In the July 3, 2015 “Notable and Quotable” column, the Wall Street Journal honors the school reformer, Marva Collins, who died this week at age 78, by resurrecting a 1982 opinion piece about her authored by Paul Gigot. Collins was a fearless supporter of funded tuition vouchers, and herself a celebrated teacher. Opponents charged that she was seeking to cripple public education, and thereby “played into the hands of the right wing,” in the words of a prominent Chicago Tribune columnist, who was “incensed” by her.

“Notable and Quotable” asserts that the columnist himself (later affiliated with the Chicago Sun-Times), acknowledged that, owing to gang fears, “he sent his two sons, now adults, to parochial schools…" 

One of those sons became a prominent physician in Chicago, though he died tragically at age 40 in 1993, from a heart attack. The physician was Dr. William Robert Jarrett, and the columnist was his famous father, Vernon Jarrett. 

One could add that Dr. William Jarrett was the husband of White House Senior Advisor Valerie Jarrett, who kept the name and the attachment to her famous father-in-law after a 1988 divorce, as she rose in Chicago political circles. She, and the Administration she now serves, do not appear to be supporters of school vouchers -- at least, for others.