Schoolyard brawl.(Voucher Wars: Waging the Legal Battle Over School Choice)(Book Review)

Voucher Wars: Waging the Legal Battle Over School Choice By Clint Bolick Cato Institute, 219 pages, $12

Javanny, my "little" from the Big Brothers Big Sisters program, just turned 13, but she can barely read at a third-grade level. Since moving here from Jamaica with her mother and sister three years ago, she has been getting mostly B's and C's on her report card, but last spring she failed every subject on the New York City-wide exam. When her mother confronted Javanny's teachers with this obvious discrepancy, they simply said that none of the other kids were passing the tests either. (Only about 10 percent of her classmates scored a proficient rating in any of the subjects.)

Through some research and a few phone calls, Javanny's mother, Marie, and I learned that President Bush's "No Child Left Behind" initiative includes money for students who are failing state and city-wide tests to receive two hours of private tutoring per week from companies like Kaplan or Princeton Review.

No sooner did Marie hand in the application for the tutoring sessions than she began receiving phone calls from various administrators in Javanny's school and bureaucrats from the district office. They would really prefer it, they explained, if she did not sign up Javanny for such a program. Javanny's own teachers, the ones who failed to teach her to read for three years, will be starting their own after-school tutoring program and would like Javanny to sign up for their program so they can get the government money.

I offer this story to illustrate three of the most important points made by lawyer Clint Bolick in his new book, Voucher Wars, an account of his struggle (along with that of dozens of colleagues at the Institute of Justice and other think tanks) to bring school choice to various, mostly inner-city, areas across the country. The first and most obvious point is just how terrible these schools are. The second is the lengths to which public school teachers, administrators, and union officials will go in order to prevent any infringement on their education monopoly. And the third point is the extraordinary importance of fighting the battles over school choice on numerous fronts. Passing legislation or even winning the subsequent court battles means nothing if parents and students are left in the dark about the opportunities open to them.

Bolick's account of the 12 years between the institution of Milwaukee's pilot voucher program, in which 1,000 of the children in the city's worst schools would receive $2,500 to pay tuition at a local nonsectarian school, and his victory in Zelman v. Harris, last spring, in which the Supreme Court upheld the Constitutionality of Cleveland's voucher program for 4,000 schoolchildren, is a dramatic one. The many courtroom scenes that Bolick describes could just as well have come straight out of the movies. A summer day in Madison, Wisconsin: "The courtroom was packed, half with white bureaucrats, and the other half with black parents and children sporting their school choice buttons. Though the judge had managed to get the courtroom open for a rare Saturday hearing, the air-conditioning was off and ...