The Revival of the Private School Voucher Movement
A few years ago, the private school voucher movement looked pretty much dead. The definitive study of the nation's largest such program, in Milwaukee, found no evidence that 20,000 students who won vouchers to attend inner city parochial schools performed better academically than students in traditional inner city public schools. Barack Obama hit the campaign trail as an education reformer not afraid to piss off teachers' unions, but made it clear he wasn't all that interested in compromising on vouchers, calling himself a "skeptic" and a "critic" of such policies. One of his first acts as president was to cut funding for the D.C. Opportunity Scholarships, a small voucher program with mixed results.
Even prominent Republicans lined up to offer mea culpas on vouchers, prompting Greg Anrig to ask in aWashington Monthly essay, "How did one of the conservative policy world's most cherished causes crumble so quickly?"
Well. One mid-term shellacking and a few Tea Parties later, vouchers are back, and in a very big way. Yesterday