SACRAMENTO, CA - The day before the Supreme Court ruled on the Cleveland school-choice plan, some addled jurist declared the Pledge of Allegiance unconstitutional, thereby robbing the Cleveland decision of the attention it deserved. This was an emancipation proclamation.

America’s government education monopoly has depended on the power to keep children captive in failed, dangerous schools. If parents remove their kids, their tax money remains with the system. This is wrong, and compounded with hypocrisy.

Many of those in government opt to send their own children to private schools. Former president Clinton was a prime example, vetoing a choice program for the District of Columbia but sending Chelsea to an upscale private academy. In some cities, such as Boston, nearly half the public-school teachers, virtually all of whom union members, send their own children to private schools.

Suburban government schools in Cleveland refused to accept children from a limited choice plan. Most parents, therefore, opted for parochial schools, which they could afford with the $2,250 voucher. Opponents said this constituted a state establishment of religion, a tired, fifteenth-rate argument that shows the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the anti-choice forces.

By declaring parental choice in education constitutional, the Supreme Court removed the legal impediment to choice. And as the Milwaukee choice plan confirms, choice does not “take money from the public schools.” Choice in Milwaukee and Cleveland has not promoted segregation or elitism. Students are doing better and parents are satisfied. Now legislators and policymakers nationwide need to get the message and take action.

There is no academic, fiscal, moral, practical, or legal case against school choice. And there is every indication that choice promotes achievement, just as it does in higher education, where the dollar has always followed the scholar. Legislators should now make school choice the cornerstone of their K-12 policy.

They should begin with programs such as Cleveland’s, tailored for low-income students. But in the long run, every parent in America should be able to choose the schools their children attend, with a voucher for whatever the state spends per child per year, about $7,000 in the case of Cleveland and higher in California.
Government schools that want to keep or gain students will have to shape up.

The anti-choice forces of a reactionary establishment will marshal their considerable power and money to fight choice at every turn. When they do, policymakers should remember how these forces tried to take low-income African-American students out of the schools their parents, 70 percent of them single mothers, had chosen, and force them back into failed, dangerous government schools. If this is not immoral, it’s hard to imagine what might be.

When some state official makes a racist joke in public, his career is generally over, as in the case of former agriculture secretary Earl Butz. The opposition to choice on the part of the education establishment and teacher unions is their equivalent of a racist joke. There is no moral or practical reason for legislators to give these ideas any attention.

America’s children now face a brighter future, with their parents at long last empowered by choice. Let freedom ring!

K. Lloyd Billingsley is editorial director of the Pacific Research Institute in San Francisco. He can be reached via email at klbillingsley@pacificresearch.org.