For several years, I tried to be understanding of people who tie school choice to racial segregation. After all, some people after the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling did want to use choice to bypass integration. But just as the fact that the worst monsters in human history breathed air does not make air‐​breathing evil, supporting freedom, even if some people have used it for ill, does not make freedom heinous. And frankly, I’m at my wits’ end with choice opponents who proclaim dastardly motives and ignore historical reality to smear choice proponents as monstrous.

Enter Nancy MacLean—author of Democracy in Chains—with a Washington Post op‐​ed that we have seen in its basic form many times before. It eschews the history of school choice before Brown; says Milton Friedman was at best unconcerned, at worst sympathetic to, segregationists; and most spectacularly, ignores a little thing called “force” and the gargantuan injustices perpetrated by government‐​controlled education, AKA, public schooling.

First, a quick response to the implication that Friedman supported segregation in calling for choice around the same time as Brown. Actually, “implication” is too generous a gloss on MacLean’s piece. While she leaves some doubt where Friedman stood, she nonetheless writes that Friedman and other major libertarians and conservatives “backed the White southern cause.” And even if Friedman’s desire truly was freedom, it was really only “White freedom.”

This accusation has been repeatedly debunked, but just as a quick recap, yes, Friedman wrote that he believed in freedom over force in his seminal 1955 book chapter, “The Role of Government in Education.” As a result, he condemned government‐​forced segregation but also opposed government‐​imposed “nonsegregation.” That said, he also wrote that if he had to choose between forced segregation and forced integration he would select the latter.

Not only did Friedman oppose forced segregation, he explicitly argued for choice as an integrator. That, of course, indicated a desire for integration. It was also consistent with burgeoning research on intergroup contact, which showed divisive effects when putting groups into competition with one another. Forced integration, well‐​intended and morally compelling though it was, created just such competition.

Moving on, the idea of school choice – that people should be able to choose among a multiplicity of different schools – was born well before Brown.

Crucially, education only became widely provided by government around the middle‐​to‐​latter 19^th century, which means that by the 1950s the system by which everyone paid for, and de facto attended, government schools was less than a century old. Before that, choice was the norm, with people using lots of different schools and education arrangements. And they did so widely, achieving a greater than 90 percent literacy rate among white adults by 1840.

Why only white adults? Because many governments – the entities that establish and control public schools, and from which choice frees people – prohibited African Americans from being educated. Indeed, economist Friedrich Hayek, whom MacLean smears as in league with segregationists, nailed the long, ugly reality of public schooling, writing in his 1960 book The Constitution of Liberty that “we must remember that it is the provision of education by government which creates such problems as that of the segregation of Negroes in the United States.”

Returning to school choice history, while the public schooling movement essentially began with the crusade of Horace Mann in the late 1830s and 1840s, the possibility of government funding education was entertained before that. Thomas Paine, for instance, in 1791 called for government education funding, but wrote that “the ministers of every parish, of every denomination” would “certify jointly to an office…that this duty is performed.” Education would be provided by families’ chosen religious denominations.

As public schools developed in the 19^th century United States, however, uniformity, including pan‐​Protestant religion, often took hold. This kicked off the first major school choice struggle in the United States: Roman Catholics, who could not with clear consciences use many public schools, fighting to get funding for their own institutions. The effort went on in various ways and levels of intensity for decades, but MacLean does not mention Catholics at all.

Continuing with theory, in 1859 John Stuart Mill wrote that government should require education. It should not, however, provide it, instead funding choice. Why?

A general State education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another: and as the mould in which it casts them is that which pleases the predominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, a priesthood, an aristocracy, or the majority of the existing generation, in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by natural tendency to one over the body.

A call for liberty that can only come with education pluralism was not pulled out of a historical vacuum, or based just on unhappy American Catholics, but centuries of European experience with religious strife. The need to defuse and avoid such strife is why many European countries, Canadian provinces, and other governments base education in choice of different religious schools and more. Of course, none of this gets a mention in MacLean’s piece.

The other history that gets the silent treatment from MacLean is the mammoth and inescapable‐​because‐​government‐​forced‐​it segregationist history of public schooling. It was, indeed, government force that was the target of Brown v. Board, which is far more dangerous than private choice because it is ultimately imposed at the point of a gun. Even absent de jure segregation, government often de facto forced segregation via discriminatory housing policies, policies that have a lasting public schooling impact today.

Perhaps because of public schooling’s long and expansive history of injustice, surveys have repeatedly shown that African Americans strongly desire school choice, which MacLean only hints at by writing that “some parents of color” have come to support choice. Research also suggests that private school choice in the United States has an integrating effect, as Friedman predicted.

MacLean makes one more assertion: that Friedman wanted education to work as a free market, though she acknowledges that he said some government provision for the poor might remain. She then leaps to a conclusion: “The system…would produce staggering inequalities, far more severe than the disparities that already exist today.”

MacLean offers no evidence for her conclusion. She just states it. This is a big problem, because the inequalities in the current, public school dominated system are very deep, with lower‐​income students having much lower literacy and numeracy levels than wealthier children, whose tuition is often the staggering price of a house in a “good” district. More important, research suggests that choice not only leads to better outcomes for those who have it, but also public schools facing families with choice. Competition, it seems, powerfully incentivizes improvement.

Of course, the ultimate case for freedom is not test scores or graduation rates, but that the massive force of government, which for so long was used to keep African Americans down, does not determine one’s fate. The formerly oppressed gain power of their own, no matter how much choice opponents try to claim the opposite.