Yesterday in the Wall Street Journal (sorry no link), Clint Bolick, President of “The Alliance for School Choice” had an article expressing his enthusiasm for the inroads that the school choice movement is making with Democrats. (My view has always been that once liberals realized that government money will be the bridge to government control of private schools the entire movement will be dominated by the left.) Here are three aspects of this new development that Bolick cites with optimistic approval:
1. “pro-school choice legislators are bargaining hard, exchanging increases in public school funding for private school choice.” (and the taxpayers?)
2. “So accepted and popular is the idea that when Democratic Gov. Janet Napolitano proposed a full-day kindergarten public school program last year, she called it school choice because, after all, families could choose whether to enroll their kids.” (Now if the choice movement would extend this principle to the next 12 years….well, there’s just some choices that parents aren’t competent enough to make.)
3. “both sides [Republican school choice advocates and Democrats] are learning that the two approaches [“pouring more money into public schools or greater choice and competition”] are not mutually exclusive.”
These are very exciting developments for small government conservatives, aren’t they?
As an aside, I have learned something new from this article. Not only will liberals jump on the school choice bandwagon because of the promise it has for government control of private schools but it is apparently easily used as a bargaining chip for bigger government school budgets and programs?the benefits for statism just keep on coming.
