The Voucher Wars

Now that the Supreme Court has announced that it will decide the constitutionality of Cleveland's school voucher program, we may see an uptick in those annoyingly effective school voucher ads featuring a sympathetic African-American child, such as Ebony Johnson, who was stuck in a failing public school until a voucher program liberated her. The ads are like a continual rerun of the 2000 Republican National Convention, racially inclusive, compassionate and conservative.

Perhaps we should be thankful that the right has, at least for the moment, shifted its strategy of putting a black face on crime and welfare, and instead is depicting African-Americans as striving for educational op-portunity. Still, the approach is galling to those of us who don't see privatizing education as the next civil rights movement.

In any event, expect to see a lot more of this. The voucher movement has exchanged Milton Friedman for Floyd Flake. It's very smart politics, according to Terry Moe's new book, Schools, Vouchers, and the American Public (which, incidentally, features two African-American girls on the cover). Moe, a Stanford professor and Hoover Institution senior fellow, is an ardent voucher proponent who made his name when he published, with John Chubb, Politics, Markets and America's Schools in 1990. The book, which concluded that democratic control of schools is inherently inefficient and promotes bureaucracy, became the academic bible of the voucher movement.

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