Choice for the Long Haul

By Lynn Olson

Despite the resounding defeat of a school-voucher initiative in California this month, the campaign for private school choice continues to gain momentum. But the highly charged fight over vouchers has masked a quieter revolution in American schools: the widespread acceptance of public school choice.

"I don't think choice, in the broad sense, is really a questionable concept anymore,'' says Connie L. Koprowicz, an education-policy associate for the National Conference of State Legislatures. She has stopped monitoring how many states will consider public-school-choice plans this year. The reason: No one asks her. "What I'm really tracking more are voucher and privatization issues,'' she says, "because that's where the controversy is.''

The California initiative, Proposition 174, would have amended the state constitution to provide parents with tax-funded vouchers--worth about $2,500 each--to send children to the participating public, private, or parochial schools of their choice. Voters' rejection of the measure by a seven-to-three margin marked the third-straight loss for voucher advocates at the polls in four years. Voucher referendums were defeated in Colorado in 1992 and in Oregon in 1990, both by two-to-one margins. (See Education...