“A Private Matter” WI Court Restricts School Choice Growth In Milwaukee (NBC Nightly News, 1990)
The WI school choice program, one of the first choice programs in the nation, allowed 400 Milwaukee students to use school vouchers to attend a private school free of charge. Even with the number of federal education officials backing school choice on the rise, its enactment was ruled unconstitutional in a WI court in 1990.
Many Milwaukee parents participating in the voucher program vowed they would not send their children back to public school.
Proponents of school choice and school choice programs, including CER, took the case to the Supreme Court and eventually won, the Court ruling to uphold the law, allowing the programs to continue.
Clint Bolick, a lawyer in defense of school choice, reiterates the benefits of the voucher program, saying, “…[public] schools, faced for the first time with competition are beginning to listen to low income parents and hear what it is they need and want.”
Clint Bolick serves as director of the Goldwater Institute’s Scharf-Norton Center for Constitutional Litigation in Phoenix.
A legal pioneer, Bolick has argued and won cases in the United States Supreme Court, the Arizona Supreme Court, and state and federal courts from coast to coast. He has won landmark precedents defending school choice, freedom of enterprise, and private property rights and challenging corporate subsidies and racial classifications.
Before joining the Goldwater Institute in 2007, Bolick was co-founder of the Institute for Justice and later served as president of the Alliance for School Choice.
