Book Review: An Insider’s Story

From THE LEARNING CLASS: Essays on Education by Philip Vassallo, Ed.D. at EducationNews.org

Voucher Wars: Waging the Legal Battle over School Choice by Clint Bolick. Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute, 2003. 277, xvi pp. $20.00. Paper.

Readers looking for an insider’s treatment of the school choice movement—albeit one from an unabashedly impassioned and highly persuasive proponent of school choice—need look no further than Voucher Wars: Waging the Battle over School Choice. Author Clint Bolick has written a recent history of American education that does not read like one. He steers clear of the academic researcher’s mind-numbing statistical tables and ambiguous longitudinal analyses to submit a trenchant narrative in which he plays the main character, championing the many voucher, tax credit, and private scholarship programs that have sprouted like wildflowers throughout the nation in the past fifteen years. In doing so, Bolick relates his experiences as a courtroom advocate of a grassroots movement that has drawn friends and enemies from unlikely circles into a cause that appears destined to transform American education.

Voucher Wars reads like a novel. In allowing his gift of storytelling to take center stage, Bolick, Co-founder and Vice-president of Institute for Justice, vividly portrays his friends as heroic and enemies as sinister, and he places them in contexts that are occasionally ironic (the Clintons were the only parents living in Washington, D.C. public housing allowed to exercise school choice for their daughter at taxpayer expense), frequently poignant (a second-grade boy emerges from his coloring book to encourage Bolick to fight the good fight after losing a case in Appeals court), and consistently compelling. But if his anecdotes seem too creative or his interpretations of court rulings too strident, he does so at the service of the parents whose circumstances do not give them the same freedom as their more fortunate fellow citizens to choose their children’s school. On this point, Bolick defers to no pundit and yields to no alternative. After all, this is a lawyer’s story.

Bolick opens his exposé by describing his evolution from a working class New Jersey public school student to a beleaguered education major at local Drew University and St. Elizabeth College, to a law student at University of California Davis, where the house organ seemed to be the Communist Manifesto, to his first job as a litigant for the Mountain State Legal Foundation in Denver, where he began advocating for children’s rights. Before long, the young attorney found himself chasing Wisconsin state legislator Polly Williams, who spearheaded the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, now in its second decade. Remarkably, he convinced Representative Williams to appoint him as the Program’s legal advisor and litigator. He offered sound counseling, encouraging Williams to place students in choice schools immediately, before legal challengers had their day in court, because he knew that judges would be averse to removing children from good schools. In mercurial fashion, school choice initiatives seemed ubiquitous, and Bolick seemed omnipresent—in Ohio, Maine, Vermont, Pennsylvania, and Puerto Rico, and other environs, all with their own legal precedents, protocols, and loopholes.

When statistics do appear in Voucher Wars, Bolick uses them from a human perspective that is virtually impossible to ignore:

The numbers 1 in 14 will forever haunt my memory: a student in the Cleveland city public schools had a slightly less than 1 in 14 chance of graduating on time with senior-level proficiency; the same student had a slightly greater than 1 in 14 chance of being a victim of crime, inside the schools, each year. It blew me away that in light of such a debacle, anyone would depict any proposed reform as too radical, rather than not radical enough.

It was Cleveland, of course, that became the battleground of the landmark Supreme Court decision, Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, which on June 27, 2002, ruled by a 5-4 margin in favor of the Cleveland Scholarship Program. The Hollywood-type climax of Voucher Wars centers on this decision, the greatest legal victory yet for school choice. Here we have a tale of David, empowered by the voices of disenfranchised parents, slaying Goliath, bloated with the awesome bureaucracy and unlimited funds that big government has at its disposal to squash whatever it does not like.

Bolick is not so quixotic, however, to end his story there. He admonishes supporters about the administrative stonewalling, legislative roadblocks, and legal battles that lie ahead. In discussing the dearth of options available to public school students in major American cities, he concludes:

School choice is not even on the horizon in Baltimore, Chicago, or Los Angeles because of the vise-grip control the unions exercise over the school districts and state legislatures. It is nothing less than criminal to fail to consider private options in a rescue mission for those children’s futures.

For Bolick, the best defense is a good offense. He calls for choice programs large enough to pressure government schools into changing their culture of failure as wells as a diverse approach which includes vouchers in some cases and tax credits in others. Ultimately, he urges endurance and shrewdness, for he is uncompromising in his belief that government-controlled schools should not be the sole option available to most Americans. Those agreeing with Bolick’s viewpoint will get plenty of talking points from Voucher Wars; those who do not will know the full force of what they’re up against.

Philip Vassallo, Ed.D., writes on education issues and specializes in writing instruction, family participation, and school choice. His books include The Art of On-the-Job Writing and The Inwardness of the Outward Gaze: Learning and Teaching through Philosophy. He accepts messages at Vassallo@aol.com.