Polly Williams, the Milwaukee Democrat Who Started the Voucher Movement

If you ask a room of Americans who started the modern school choice movement, you will get a few names, and most of them will belong to white men in think tanks. Economists. Governors. Foundation presidents. It is a respectable list. It is also missing the person whose name belongs at the top of it: a Democratic state legislator from Milwaukee's north side who spent her career on the other side of the aisle from most of the people who later claimed the credit.

Folks, I love this story, and I love it for a reason that has nothing to do with school policy. It is a story about what happens when somebody with a problem and a vote finds a partner who has a different party label, and they both decide the child matters more than the label. We could use more of that in Washington. We could, frankly, use some of it in the Thanksgiving seating chart.

The woman's name was Annette "Polly" Williams, and she was a Democrat in the Wisconsin State Assembly. She believed that poor families in Milwaukee deserved the same thing wealthier families already had: the ability to pick a school for their children. Here is her story, in order, and then the lessons.

The woman and the district

Annette Polly Williams (1937 to 2014) represented a Milwaukee district in the Wisconsin State Assembly, as a Democrat, from 1981 to 2011. She was a figure in Black politics in the city and in the state, an outspoken advocate for her community, and a public supporter of Jesse Jackson's presidential campaigns. By any measure she was a progressive on most issues of her day. Her politics did not fit the usual picture of a "voucher advocate," and that is the heart of why the story matters.

Her concern was the public school system in Milwaukee, which served a large share of the city's Black and low-income children. The family with money could move to a suburb with better schools or pay private tuition. The family without money had one option: the school assigned to its address. Her conviction, which she stated in public for years, was that the poor families of her district were captive customers of a system that did not have to compete for them, and that the remedy was to give those families the power to leave. That is not a Republican idea or a Democratic one. It is the oldest idea in a market economy: when the customer can walk away, the supplier pays attention.

The idea before her

The intellectual lineage of vouchers is worth knowing, because Williams did not work in a vacuum. The economist Milton Friedman proposed the voucher idea in a 1955 essay, arguing that government could pay for education without running the schools, by giving parents funds to spend at the school of their choice. That history is in Milton Friedman's 1955 Voucher Essay and Its Seventy-Year Road. For decades the idea stayed in the academy and the think tank, with some local experiments and many failed bills.

What the idea lacked was a political base among the people who stood to benefit. Williams provided it. She took a proposal that had been pitched as free-market theory and recast it as a question of civil rights and fairness, asking why a poor Black mother could not do for her child what a wealthy white family could do as a matter of routine.

The alliance with Governor Thompson

Here is the part that makes the story a lesson in coalition. Williams, a Democrat, found a partner in Tommy G. Thompson, a Republican who served as Wisconsin's governor from 1987 to 2001. Thompson favoured school choice, and he saw that the proposal would be stronger if it came from the city's own legislators and communities than if it arrived as a program imposed by the governor's party.

The two worked together, with community allies, including Howard Fuller, a longtime Milwaukee education activist who became the city's school superintendent in 1991 and became one of the movement's leading voices. The coalition was unlikely by party and natural by purpose. It put together an urban Democratic legislator, a Republican governor and a set of grassroots advocates who wanted the same outcome for different reasons. A Republican might call it market discipline. A Democrat might call it justice. Both were describing the same program.

Notice how it was done. Williams did not ask her Republican partner to become a progressive. Thompson did not ask her to become a conservative. They agreed on a specific policy, the policy had a defined constituency, and each of them could explain it to their own voters. That is how coalitions are built in a republic. Madison wrote in the Federalist that the answer to the danger of faction was a large and varied republic in which no single interest could rule, and the voucher coalition is a small, real-life example of how factions with different aims can combine on a particular measure.

The Milwaukee Parental Choice Program of 1990

The result was the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, enacted by the Wisconsin legislature in 1989 as part of the state's budget and starting with the 1990-91 school year. It is often described as the first modern, publicly funded private school voucher program in the nation. It began with seven schools and 337 children.

Its original design was modest. In broad terms:

1. It was limited to low-income families. Eligibility was tied to family income relative to the poverty line.
2. It was limited to Milwaukee. Only children in the Milwaukee Public Schools could use it.
3. It was capped. Only a small percentage of the district's students could participate in the early years.
4. It paid for tuition at private schools. The state paid an amount per student directly to the school the family chose.
5. It was restricted to non-religious private schools at the outset.

Those limits are worth noticing, because they show the program began as a careful experiment, not a sweeping revolution. Skeptics predicted that it would collapse or that it would be struck down. It survived a state-court challenge: the Wisconsin Supreme Court rejected a procedural attack on its enactment in Davis v. Grover (1992), and the program continued.

The expansion of 1995 and the religious school question

Over the first several years, the program's limits proved to be a constraint. Many of the best-regarded schools in Milwaukee's neighborhoods were religious schools, particularly Catholic schools, which had a long record of serving the city's low-income children. A program that could pay for a secular private school but not a religious one left out many of the families it was meant to help.

In 1995 Wisconsin expanded the program. The changes allowed religious schools to participate and substantially raised the number of students who could take part. The expansion immediately raised a constitutional question, and opponents sued.

The question was whether the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, and the Wisconsin Constitution's own provisions on religion and education, barred a state from letting parents use public funds at a religious school. The state's answer was that the money went to parents, who chose where to use it, and not to the churches directly.

Jackson v. Benson (1998)

The Wisconsin Supreme Court upheld the expanded program in Jackson v. Benson in 1998. The court held that the program did not violate the First Amendment's Establishment Clause or the state constitution. It reasoned, in broad terms, that the program had a secular purpose, the education of poor children; that its primary effect was not to advance religion, because aid flowed to schools only through the independent choices of parents; and that it did not create an excessive entanglement of government with religion. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal.

The case matters for more than Wisconsin. The reasoning, that when government gives aid to individuals who then choose among a range of schools, religious and secular, the result is neutral toward religion, became the foundation of the argument the U.S. Supreme Court accepted a few years later when it upheld the Cleveland voucher program in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris (2002). The Wisconsin decision came first, and it helped show the way.

What Williams stood for

It would be wrong to turn her into a conservative in retrospect. She was a Democrat who remained a Democrat, and she disagreed with some of her allies on other matters. Her principle was narrower and more durable: the families who are poorest should have the most power over where their children learn, not the least.

There are three elements in it that a conservative should admire, whether or not he shares her party.

1. She started from the child and the parent, not the system. Her first question was not "how do we improve the district?" It was "how do we help this family now?" That is a more conservative question than many conservatives ask.
2. She treated choice as a civil-rights issue. The poor have always been the people least able to exit a failing institution. A right to choose is, for a family without money, the difference between having a say and having none.
3. She was willing to work with people who did not share her party. In an age of purity tests, that is an unusual and valuable trait.

The steelman: the case against vouchers

A post about a movement should state its critics' best case, and it is a serious one.

Vouchers divert money from the public schools that serve most children, leaving the remaining students with fewer resources. Private schools can select students and are not always subject to the same accountability for results. Religious schools may teach doctrine with public money. And the evidence on academic gains is mixed, so the program may not deliver what it promises.

The answer comes in four numbered points.

1. The money follows the child, which is the point. The funding exists to educate a particular student. If that student leaves, the cost of educating her leaves too, and the evidence on how a district's finances actually adjust is a matter for budget data, which any citizen can examine. The more important question is whether the child is better served.
2. Accountability can be built in. A program can require testing, reporting and audits, and the Milwaukee program has added accountability measures over the years. The better question is whether a parent, who can leave a school that fails, is a more effective check than a distant bureaucracy.
3. The religion question is answered by the structure. If the aid goes to the parent, and the parent chooses, the state is neutral. The same principle applies to the GI Bill and to Pell Grants, which can be used at religious colleges.
4. The evidence is mixed, and the honest conservative says so. Studies of voucher programs have found a range of results, and a reader who wants the real record should read the studies themselves. But a program that gives families a choice, delivers results comparable to the system it replaced and does so at lower public cost has a case that does not depend on test scores alone: it respects the right of a parent to decide.

What the story teaches about coalitions

Let me give you the lessons, plainly.

One: find the person with the problem. The movement succeeded because the proposal came from the community it was designed to help. A policy has more power when it comes from the families who will live with it.

Two: agree on the policy, not the philosophy. Williams and Thompson did not need to agree on everything. They needed to agree on a bill. A coalition that waits for ideological agreement never forms.

Three: start small and prove it. The first program was capped and limited, and it grew as it showed that it could work. A modest start lets a skeptical public watch and judge.

Four: expect a court fight and prepare for it. The program lasted because its architects built a legal structure, aid to parents, who choose, that could survive scrutiny.

Five: do not let the movement forget its origin. School choice began as a civil-rights effort for poor families. When it is advertised only as a tax or market idea, it loses its moral center. A conservative who wants the policy to last would do well to remember whom it was for.

The Founding angle

Conservatives love to say that the family comes before the state. The principle was established in the Founding generation's thought and has deep roots in the common law, which treated the parent as the child's natural guardian. A voucher program is an application of that principle to the money that funds education. In the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, the Founding generation declared that "Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged," a sentence examined in Religion, Morality and Knowledge, the Northwest Ordinance's School Clause. The Ordinance said schools should be encouraged. It did not say that the state must run them all, and it did not say that the poor should have fewer options than the rich.

For the later story of how choice grew into a mainstream policy in the states, see Arizona Made Every Child Eligible for an ESA, How the Idea Spread So Fast, and for another model of publicly encouraged choice, Tax-Credit Scholarships, the Choice Program Built on Private Donations. And a common objection, answered in School Choice Fails Rural Kids? Here Is the Rural Objection Answered, is that choice cannot work outside cities.

What you can do to learn more

• Read the primary documents. The Wisconsin Supreme Court's opinion in Jackson v. Benson is public and readable, and so is the U.S. Supreme Court's opinion in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris.
• Look at your own state's choice laws. Find out whether your state has a voucher, an education savings account, a tax-credit scholarship or none, and who qualifies.
• Talk to families who use them, wherever programs exist, and listen to why they chose.
• Look for the Williams model in your own community. Who in your town is closest to the problem, and who could partner with them across party lines?

The case in brief

1. Polly Williams, a Democratic state legislator from Milwaukee, led the creation of the first modern voucher program because she believed poor families should have the choices wealthier families already had.
2. She partnered with Republican Governor Tommy Thompson and community allies, showing that a coalition can form around a specific policy without agreement on everything else.
3. The Milwaukee Parental Choice Program began in 1990 as a small, capped, income-limited experiment limited to secular private schools, and it survived an early court challenge in 1992.
4. The 1995 expansion to religious schools was upheld by the Wisconsin Supreme Court in Jackson v. Benson (1998), on the reasoning that aid reaching schools through parents' choices is neutral toward religion.
5. The lesson for conservatives is to start from the family, treat choice as a matter of fairness and be willing to work across party lines for a policy that will last.

What you can do: look up your state's school choice laws on the legislature's website, and find out who in your area qualifies.