The historical story that school choice would not exist without the philanthropy of the Bradley Foundation is the common misinterpretation that places school choice in a partisan light.
"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....
"The indispensable groundwork for the choice movement had been laid some two decades before the foundation was even established in 1985. More to the point, it had absolutely nothing to do with conservative ideology, and everything to do with the determination of Milwaukee’s Black and Hispanic communities to provide the sort of education for their children that the public schools had so conspicuously failed to deliver."--William Schambra, histphil.org
