Look Who's Talking ...

School Choice Quotes

"When a school district receives federal funds to teach poor children, we expect them to learn. And if they don't, parents should get the money to make a different choice."

-- Texas Governor George W. Bush, GOP Convention acceptance speech, Philadelphia, PA, August 3, 2000



"If I was the parent of a child who went to an inner city school that was failing ... I might be for vouchers, too."

-- Vice President Al Gore, New York Post, August 10, 2000


"They [low-income parents] need something wealthier Americans have always had: the power to choose their children's school ... The reason school choice succeeds is no mystery: it gives power to the people who have the most at stake -- parents."

-- John O. Norquist, Democratic Mayor of Milwaukee, Readers Digest, May, 1996.



"I believe that school choice is the most pressing civil rights issue of the nineties!"

-- Alveda King Tookes, niece of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and founder of King for America, a civil rights group whose primary issue is promoting school choice. http://www.faculty.atlm.peachnet.edu/aking



"This is not a question for me about Democrats or Republicans ... [asking] whether or not we begin to do vouchers ... [is] like saying there has been a plane crash. But because we cannot save every child, we are not going to save any of our children; we let them all die."

-- Former Representative Floyd Flake (D-NY), floor speech in support of low-income scholarships and charter schools, U.S. House of Representatives, 105th Congress, October 31, 1997



"Let parents, especially among the poor, seek a decent education wherever it may be found ... others will wave their worn-out ideologies to defend a system of educational apartheid while demonizing anyone who promotes a parent's right to choose."

-- Honorable Andrew Young, former United States Ambassador to the UN, "Educational emancipation," Detroit News, May 5, 1999



"... it's an idea [school choice] whose time has come ... You can give the scholarship to that parent, just like you did the veteran under the G.I. Bill, and ... if the parent chooses to use it here [a private Christian academy] we ought not to be afraid because they hang a cross in the foyer."

-- U.S. Rep. J. C. Watts Jr., R-OK, "Watts advocates vouchers for private schooling," Birmingham News, January 27, 1999



"I have seen too many schools that are failing. They are trapped in fossilized bureaucracies. Bureaucracies that have low expectations for children and consequently set low standards for them. These schools are leaving our children behind and they must be fixed ... We must also be open to new ideas. Let's not be afraid of ... private scholarship funding to give poor parents a choice ... Let's experiment prudently with school voucher programs to see if they help. Let's use innovation and competition to help give our children the best education possible."

-- General Colin Powell, Chairman, America's Promise, GOP Convention speech, August 1, 2000, Philadelphia.



"One of the reasons I support school choice is that it will make New Jersey's public schools more answerable to the people who pay taxes to support our schools ... if all of us who are responsible for public education had to answer to taxpaying parents who had other options, we'd clean up our act, fast."

-- Bret Schundler, Mayor of Jersey City, New Jersey, advertisement in support of The Educational Options Act.



"Even some liberal constitutional scholars have noted that vouchers to parents and children may be constitutional. When you have ... inner cities -- where the public schools are abysmal or dysfunctional or not working and where most of the children have no way out, it is legitimate to ask what would happen to the public schools with increased competition from private schools and what would happen to the quality of education for the children who live there."

-- Senator Joseph R. Biden, Jr. (D-DE), "District of Columbia Student Opportunity Scholarship Act of 1997," Congressional Record, October 9, 1997, p. H8801.



" ... a most promising way to improve school performance ... why not simply 'voucherize' all education funding and let students and their parents select where they can get the best education?"

-- Wall St. Journal, editorial, September 6, 2000, Robert B. Reich, former Secretary of Labor, Clinton Administration



"Shame on us for not realizing that there are parents in this country who ... today support vouchers not because they are enamored with private schools but because they want a choice for their children. They want alternatives, and seeing none in our rigid system, they are willing and some even desperate to look elsewhere."

-- Senator John Kerry, (D-Mass.) Speech, Northeastern Univ., June 16, 1998



"Choice is the best thing that has come around for my people since I've been born. It allows poor people to have those choices that all those other people who are fearing it already have."

-- Polly Williams, Democratic State Representative, Wisconsin, Washington Times, April 2, 1990.



"I am going to ... plead with my colleagues on the Democratic side, [re: the Student Opportunity scholarship Act] to put aside all that kind and lofty ideological rhetoric that partisanship can inspire ... [the money] can only go to poor families, only poor families ... Why should we condemn all of these children to continue to suffer such inequity because we want to uphold our lofty principles and our traditional politics? Of course we believe in public schools. But we also believe in the intrinsic worth of every one of those children .... They have the same right as everyone else has."

-- Representative James P. Moran, Jr. )D-VA) "District of Columbia Student Opportunity Scholarship Act of 1997," Congressional Record, April 30, 1998, p. H26655



"Martin Luther King III, President, Southern christian Leadership Conference and Dorothy Height, President, National Council of Negro Women, advisor board members of the Children's Scholarship Fund [a national school choice organization] ... met with some 200 African-American leaders of various organizations who want quality educational opportunities in schools for poor, inner-city children. And they explored ways to create competition among schools to inspire them to provide it for all children.

-- from Blackfamilies.com, "Hundreds of thousands' request tuition aid," go to: http://blackfamilies.com/living/parenting/scholarship_fund.html



"This is the right time for school choice ... in the 60s we didn't want to go from segregation to integration because of fears that were never realized. It's the same today, going from no choice to school choice. The only fear we should really have is that we could deprive our children of a quality education because we failed to act."

-- Florida State Rep. Beryl Roberts (D-Miami), Speech delivered at Children First: CEO America's 5th Annual Founders Meeting, October 1999


"If I find myself slowly morphing into a supporter of charter schools and vouchers, it isn't because I harbor any illusions that there's something magical about these alternatives. It is because I am increasingly doubtful that the public schools can do (or at any rate will do) what is necessary to educate poor minority children."

-- William Raspberry, nationally syndicated columnist, Washington Post, June 26, 1998.



"Given what we see every day with guns, drugs, and violence in the public schools ... I think it's kind of hard to claim that the real danger is religion."

-- Daniel McGroarty, national columnist, author, 'Break These Chains: The Battle for School Choice.



"Specifically, we would encourage the Congress to consider the following -- empower parents not bureaucracies. Parents and students should be able to choose the school and programs they use, and all money, including federal money, should follow the student to their institution of choice."

-- Lisa Graham Keegan, Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction (Testimony at a federal hearing in January 1999)



"What's wrong with education cannot be fixed with technology. No amount of technology will make a dent. It's a political problem ... I'm one of those people who believe the best thing we could ever do is go to the full voucher system."

-- Steve Jobs, Co-founder, Apple Computer, 'Wired,' February, 1996.



"Given that voucher schools have achieved at least the same, if not significantly better, results with substantially less money, the inference arises that, if voucher schools were given the same per-pupil funding as public schools, student achievement might increase by an even greater degree."

-- Jerry Ellig and Kenneth Kelly, Federal Trade Commission economists, writing on their own and not on behalf of the agency, in a paper, "Competition and Quality in Deregulated Industries: Lessons for the Education Debate," published in the Spring 2000 issue of 'Texas Review of Law & Politics.' http://www.rppi.org/education/education31.pdf


"America already has created the gretest voucher program in history. It was stupendously successful. No one minds its support for private and religious schools. It is called the GI Bill ... Choice is all around us -- even in federal aid for college students -- and it's time to bring it to the children."

-- U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige in a February 28, 2002 speech to the Black Alliance for Educational Options in Philadelphia



"It's not a money problem, it's a monopoly problem."

-- Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, February 20, 2002 during oral artuments on the constitutionality of an Ohio program that offers low-income parents publicly funded vouchers to help defray the cost of sending their children to an alternative school, public or private, secular or religious.



"Public school folk do some good things for us, but they've broken one cardinal rule. They have not educated droves and droves of our children."

-- Kaleem Caire, Black Alliance for Educational Options (BAEO), School Reform News, April 2002


Choice works. There is growing evidence from randomized studies done by Dr. Paul Peterson at Harvard University, among others, that where low-income families have been afforded the same opportunity that rich people have to choose their children’s schools, parental satisfaction with and involvement in education soars, and student achievement rises significantly...Clearly, the demand for choice in education is huge and will not be denied. The question for policy-makers is whether to accommodate it and help children benefit from it, or to dig in to try to protect at all costs a monopoly that is failing to serve far too many children.

-- Robert Holland, Senior Fellow at The Lexington Institute, School Choice for Virginia? A Forum at the Capitol, September 20, 2001



A way to hold schools accountable is to enable parents to send their children to another school if the current one isn’t meeting their needs. As a condition of receiving federal aid, states should allow students to transfer out of a low-performing public school to attend a higher-performing public school.

-- Bill Bradley (Source: The Journey From Here, by Bill Bradley, p.115-16 Aug 15, 2000)



Parents and local citizens often know better than their educrat masters, but find themselves unable to resist the power of an entrenched and costly monopoly. Education reform is thus a question of liberty and self-government. I strongly favor school choice approaches that empower parents to send their children to schools that reflect the parents’ faith and values. This should include choices in both the public and the independent schools.

-- Alan Keyes (Source: www.keyes2000.org/issues/schoolchoice.html 1/7/99 Jan 7, 1999)



Our public schools have grown up in a competition-free zone, surrounded by a very high union wall. Why aren’t we shocked at the results? After all, teachers’ unions are motivated by the same desires that move the rest of us. With more than 85% of their soft-money donations going to Democrats, teachers’ unions know they can count on the politician they back to take a strong stand against school choice.

Our public schools are capable of providing a more competitive product than they do today. Look at some of the high school tests from earlier in this century and you’ll wonder if they weren’t college-level tests. And we’ve got to bring on the competition -open the schoolhouse doors and let parents choose the best school for their children.

Education reformers call this school choice, charter schools, vouchers, even opportunity scholarships. I call it competition-the American way.

-- Donald Trump (Source: The America We Deserve, by Donald Trump, p. 80-81 Jul 2, 2000)



The No. 1 priority of any education reform must be to restore our public schools to greatness. But where schools are unsafe and a child is trapped in a failing school, the state should provide [a voucher] to help pay for education elsewhere.

-- Elizabeth Dole (Source: Time Magazine 4/26/99 p. 36 Apr 26, 1999)



Our children deserve the best education we can provide to them, whether that learning takes place in a public, private or parochial school. It’s time to give middle and lower income parents the same right wealthier families have -- to send their child to the school that best meets their needs. It’s time to conduct a nationwide test of school vouchers. It’s time to democratize education.

-- Sen. John McCain (Source: Candidacy Declaration Speech, Nashua NH Sep 27, 1999)



New York should privatize failing schools. The Board of education has been trying to turn them around for five years, and in some cases ten years. It should admit that it’s failed, and it should bring in others to educate the children. -- Mayor Rudy Giuliani (Source: State of the City Address Jan 13, 2000)



I support true parental control of education. If you want to send your child to a parochial school, you should have the freedom to do so & the government should not stand in your way. If you want to homeschool your child, you should be free to do so & not have the whole bureaucracy on your backs with truancy. If you want your child in a secular school, go ahead. Freedom of choice for parents is absolutely critical. Then we’ll have a more moral people, a better educated people, and a stronger America.

-- Steve Forbes (Source: GOP Debate in Johnston, Iowa Jan 16, 2000)



We’ve learned that just spending more money doesn’t buy you more success in the classroom. Nowhere was this more evident than in Milwaukee Public Schools, which were lagging behind. This despite the state increasing its aid to MPS by 55% and funding 82% of its costs. So we started with the principles that every student can learn and parents must be empowered with more choices.

This philosophy spawned some of the nation’s most innovative education reforms. Charter schools. Public school choice. Private school choice for Milwaukee. Charter schools operated by the city of Milwaukee, UW-Milwaukee, and MPS. Nowhere in America does a parent have more choices than in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. And it’s making all the difference. Parents are now more involved in their children’s lives. The public schools are rising to the challenge of competition. There is no doubt in my mind that Milwaukee will become the national model for renewing urban education in America within a few years.

Wisconsin Gov. Tommy Thompson (Source: State of the State Address Jan 31, 2001)



All parents, regardless of income, should be able to choose places where they know their children will learn. And they should be able to choose environments where their own values will be extended instead of lost. It's possible that there are some public schools nobody would choose. They are so bad that they might suddenly find themselves without any students. But I have no idea why we should be interested in protecting schools like that from competition--or any schools from competition. Our worst schools are our noncompetitive ones, and that's no coincidence.

-- William Bennett, former Secretary of Education --from the book: The De-Valuing of America, p.53



"We cannot write off entire generations by the whims of geography. If the true mark of a society is the education that its poor and underprivileged receive--and I believe it is--than voucher programs should be embraced as a fundamental civil right."

-- Syndicated Columnist Armstrong Williams on "Vouchers give all kids a chance to excel," in the Detroit Free Press, Sunday April 25, 1999



"Monopolies were outlawed for a good reason: they make bad products at high prices. I'm very clear on the idea we need a competitive educational environment."

-- Ted Forstmann, Children's Scholarship Fund, in USA Today, April 21, 1999.



Raise the topic of school choice and you have raised one of the most controversial and emotional issues of the day-especially among school teachers. Yet, after devoting 25 years to public schools, from elementary to community college, I have come to support school choice.

Long-time friends and colleagues have been shocked. Some argue that, especially because I am Latino, I should never support sending public dollars to private schools. But my friends and colleagues are wrong.

Giving Latino parents a stronger voice in their children's education-that is, giving them more choices about where they can send their children to school-can only improve their children's education and future.

-- Mario Chacón, an educator, is a former assistant superintendent for the Sequoia Union High School District in Redwood City