Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio) no longer attends the annual picnic held here by District of Columbia supporters of school choice. During the picnic there are lottery drawings to award scholarships empowering a few children to escape from the nation's worst -- and, in per-pupil spending, third-most lavishly funded -- school system. Boehner stopped attending because he could not bear the desperate anxiety, and crushing disappointment, of parents whose hopes for their children hung on the lottery. "I'd stand there and cry the whole time," he says.

Bill Clinton, who could cry out of one eye, was dry-eyed about the plight of D.C.'s poor: He vetoed a school-choice bill for them in 1998. He felt the pain of the strong, the teachers' unions who were feeling menaced by the weak -- by poor parents trying to emancipate their children from the public education plantation.

Boehner, who understands the patience of politics, began championing school choice as a state legislator two decades ago. Last Tuesday the House passed a small ($10 million) experimental school choice voucher program for at least 1,300 of the District's 68,000 students. This bill, skillfully managed by Rep. Tom Davis (R-Va.) passed, 209-208, only because two Democratic members, presidential candidates Dick Gephardt and Dennis Kucinich, were in Baltimore at a debate sponsored by the Congressional Black Caucus, proclaiming their compassion for poor people...

...School choice for poor children is, Boehner says, today's principal civil rights fight. The lottery of life, not choice, determines a child's parents and family situation. There should be choice about schools for children placed by life's lottery in difficult conditions. Otherwise, Boehner says, "It's like saying you can only buy bread in the grocery store closest to your house -- and the government will run the grocery store."...