School-choice supporters in New Jersey and Virginia were heartened last November by the election of reform-minded governors. Their hopes grew this week as the incoming chief executives named principled education reformers to their states’ top education posts.
In Virginia, Governor-elect Bob McDonnell tapped Gerard Robinson to be the Commonwealth’s next secretary of education. Robinson most recently headed the nonprofit Black Alliance for Educational Options, one of the nation’s leading school-choice advocacy organizations.
Robinson has successfully championed school-choice reforms around the country, including Louisiana’s school-voucher program for low-income kids and Georgia’s charter-school and scholarship programs. This year, Robinson joined other school-choice leaders in calling for U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan to save the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program.
Virginia currently lags other states in offering parent-centered options (it has one of the weakest charter-school laws in the country). Robinson is the perfect leader to advance McDonnell’s vision of greater school-choice options for Virginia families.
In New Jersey, Governor-elect Chris Christie nominated former Jersey City mayor Bret Schundler to be education commissioner. Schundler has championed parent-centered education reforms in the Garden State for decades. As the New York Times noted today, the teachers-union leaders once described Schundler as “the antithesis of everything we hold sacred about public education.”
Christie has pledged to focus on urban education reform, a critical issue in a state with some of the highest-spending and worst-performing school districts in the country. His selection of a principled reformer like Schundler shows he means business.
What is particularly exciting about the reform effort in New Jersey is the strong bipartisan support for school choice. Thanks largely to the leadership of the late-Dan Gaby of E-3 New Jersey, a diverse coalition of African-American and Hispanic community leaders and Democratic elected officials have joined Christie and other Republicans in calling for school choice for disadvantaged children.
It’s early, but 2010 is already shaping up to be a promising year for education reformers and a tough one for the teachers unions.
– Dan Lips is a senior policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation.