By the way, built on a decade and a half of success the Michigan legislature just passed law that’ll remove entirely the charter school cap by 2015 and Governor Snyder just signed it into law. Is that a choice bill worth passing?

In the mean time thousands of Detroit’s poor kids escaped the clutches of the Detroit Public School district. You seem pretty indifferent to their plight arguing for consigning them to the tender mercies of the district hierarchy against the possibility that their salvation might – just might – come at the cost of even better legislation.

Fortunately the Michigan’s, and other state’s, legislatures have seen fit to provide some merciful relief for what defenders of the current system see as nothing but cannon fodder.

One could either celebrate the fact that a serious design flaw of the MPCP was vastly improved, or lament the fact that it is still imperfect. Given the gravitational constant, I’m inclined to do the former despite the fact that means testing is obviously irrational.

After all, if Bill Gates moves to Milwaukee, should I be more upset if he gets $6,400 vouchers or enrolls his children in public school at $13,000 per child? No one would blink if he chose the public schools…

I’m much happier to contemplate giving Bill’s kids $6,400 vouchers and poor kids $15,000 vouchers. Let the Gates kids help generate the savings needed to give larger aid to the poor.

I understand the factors that dictate an incremental strategy. When it comes to school choice, the Milwaukee program was launched with those factors in mind.

The limitations in every choice and tax credit program since then have been explained by the need to take the best we can get. (Some school choice supporters would dispute that the programs are as limited in scope as I claim.)

You observe, “If there is a strategy to speed things up, color me interested.” For there to be such a strategy there would need to be a change of approach and outlook on the part of major national leaders in the movement. I don’t see evidence of that, but I could be wrong.

Most recently, when Wisconsin’s Governor tried to “speed things up,” his effort to make all Milwaukee families eligible was thwarted by a key player in the school choice movement. Milwaukee is a middle class/working class community with a scattering of rich people who already send their children to private schools. Yet Walker’s initiative was cast in Obama-like class warfare terms by supposed school choice supporters.

Perhaps in their private councils some key players in the school choice movement express concerns about the proliferation of poorly financed and poorly structured programs…programs leave the real potential of choice unexploited.

One of my favorite Star Trek the Next Generation episodes had Q lose his godlike powers, demoted to the status of a mere mortal. The crew of the Enterprise is struggling with a planet threatened by having a moon fall out of orbit, and Q breezily announces that the solution is simple: they should simply change the gravitational constant of the universe, and put the moon back into orbit.

The crew explains to Q that they are incapable of changing the gravitational constant of the universe, putting Q at a loss for what to do.

Sadly in this case, incrementalism is the graviational constant of the American political universe. This is especially the case when whatever it is you are up to has powerful and entrenched opposition. In this case, school choice faces the most powerful state level opposition.

I don’t want to make the same mistake that some White liberals used to make by urging southern Blacks to have “patience.” We should never be patient or satisfied. What they ought to have said is: “we are going to fight for this for as long and as hard as it takes. If the fight outlives me, it outlives me, but if so I am going to go down swinging and I hope you will too.”

If there is a strategy to speed things up, color me interested. If not, I’ll keep hammering away. I hope you will too.

?

The answer is, as I’ve already pointed out, in politics you get while the getting is good because you may not have another chance to get what you want for a long time or ever. It’s only people for whom the issue is academic that waiting a minute longer then necessary to get any sort of relief might not be quite such a good idea.

The reality of politics is that you get while the getting is good and for parental choice that means highly-constrained laws which opponents of the law are frantically trying to repeal.

On the basis of the response of those opposed to any parental choice it’s clear that a lousy bill is worth passing.