The school choice majority
Last month Arkansas became the 25th state to enact a school choice program. The idea allows students to attend non-public independent schools using tax credits or vouchers. Nevada, Montana and Tennessee lawmakers followed suit, making school choice the law in a majority of states, a development once considered inconceivable. Therein lies a lesson for the center-right and a cautionary tale for liberal obstructionists.
A quarter-century ago, school choice was an American anomaly, limited to 19th-Century tutoring programs in New England (Maine and Vermont) and Upper Midwest tax credit programs (Minnesota and Iowa). Then Polly Williams, a Democratic lawmaker representing an African-American constituency in Milwaukee, joined with Republican Gov. Tommy Thompson to support a voucher program. Williams “believed that the poor and the non-white need both the power and the responsibility to educate their own,” professor Harry Hutchison noted in a 1991 report by the Mackinac Center, a Michigan think tank. “Finding the Milwaukee public school bureaucracy unresponsive to her ideas, she pushed for private choice.”
Williams, a Mississippi native, did not waver in supporting school choice for the powerless, disagreeing with those who wanted to expand it to the middle class. School choice was created to serve “those lowest in income,” the New York Times (Dec. 19, 1990) observed, “most of whom are black or of Hispanic descent,” using $2,500 per student deducted from the Milwaukee school district. The Wisconsin Supreme Court upheld the program, and 24,915 students participated in 2013-14, reports the Friedman Foundation, an Indianapolis non-profit.
The center-right embraced the Milwaukee experiment, advancing the idea in other urban areas such as Cleveland, where a voucher program was enacted in 1995. The intellectual foundation for school choice was established decades earlier by economist Milton Friedman, a Nobel laureate. Friedman argued the competition engendered by school choice would benefit students, including those trapped in failing public schools. Another factor was the decision by center-right strategists to focus on state-level policy. Washington, it was argued, was dysfunctional, whereas state capitals allowed conservatism—infused with a libertarian policy sensitivity—to advance education reforms and govern.
The disadvantaged and powerless were embraced, a process evident in the Southeast, where 10 of 12 states have school choice programs. Florida (1999), Georgia (2007), Louisiana (2010), South Carolina (2013) and Tennessee (2015) advanced choice for students with special needs or exceptionalities. Mississippi (2012) serves students with dyslexia. Virginia (2012) and Alabama (2013) have income-based programs. North Carolina (2013) and Arkansas’ new Succeed Scholarship Program serve students with disabilities. Meanwhile, liberals mounted unsuccessful legal challenges. Cleveland’s vouchers were upheld in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, a 2002 U.S. Supreme Court ruling. Arizona’s income tax credit (1997) serves students with disabilities, and was upheld in Arizona Christian Sch. Tuition Org. v. Winn, a later U.S. Supreme Court ruling.
The lesson for the center-right is that it’s possible to govern, not remain in perpetual opposition. As a result, the parameters have broadened in some states to include the idea that school choice should serve students in failing public schools. Six Little Rock schools are in academic distress. They are Baseline Elementary, Cloverdale and Henderson middle schools, and J.A. Fair, Hall and McClellan high schools. Choice, applied to Little Rock, would give parents or guardians a tax credit or voucher to transfer their children from failing public to independent schools.
“President Bill Clinton,” I noted in a May 14 National Review Online column, “met Republicans halfway on charter schools in the mid 1990s.” The legal losses suffered by liberals around school choice illustrate they no longer enjoy a monopoly in the realm of public interest law, and must now decide how—not if—they will meet the center-right halfway on the issue.