The DC Opportunity Scholarship Program

Today the editors of the Washington Post call on President Obama and Congress to renew the Opportunity Scholarship Program which provides about 1,600 children in the nation's capital with vouchers worth $7,500 to attend the private school of their choice. 

It always excites me to see this newpaper argue for school vouchers because I played a role in their decision to support this point of view.  Let me explain.

In 1999 I decided I was going to pour all my energy into getting the use of vouchers approved in Washington D.C. I reached my conclusion mostly because of my political philosophy. I have been a libertarian for over 20 years and people who believe as I do have yearned for parents to have the ability to send their children to the public or private school of their choice ever since Milton Friedman introduced the idea in the 1950's.

So I began to look for a prominent Washingtonian who might support parental choice and whose opinion the general public would respect. A Washington Post columnist who used to be co-deputy director of the newspaper's editorial page came to mind. I approached Colbert King, not only because he is both liberal and an African American (traits he shares with most D.C. residents), but also because he writes from the point of view that only District residents can and should solve District problems. I thought that he would see educational freedom as a means that parents could use to improve one of this country's worst public school systems.

After six months of mostly friendly conversations with Mr. King, he agreed to meet with me to talk about school vouchers. I brought along an education policy analyst from the CATO Institute to give legitimacy to my arguments. Our conversation changed my life.

During the hour-long session in the Post's editorial board conference room Mr. King said that he generally opposed vouchers because of the small number of kids that would be helped by such a program. He added that those students who remained in failing public schools would realize that they had been left behind which would further degrade their learning environment. I politely disagreed and pointed out that vouchers instead should be viewed as a life preserver for anyone who could leave the system to achieve a good education. But this was not the most salient part of the meeting.

Mr. King asked us whether widespread student enrollment in charter schools could bring about the same benefits we envision with vouchers. After all he said, if the idea was to force schools to improve through the competition for students, won't allowing parents and students to pick from charter schools be identical to giving them the option of attending private institutions?

His insightful question made me terribly uncomfortable. Here I was pretending to know something about education in this city and I had no idea what a charter school was. My embarrassment grew when I learned that D.C. has one of the most active charter programs in the county. This year approximately 35% of primary and secondary age students attend one of 60 such schools on 95 campuses in the district. I promised myself that I would find out what this movement was all about.

Almost exactly a month after my meeting with Colbert King, Washingtonian Magazine featured a story about the start of one charter school called the Cesar Chavez Public Charter High School for Public Policy. Irasema Salcido, the school's founding principal, had a vision to create an academically rigorous curriculum while at the same time introducing her students to the field of public service. The mission immediately pulled at my heart.

I decided to become a volunteer tutor. The more I became involved in the school the more I liked what I saw. Kids came from all four quadrants of the city in order to get a good education. Over 70% qualifyed for free or reduced lunch. I started asking others to get involved by volunteering their time or by providing resources. Mrs. Salcido recognized my hard work and invited me onto the school's board of directors. Once I was in a formal position at the school there was no holding me back. I initiated opportunities in which I introduced the school to many enthusiastic supporters of both youth in our city and of Washington, D.C. in general. Many people shared their time, financial resources, or both with Cesar Chavez. One individual even became a tutor like myself.

In fact, more exciting to me than the great honor of serving on the board was working with the students. I remember one young woman in particular who was from Central America. English was of course her second language and her reading and writing skills could not have been higher than a third grade level. She came from a poor family and she understood that graduating from Cesar Chavez was her ticket to a better way of life. During her senior year at the school we worked together twice a week to help her pass her classes. She graduated on time and we both cried at the graduation ceremony.

After four fantastic years at Cesar Chavez I joined the board of a charter school that I became involved in from the time the charter was first being written. It is called the William E. Doar, Jr. Public Charter School for the Performing Arts.  A year and a half after joining this board I was elected chairman.

My work on the voucher issue had an impact. Since meeting Mr. King the Post has printed many unsigned editorials on the school choice issue, all strongly supporting this initiative. Here is an example from one published in 2003:

"We applaud Mayor Anthony A. Williams, D.C. Council member Kevin Chavous and Board of Education President Peggy Cooper Cafritz for their bold support of the voucher experiment. The mayor has personally won the backing of senators who had been on the fence or reluctant to buck the education bureaucracies and unions that oppose the plan. If, as we hope, a Senate majority prevails, both low-income children in District failing schools and the cause of D.C. school reform will be advanced." (September 22, 2003, A22.)

You can just imagine how extremely gratified I am was to see that the paper's editorial position was recognized in the 2003 book Voucher Wars by Clint Bolick, a co-founder of the Institute for Justice lawyer who was part of the team that successfully defended Cleveland's voucher program before the U.S. Supreme Court. Mr. Bolick writes in reaction to a Washingoton Post 1992 editorial that failed to support the Milwaukee voucher plan, "And only a few years later, the Post abandoned its reticence and became one of the nation's most consistent and influential backers of school choice experiments" (p 58).