Sol Stern, Lapsed Liberal and Conservative Heretic, Dies at 89

New York Times

17-07-2025

Sol Stern, a public policy apostate and provocateur who evolved from an ardent leftist in the 1960s to a self-described moderate conservative, but who broke with the Republican establishment over its unconditional embrace of Donald J. Trump, died on Friday at his home in Manhattan. He was 89.
His wife, Ruthie Stern, said the cause was cancer.
As a writer, an editor and an adviser to government officials, Mr. Stern remained an enrolled Democrat, although he voted for John McCain, the Republican candidate, over Barack Obama for president in 2008. He was known for his largely nonideological judgment and his willingness to change his mind when he believed his prescriptions for society's ills had been overtaken by factual evidence.
In the 1990s, disillusioned with how his two sons were being taught in Manhattan's public schools and impressed with the curriculum in Roman Catholic parochial schools, Mr. Stern, a Jew born in what is now Israel, improbably joined a conservative chorus asking for an expansion of school-choice programs. He supported, among other things, giving government vouchers to poor and minority children stuck in failing public schools so that they could attend parochial schools instead.
Mr. Stern, whose wife was a junior high school teacher on Manhattan's Upper West Side, was so impressed by the performance of the city's Catholic schools that he went so far as to proclaim school vouchers 'the new civil rights movement.' In 2003, he published a book on the subject, 'Breaking Free: Public School Lessons and the Imperative of School Choice.'
Mr. Stern had been urged to assess the parochial school system by Myron Magnet, his editor at City Journal, the magazine of the right-leaning Manhattan Institute, where Mr. Stern was a senior fellow and contributing editor.
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