WISDOM OF SOLOMON
It's been a good year for school choice. The most sweeping voucher legislation ever enacted was passed in Florida under Gov. Jeb Bush's leadership. Not a month goes by without some liberal declaring himself for school choice, at least as a pilot project. (The latest is Bill Bradley, which suggests that he really is more willing to break with corrupt establishments than Al Gore.) But this last week may ultimately prove to be the pivotal one in the history of school choice, thanks to a federal judge in Cleveland.

Last Tuesday, District Court Judge Solomon Oliver Jr. issued an injunction suspending the city's voucher program. The act seemed almost vindictive, coming as it did a day before the start of the school year. (When the Ohio Supreme Court struck down the state's school-choice law on technical grounds earlier this year, it waited until after the school year had ended so that the legislature could fix the problem without disrupting the lives of schoolchildren-3,801 of them in Cleveland.) The response from Republican politicians and, more important, Cleveland parents was immediate and forceful. The schools involved in the program agreed to take the students despite the financial uncertainty, and supporters started to raise money in case the program was dissolved entirely. On Friday, the judge retreated, allowing most of the children to get their vouchers.

Matthew Berry, staff attorney for the Institute for Justice, which represents families involved in the program, says, "This was a very, very costly temporary victory for the other side." He's right. School-choice opponents on the tube have been on the defensive-and their willingness to hold children's futures hostage to ideology and political interest has been exposed. "It's the judge who looks illegitimate, not the school choice characters," says Michael Greve of the Center for Individual Rights, another conservative/libertarian public-interest law firm. "That makes all the difference in the world." Meanwhile, the very families who are supposed to be the clients of the liberal state are revolting against it.

The judge's retreat must be demoralizing for the education establishment. Its position, after all the requisite caveats and qualifications are made, looks more and more like that of the Soviet Union in the early '80s: seemingly invulnerable because it commands vast resources but actually decaying because it no longer commands belief in itself. Even the press coverage is beginning to hint that something fundamental has changed in the education-policy debates. Increasingly, the triumph of school choice looks like only a question of time.