Clint Bolick correctly highlights the huge legal threats to nearly ALL genuine school reform efforts.

Despite the flimsiness of the Florida court's logic and its dire ramifications, the closeness of the Ohio Supreme Court vote suggests that the precedent may spread. Already, Arizona's recently enacted private scholarship program for children of modest means has been challenged on uniformity grounds; and the Florida teachers unions are gearing up for challenges to the state's remaining school-choice programs, including a voucher program for disabled children.

It is increasingly clear that the interests of the public charter-school movement and the private school-choice movement -- which have proceeded in parallel but never in united fashion -- are aligned. As the Ohio litigation demonstrates, those whose interests are served by the status quo are determined to destroy school choice in all its forms. All forms of school choice, in turn, must be defended in order that any school choice can flourish.

Though educational uniformity has emerged recently as a primary device to stifle education reform, it is nothing new. Nearly a century ago, the Ku Klux Klan and other nativists sought, nearly successfully, to ban private schools established by Catholic immigrants in the name of educational uniformity. The U.S. Supreme Court repudiated those efforts and proclaimed the right of parents to control their children's education. Judges faced with similar arguments today need also to reject arguments that would destroy parental choice for the sake of those whose motives are far from noble.

---------------------------

School Uniform

By CLINT BOLICK
November 1, 2006; Page A18

By a single vote, over 87,000 children were given an educational reprieve last Wednesday by the Ohio Supreme Court, which ruled that public charter schools are constitutional. But the narrowly rejected legal theory remains alive, a cancer that threatens to destroy education reform around the nation.