Defenders of a failed status quo are spreading a myth that school choice is racist

Opponents of voucher and other educational choice programs have been pushing a new narrative concerning the origins of such programs: that they were born in 1950s Southern racism.

Although segregationists did attempt to use vouchers to circumvent the Supreme Court’s order to desegregate public schools in Brown v. Board of Education, that was by no means the origin of educational choice. In fact, it was an aberration.

As I discuss in the Syracuse Law Review, the true roots of school choice run deeper — two centuries deeper. The modern educational choice movement, meanwhile, which counts Black parents among its most fervent supporters, arose in inner city Washington, D.C., Milwaukee and Cleveland. This movement traces its lineage to classical liberal thinkers — not to reactionary racists.

The gradual turn to race as the basis for attacks on educational choice began in 2017. That year, the Center for American Progress published a report titled The Racist Origins of Private School Vouchers. It spun an origin story that grounded the educational choice movement in racial bigotry. According to the report, vouchers had their genesis in the 1950s South, where states used them to evade the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown. Rather than see their public schools integrated, the report explained, Southern states created voucher programs that enabled white students to attend all-white private schools.

This argument quickly gained traction in the court of public opinion, and it was only a matter of time before it found its way into a court of law, as well. For instance, a recent lawsuit challenging an educational choice program in Arkansas alleges that the “predecessors” of the program were segregationist voucher proposals struck down by courts in the late 1950s. That is hardly the case.

The genealogy of school choice traces to two of the greatest intellectual influences on America’s founders: Adam Smith and Thomas Paine. In "The Wealth of Nations," Smith posited ways to inject competition into education as a means of improving teacher effectiveness and responsiveness. And in "Rights of Man," Paine advocated a true voucher system to provide for the education of children from poor and low-income families.

Fast-forward to the mid-19th century, when John Stuart Mill, widely regarded as the father of modern constitutional liberalism, called for vouchers in his classic work "On Liberty." He urged government to “leave to parents to obtain the education where and how they pleased, and content itself with helping to pay the school fees of the poorer classes of children, and defraying the entire school expenses of those who have no one else to pay for them.” 

It was this classical liberal tradition that Nobel laureate economist Milton Friedman, considered the father of the modern educational choice movement, built upon. But Friedman was not the only champion of choice in the 20th century. Progressives in the 1960s and 70s, including sociologist and former New Republic editor Christopher Jencks, Harvard Graduate School of Education dean Ted Sizer and Berkeley law professor John Coons, advocated for vouchers as a means of empowering poor and minority families failed by the public-school establishment.

And it was Black intellectuals, activists and elected officials such as Polly Williams, Howard Fuller, Fannie Lewis, Anthony Williams and Virginia Walden Ford who led the charge for educational choice programs adopted in Milwaukee, Cleveland and the District of Columbia in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Those programs were certainly pioneering, but they were not the first school choice programs to operate in this country. In 1802, the Pennsylvania legislature enacted a law that required municipalities to pay for the education of poor students at “any school in their neighborhood” chosen by their parents.

In 1856, the Texas legislature passed a law appropriating funds to counties based on student population, directing county courts to apportion those funds “among the children between the ages of six and eighteen years, who may attend any school in their respective counties.

And around the turn of the 20th century, Vermont and Maine adopted voucher programs to provide for the education of children in towns that lacked public schools.

It would be irresponsible to ignore the use of vouchers to evade school integration. But it is also important to understand two critical aspects of that ugly episode.

First, vouchers were being used as a means not of maximizing parental choice in education, but of denying it. In fact, they were often used as part of a bigger scheme that included closure of the public schools that were being forced to integrate. Students were given vouchers in the public schools’ stead, and in many areas, all-white private schools, or “segregation academies,” were the only option, leaving Black families with no choice at all (and white families without the choice of a public school). This objective — denying choice to maintain segregation — was the opposite of the goal of today’s educational choice movement: maximizing parental choice to ensure that every child can get the education that will work best.

It is also important to remember that these voucher and public-school closure schemes were often advocated for by the public-school establishment itself. In many instances, the public schools simply turned over their facilities and equipment to the new, all-white supposedly private schools, which were often staffed by the very same teachers and administrators. 

We should never ignore that vouchers were used for horrible ends in the post-Brown South. But nor should we accept a false origin story. Educational choice — as an idea and a practice — is far older than Brown and has noble origins. Its brief deployment by racists as a tool to circumvent the Supreme Court was an opportunistic aberration, one in which the public-school establishment played an unfortunate part. 

Michael Bindas is a senior attorney with the Institute for Justice and author of School Choice is Racist (and Other Myths).