Choice struggles on: the progress of a great and necessary idea.(school choice and educational vouchers)

THE year 2004 will be remembered as a pivotal year for the school-choice movement for multiple reasons, not least of which is that this was the year the president of the United States endorsed school choice.

Not George W. Bush--he's been a backer for years. Rather, it was Jed Bartlet, the liberal president on TV's The West Wing, whose grudging endorsement of school choice in Washington, D.C., was symbolically significant. If even Hollywood recognizes the importance of this educational reform, can the rest of the nation be far behind?

The West Wing episode was a case of art imitating life. In September, more than 1,000 D.C. children were able to attend private schools using publicly funded vouchers. The program resulted from an impressive coalition, one that joined the Bush administration and congressional Republicans with D.C. mayor Anthony Williams, City Council member Kevin Chavous, and school-board president Peggy Cooper Cafritz. In the coming year, school-choice legislation will be in play in more states than ever before. Depending on state election results this fall, serious efforts could be mounted in a dozen or more states.

Predictably, teachers' unions have shifted into high gear to defeat the one reform that threatens their monopoly vise-grip on public education. Earlier this year, the National Education Association announced new partnerships with ACORN and MoveOn.org--two of the nation's most sophisticated grassroots organizing groups--in a campaign to "protect" public schools.

At its most recent national convention, the NEA introduced a $1-per-member increase in dues for each of the next five years, which will generate $40 million for political activity. (By contrast, the Alliance for School Choice, the leading national pro-school-choice organization, has an annual budget of $6 million, which must be raised from voluntary contributions.) In Washington state, unions are trying a new tactic: bankrolling a referendum to repeal the state's newly enacted charter-school law. If it passes, expect similar ballot efforts to become a staple of the anti-school-choice arsenal.

Despite the validation of school choice two years ago by the U.S. Supreme Court in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, union-backed legal challenges continue to vex school-choice programs. This year, the Colorado supreme court struck down that state's voucher program for poorer children under the state constitution's local-control provision. Meanwhile, a Florida appeals court invalidated a similar program under the state's Blaine Amendment, which forbids direct or indirect aid to religious schools. (So far, the U.S. Supreme Court has ducked the issue of whether state-court decisions that discriminate against religious options violate the First Amendment's guarantee of religious liberty.)

But school-choice forces are growing more sophisticated. Several organizations merged in May to lead the national school-choice effort, forming the Alliance for School Choice and its sister lobbying group, Advocates for School Choice. Together with the Black Alliance for Educational Options, the Hispanic Council for Reform and Educational Options, and the Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation, the national groups are pumping resources and lobbying acumen into states to create school-choice programs and protect them against attacks from unions and groups such as People for the American Way.