One thing upon which friends and foes of school choice agree: without the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the initial education voucher experiment in Milwaukee would never have occurred.
As fierce voucher opponent People for the American Way put it in 2003, quoting a state superintendent of instruction, “the program would never have started if it were not for Michael Joyce, president of the Bradley Foundation until 2001. … Without them, we wouldn't have school vouchers.” In its recently published monograph Agenda Setting: A Wise Giver's Guide to Influencing Public Policy, voucher friend Philanthropy Roundtable noted that “the [Bradley] Foundation was indispensable to transforming school choice from mere concept to active movement …. If the reform effort continues to expand, it will be due almost entirely to philanthropists who have been willing to invest for the long haul.”
But school choice friends and foes are dead wrong about this—an error of more than mere historical interest, because so much of philanthropic practice today rests on this misconception.
In fact, well before the Bradley Foundation was established in 1985, Milwaukee had already witnessed the rise of a powerful movement among African Americans and Hispanics to establish independent, community-based schools, and to secure public funding for them through vouchers.
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