The unions hoped to defeat the reelection of at-large school board member (and vociferous school choice champion) John Gardner; he was attacked in a polished and predictably distorted series of radio, TV, and newspaper ads. It didn't work: In an election that was widely considered a referendum on Milwaukee's growing voucher program, Gardner trounced his union-backed challenger. Even better, reform candidates swept all the board's open seats, leaving the unions with only two remaining allies on the nine-member board. "The status quo in the Milwaukee Public Schools was turned on its head Tuesday," the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported after the upset. It's about time. And now for the rest of the country . . .