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A Reversal on School Vouchers, Then a Tempest PDF Print E-mail
Written by JENNIFER MEDINA   

Despite his many earlier City Journal articles calling for vouchers and charter schools, in the new essay Mr. Stern focused on the shortcomings of the voucher movement. He argued that in recent years, vouchers had steadily lost political support. And citing the need for a “Plan B,” he urged educators to focus on improving curriculums instead. To support his idea, Mr. Stern pointed to Milwaukee’s experiment with school vouchers.

“Milwaukee’s public schools still suffer from low achievement and miserable graduation rates, with test scores flattening in recent years,” Mr. Stern wrote. “Violence and disorder throughout the system are as serious as ever. Most voucher students are still benefiting, true; but no ‘Milwaukee Miracle,’ no transformation of the public schools, has taken place.”

In his online opposition, Mr. Greene said he was particularly bothered because the essay was being widely interpreted as setting up a choice between vouchers and curriculum changes.

“There’s no reason you can’t have both — just like you like brownies and ice cream,” Mr. Greene said. “You shouldn’t be made to choose.”

In a recent wide-ranging interview in the institute’s offices, Mr. Stern described himself with a mix of pride and self-deprecation, brushing off efforts to label him politically. He said he saw himself as a kind of revolutionary who was now simply reporting and writing about issues he cared about.

“I’m a reporter,” he said, as if stating the obvious.

His 2003 book, “Breaking Free: Public School Lessons and the Imperative of School Choice,” relied on his own trips to Milwaukee to measure the impact of the voucher system on public schools there. In the book, he found much to praise about vouchers, saying they would give needed competition to the failing schools. But now he says more recent evidence has fallen short.

“People have to pay attention to what’s going on,” he said, his gravelly voice somewhat incongruous to his broad smile. “They have to respond. I am not ideological about this.”

To describe his current political outlook, Mr. Stern refers to an adage coined by Irving Kristol: A neoconservative is a “liberal mugged by reality.”

“I’m a liberal whose children were mugged by the public schools,” Mr. Stern said.

His history with the city’s schools goes back to his childhood. Just before World War II, Mr. Stern immigrated with his parents from what was then Palestine. The family settled near Fordham Road in the Bronx, where Mr. Stern attended Public School 6 until eighth grade. He went on to Stuyvesant High School and City College, and then started but did not finish a doctorate in political science at the University of California, Berkeley.

At Berkeley, he became entranced, he said, by the left-wing student movement and dropped out to write for the radical magazine Ramparts, gaining national attention. One of his most famous articles included assertions that the Central Intelligence Agency had infiltrated the National Student Association, a group of student governments, as part of its Cold War strategy. JENNIFER MEDINA