Journalist Michelle Bernard chats with ReasonTV’s Matt Welch about her reasons for advocating school choice and where she thinks the school choice movement will stand in five years.
As the country celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education in 2004, she said, she realized that parents and activists were still having the same trouble with public schools that black families had in the 1950s.
“Our schools are just as separate and unequal now,” she said. “It’s not so much race-based now. Today, the quality of education is based on your zip code. If you don’t have a great zip code, your chance of realizing the American Dream is very, very small.”
Any parent or caregiver should be able to use their tax dollars to place their child in a school they believe best suits him or her, Bernard said.
Joy Pullmann is a research fellow on education policy for The Heartland Institute and managing editor of The Federalist, a web magazine on politics, policy, and culture.
