Even by the standards of the teachers unions’ “burn the village to save it” approach to maintaining political power, it was a remarkably cynical ploy: In a speech last week, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten called school vouchers the “only slightly more polite cousins of segregation.” It wasn’t an offhand remark, but rather a calculated escalation of the school choice fight and an appeal designed to address politics within her union.
Given the current climate on race in America, it was Trumpian in its naked political opportunism. It also wasn’t entirely wrong in its history. Too many school choice supporters suffer from a Trumpian historical amnesia about one aspect of school voucher history.
Contra Weingarten, there is not a singular history of school choice. In contemporary America, the idea of school choice came to the fore in the 1950s and 1960s. One aspect was resistance to desegregation. As part of “massive resistance” some southern states and communities enacted school choice schemes as a way to thwart the integration of schools in the wake of the Brown v. Board of Education decision. By the 1970s, federal courts had struck down these plans and the focus of school choice jurisprudence had shifted to the conditions under which public dollars could flow to religious schools.
The wounds, however, understandably linger, and this is the scab Weingarten wants to pick at. While a majority of African-Americans support school vouchers and school choice more generally, that support is tempered along generational and geographic lines.
Resistance to integration, though, is only part of the voucher story. In the 1960s there was also a push for choice among left-leaning thinkers focused on equity. Berkeley law professor Jack Coons saw vouchers as a way to equalize opportunity for the poor. So did Harvard sociologist Chris Jencks, whose ideas informed a now mostly forgotten Nixon-era federal school voucher pilot in Alum Rock, California. They, along with a host of other academics and advocates, saw choice as a tool of empowerment.
Milton Friedman also popularized the idea of giving each family a grant for education but letting them spend it as they saw fit. Friedman believed this approach balanced the dynamism a market for schooling might create with society’s interest in providing education to all children. He wrote about the idea in his landmark 1962 book, but the idea really came to be associated with him as his prominence grew in the 1970s when he had a TV show and had won a Nobel.
The 1990 book, “Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools” by political scientists John Chubb and Terry Moe introduced fresh arguments to the school choice debate and had a powerful signaling effect coming from the centrist or center-left Brookings Institution rather than a conservative think tank. That book coincided with a new wave of African-American legislators who, frustrated with decades of failure in urban education, were hungry for new alternatives as well as calls for voucher demonstration pilots by public intellectuals including Bill Galston and Diane Ravitch. Cities like Milwaukee and Cleveland enacted voucher plans.
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Then, and now, the choice movement is far from a happy family. Today, some pro-voucher African-American legislators feel politically used by conservatives whose primary focus is choice rather than the raft of issues facing that community. Friedman, meanwhile, thought Chubb and Moe’s ideas for a regulated voucher program were heretical. “I liked the book a lot until the last chapter” he told me, and the Nobel Laureate once publicly upbraided Moe over what he perceived as too much compromise on the issue of how to regulate vouchers.
For his part, Coons blamed Friedman for hampering greater acceptance of school vouchers. One day I was leaving breakfast with Coons heading across the San Francisco Bay to interview Friedman for a project I was working on and Coons cheerfully snarked, “Don’t forget to tell him he set the cause of choice for the poor back decades.” It wasn’t an idle barb. Like many, Coons believed the association of school choice with Friedman’s ideas more generally turned choice into a right-wing idea.
What does all this mean today? Well, be skeptical of anyone who tries to tell you about the “history” of school choice in this country. There is no one narrative. Nor is there is a single reason people want more choice today. Education activists support school choice because they think it will empower the poor, help racial and ethnic minorities, expand opportunities for special education students, create a more efficient education system, advance religious freedom, reduce the government’s role in schooling, or some combination of those and other reasons.
Political thinkers have wrestled with how to organize schooling in societies as long as we have had political thinkers and societies. The question won’t be settled on our watch. School choice is controversial precisely because it’s fundamental to the politics of power in education. But we might ask whether it has to be so toxic? Especially because most parents aren’t interested in grand political or economic theories, they just want better schools for their kids.
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