Monday, June 18, 2012

Walker's win could boost parental choice

"The most important consequence of Scott Walker's key victory," Joel Belz writes, "is likely to be its ripple effect over the next decade on the issue of educational choice."
Wisconsin has its own historic role, especially in the city of Milwaukee, as a hospitable laboratory for educational vouchers and charter schools. Now, Wisconsin has also strategically minimized the potentially hostile role of the teachers unions. More than almost anywhere in the nation, and largely because of Scott Walker's remarkable courage, genuine educational diversity may have the opportunity to flourish and thrive.

I don't mean to imply that Walker's role in public life ought to be limited to a single issue. But choice in education has been a central focus during the controversial first term of this son of a Baptist minister. If after expanding energetic voucher programs from Milwaukee to Racine, Beloit, and Green Bay, he now provides a replicable template that can be exported to the rest of the nation, I can think of no more enduring gift he could offer the rest of the nation and its desperately broken culture.

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