What’s Behind the Recent Surge in School-Choice Victories

After making incremental progress for three decades, the school-choice movement is now rapidly achieving massive victories across the country. A key factor in this sudden success is the adoption of a new strategy to highlight the gap between the values that parents espouse and what’s going on in public schools.

In the early days of the movement, new programs were adopted infrequently and were designed to serve very few students. Wisconsin launched a voucher program in Milwaukee in 1990, serving only a few hundred students, but it wasn’t until 1996 that Ohio began a voucher program in Cleveland, and that one served only a few thousand students.