In memory of a champion of school choice for lower-income parents

Berkeley Law professors Jack Coons, left, and Stephen Sugarman, circa 1978.

Stephen Dwight Sugarman died the day after Christmas, interrupting almost 60 years of our friendship and collaboration on this planet. His unique character, personality, and family life I will save for another occasion. Here, I will briefly remember his impact on school choice, law school – and myself.

We met in his senior year at Northwestern, academic year 1963-64. I’d like to imagine that I helped lure him to the law school in downtown Chicago. Northwestern had developed a then unique program in law and social services. In any case, he came, and both he and the program prospered.

So did I, as both Steve and classmate Bill Clune, long a Wisconsin professor, spent too much of their second and third years assembling the picture of public school finance systems that led eventually to our persuading the California Supreme Court to hold its state system unconstitutional (Serrano v. Priest, 1971, 1977).

By that time, both Steve and I were on the U.C. Berkeley law faculty where we remained (I in semi-retirement) until his recent higher calling.

Gradually, through the late sixties, we had come to realize that “public” school is anything but what that name implies. The Institute for Governmental Studies published our model for state systems of subsidized parental choice in book form – “Family Choice in Education: A Model for State Voucher Systems.”

In a dozen joint essays thereafter, Steve and I kept trying to explain the catastrophic civil and social effects of a state’s conscription of the un-monied family. In 1978, we put our full message in the volume, “Education by Choice: The Case for Family Control.”

In that year, at the encouragement of Democratic Congressman Leo Ryan, we prepared an amendment to the California Constitution aiming for a popular vote. It was focused upon liberating families of lower incomes.

That year, Leo was murdered in Guiana.

Steve and I – in spite of our political naivete – decided to try it alone. We had expected help from Milton Friedman; instead, the great marketeer inspired a competing, unregulated form that ensured that neither proposition could succeed.

Steve and I tried several times in the early eighties and later and managed to assemble a sufficient coalition of right and center. In his later days, Steve was happy to see the positive relevance of these early failures to most of the “choice” movements of the last few years.

Finally, for the moment: Even in his latter difficult and suffering years, Steve never wavered from his professional role in the academy. He was a much-beloved teacher and a prominent figure in the reform of law of torts, with his own widely praised casebook and many an article striving to make our laws treat the ordinary consumer with fairness and dignity.

Steve finished the fall semester, teaching his last class, a few days before he died. In a very un-Sugarmanic finale, he passed before he could grade his students’ exams. My guess: At higher levels, it had been decided that he deserved a break.


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BY John E. Coons

John E. Coons is a professor of law, emeritus, University of California at Berkeley, and author with Stephen D. Sugarman of "Private Wealth and Public Education" and "Education by Choice."