School Choice Alliance Appoints New Leader

Published March 1, 2007

The Alliance for School Choice and Advocates for School Choice will experience their first leadership transition in April, when President and General Counsel Clint Bolick will be replaced by Charles Hokanson, Jr.

At that time, the organization will move its headquarters from Phoenix to Washington, DC.

The Alliance and Advocates were launched three years ago to help coordinate national efforts to promote private school choice options for disadvantaged children. In their first two years, the groups and their allies helped create or expand 19 school choice programs nationwide.

New Leadership

Hokanson currently is chief of staff in the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Planning, Evaluation, and Policy Development. He has served in the department’s Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, as a professional staff member to the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Education and the Workforce, and as a research fellow at the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation and Manhattan Institute for Public Policy Solutions.

A Harvard Law School graduate, Hokanson also holds a master’s degree in public policy from Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and graduate and undergraduate degrees from Stanford University. A long-time supporter of school choice expansion, Hokanson is a past co-chair of the Federalist Society’s national school choice subcommittee.

“I am excited to be joining the Alliance and Advocates at this critical time for the school choice movement,” Hokanson said. “We still have much to accomplish on behalf of low-income students who currently have limited options of quality schools they can choose to attend.”

Educational Opportunities

William Oberndorf, the groups’ board chairman, said, “Charles brings to the Alliance and Advocates an excellent blend of policy, legal, and management experience, and a keen intellect–all critical skills. He also brings the requisite passion for systemically improving K-12 education by empowering parents to choose the education they determine is best for their children.”

Bolick announced his intent to resign in May 2006, citing a desire to spend more time in Arizona with his young children and to return to litigation.

“I am enormously proud of our track record over the first three years at the Alliance for School Choice in helping create tens of thousands of educational opportunities for children who desperately need them,” Bolick said. “I’m eager to start suing bureaucrats again. I’m leaving but won’t be far away.”

Bolick will spend May as a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University before helping the Goldwater Institute, a free-market group in Phoenix, open a new Center for Constitutional Litigation in June.


Megan Rudebeck (mrudebeck@allianceforschoolchoice) is the Alliance for School Choice’s media relations officer.