KINDER'S COMMENTARY: AT LAST, PARENTS ARE ACHIEVING THE FREEDOM TO MAKE SCHOOL CHOICES

When I began a decade ago writing and talking about school choice, or parents' freedom to choose their children's schools, it was considered a strange, sort of fringe issue of the libertarian right. During my first campaign (1992), the stand I took in favor was widely considered both unwise and risky.

Mark 1999 down as the year when the spreading prairie fire of parental freedom to choose any school -- public, private or parochial -- went mainstream. This year saw the breakthrough achieved in Florida by Gov. Jeb Bush. Working through Republican legislative majorities in the Sunshine State, Bush pushed through to enactment America's first statewide school choice program. Bush's program grades Florida schools from A to F. Schools that receive failing grades, based on abysmal graduation rates and testing criteria, are placed on the list where parents may apply to the state for Hope Scholarships to attend any school, public private or parochial. In other words, the financial penalty that traps mostly poor minority children in the worst inner-city schools is removed, and those parents are empowered to choose whatever school suits them.

Civil rights leader and former U.N. ambassador Andrew Young, an intimate of the late Dr. Martin Luther King, says he didn't suffer jail in the turbulent 1960s only to miss this. Young agrees with what has long been argued in this space: School choice is the most important civil-rights issue of the 1990s and the decade beyond. Young has emerged as a leader fighting for parental choice in education. Writing last May in the Washington Post, Young eloquently compared the battle for school choice to the American civil rights movement:

"Certain flash points in America's civil rights struggle represent moments of moral awakening: Rosa Parks' refusal to give up her bus seat; John Lewis' beating at the Edmund Pettus Bridge; Martin Luther King's letter from Birmingham jail." Young makes the comparison of these historic events to "another such moment: 1.25 million cries for help voiced by poor, largely minority families, seeking something most American families take for granted -- a decent education for their children. ... This was the message sent by those who applied to the Children's Scholarship Fund to win one of the partial, K-8 scholarships we [the Children's Scholarship Fund, on whose board Young sits] offered to help low-income families to send their children to the schools of their choice.

"... Will allowing parents to choose from different education options `destroy public education'? Did competition from Toyota `destroy' General Motors? Has competition from Compaq, Dell and Apple `destroyed' IBM? Or to use an even closer analogy: Has competition from Federal Express `destroyed' the government postal service, or has the latter indeed become faster, better and more innovative in response?"

This week saw an Ohio federal judge rule against an experimental, five-year-old school-choice in Cleveland, and this the day before thousands of children were to start school under its terms. This lone judge's ruling flies in the face of rulings from Wisconsin, Arizona and Ohio supreme courts that as long as the money goes to the parents, who then make the choice, there is no separation-of-church-and-state violation. Last fall the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal from Wisconsin. We'll look back on this judge's ruling as a speed bump.

The decade that lies ahead will be the decade that sees the full flowering of parental freedom to choose any school, without financial penalty.

~Peter Kinder is assistant to the president of Rust Communications and a state senator from Cape Girardeau.