this Is today. What about tomorrow?

Thursday, April 01, 2010

School Choice Advocate
The New Emerging Leaders of the School Choice Movement

Milton Friedman was fond of saying that no one could predict what the future education marketplace would look like under a truly competitive system, except that it would be much different than what we know today.

The same is true for the school choice movement. No one really knows what it will look like in five or 10 years, except that it will look and act different than it does now.

Anyone who has been watching already knows that the school choice movement doesn't look like it did 13 years ago. Then, there was really only one national group solely dedicated to advancing publicly funded private school choice, a good coalition of high net worth individuals interested in promoting private voucher programs as a model for public voucher programs, the Institute for Justice (the school choice lawyers), and almost no state-based groups solely dedicated to advancing choice in their state. True, there were a number of state and national think tanks promoting choice as one of their important policy goals – which was and is great – but there were very few, if any, groups whose sole job was to advance school choice.

Today, the field looks much different. The Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice and the Institute for Justice are still on the scene, but there are at least three other national groups who work every day to advance school choice. Each of us fills a different and necessary niche in the movement. Moreover, there are now over a dozen state based organizations whose only job is to advance school choice. From School Choice Ohio to the REACH Foundation in Pennsylvania to California Parents for Educational Choice to Parents for Educational Freedom North Carolina, there has been a steady growth in the number of new leaders and new groups promoting school choice. And, this doesn't even include the hundreds of different scholarship granting organizations in Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Florida, Arizona, Iowa and Georgia.

But this is today. What about tomorrow? What will the school choice movement look like in 10 years time?

Some people are worried that there won't be a school choice movement in 10 years because we don't have a deep enough bench and that there aren't enough emerging leaders to fill the need. But finding and getting new talent is a concern with all entrepreneurial ventures that are on the cutting edge. It is our job to make sure that there are enough new leaders for the future, something which is already happening through training programs created by the Friedman Foundation and the Institute for Justice, and through the Black Alliance For Educational Options' efforts to identify and organize a bipartisan pool of Black elected officials who support parental choice programs.

Still others are concerned that there won't be a school choice movement in 10 years time because we haven't cracked the suburban and rural support problem and because we have not shown the relevance of school choice vis-à-vis all the other choice-like reforms, including charter schools, home schooling, standards and accountability, and virtual schooling. These are serious concerns but not insurmountable problems. There is a tremendous opportunity to reach out and build new partnerships with an entirely new sector of potential supporters. The technology wave that is running across our country isn't what will make our movement obsolete; it's what makes us relevant. School choice is the issue that binds all the reforms together. It's the market-based glue that ties charter schools to home schooling and standards and accountability to private schooling.

In the end, none of us knows what the school choice movement will look like in 10 years. Will it have new energy? New partners? Will there be one national group? Ten? How many new schools will have started?

What will be the mix of public and private schools? How will private schools be held to account? Who really knows? What I do know is that it will look different than it does now because if it doesn't, we will have been working against the principles and legacy of Milton and Rose Friedman.

I also know that in 10 years time we will still be fighting the fight for true market-based reforms. Some may say this is a bad thing. I don't. Supporters of school choice, particularly donors, should be excited by this prospect. It took years for Milton and Rose Friedman to tear down Keynesianism and yet, after their deaths, it has again reared its head. That's because, as Thomas Jefferson said, the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.