Jonathan Butcher, my former colleague and an occasional guest blogger on JPGB, has an interesting new piece in Education Next on the flurry of expanding school choice over the last few years. It begins with a bang:
One year ago, the Wall Street Journal dubbed 2011 “the year of school choice,” opining that “this year is shaping up as the best for reformers in a very long time.” Such quotes were bound to circulate among education reformers and give traditional opponents of school choice, such as teachers unions, heartburn. Thirteen states enacted new programs that allow K–12 students to choose a public or private school instead of attending their assigned school, and similar bills were under consideration in more than two dozen states.
With so much activity, school choice moved from the margins of education reform debates and became the headline. In January 2012, Washington Post education reporter Michael Alison Chandler said school choice has become “a mantra of 21st-century education reform,” citing policies across the country that have traditional public schools competing for students alongside charter schools and private schools.
But Jonathan goes on to warn that legal challenges are taking some shine off of the choice victories:
We must wait to see which laws will survive legal challenges and whether students will enroll while judges consider the programs’ constitutionality. While school-choice laws arrived en masse in 2011, and the laws that passed are bolder than ever, lawsuits keep the systemic change reformers hope for just out of reach.
As Terry Moe has warned, our political system is designed to offer many opportunities for organized interests to block new programs. Then again, the courts are the establishment’s last ditch effort to block a program. And the more they have to go to the courts the more they are losing, even if they occasionally halt a program with a legal challenge.
Jay P. Greene's Blog 
“Furman University professor Paul Thomas says…[school choice] reforms lack an agenda for comprehensive change.”
That’s the beauty of thinking small. Grand schemes have their place, but thousands of small efforts can be just as effective. In almost every state there are dozens of effective schools modeling various types of reforms. Fed-up parents, energetic reform leaders and teachers, a handful of pioneering foundations and small donors are making a difference. (I’m a fan of faith-based Core Knowledge, classical and Great Books schools and support full-ride scholarships at several). It’s frustrating to see wide-scale reform blocked by the usual suspects, but signs of hope – one child at a time – really are everywhere (and this blog provides daily testimony).
You’re missing the irony, mom. Professor Thomas’ agenda has one item on it, maintenance of the status quo.