...program the court could decide the case. Despite the disruption such an injunction would cause, Judge Solomon Oliver proved remarkably cooperative, enjoining the program on the eve of the fourth year of its operation: four thousand students from low-income families would have to give up the voucher assistance that had allowed them to attend private (mainly religious) schools until it could be determined whether the program violated the "establishment of religion" clause of the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Teachers unions and other members of the anti-voucher coalition were elated. For the first time, an ongoing school voucher program had been halted.

But the judge's decision provoked a powerful backlash. Newspaper editorials condemned it; one cartoon depicted a school bus running down black children, with a crazed Judge Oliver at the wheel. The Bradley Foundation, John Walton, Ted Forstmann, and others pledged millions of dollars to keep the kids in school. Realizing he had reached too far, Judge Oliver reversed part of his ruling, and the U.S. Supreme Court dissolved the remainder of the injunction. Even though an appeals court later affirmed the judge's subsequent ruling on the substance, that decision was itself overturned in 2002 by the Supreme Court in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, which found no violation of the "establishment clause" as long as students had a choice of school, religious or secular.

The anti-voucher lobby learned a valuable lesson: fighting school choice in the abstract is fine, but forcing disadvantaged kids out of good schools is risky business.

Five years later, the tables turned. School choice activists, myself included, celebrated the passage of the nation's first universal voucher program in Utah. But it turned out, just as it had for the unions in Cleveland, that we had badly overplayed our hand. Making use of a little-known provision in the Utah constitution, voucher opponents put the new law up for a referendum, where voters killed the voucher program by a large margin.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The teachers unions and their public-school allies schooled us. Now our future prospects depend on how much we learned in the process.

Vouchers in Utah

Since the landmark Zelman v. Simmons-Harris ruling, the school choice movement's progress in enacting vouchers and tax-credit legislation has been steady but slow. Voucher and tax credit programs have been enacted by the District of Columbia, Florida, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and elsewhere, but such gains have been offset by disappointing setbacks in states such as Texas, South Carolina, and Missouri, despite energetic pro-choice campaigns in these states. Even worse, courts...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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