It seems like no matter where you live, you don’t have to look far to see your fellow Americans fighting over whose values, histories, and more will be taught in public schools. They’re fighting over Advanced Placement African American Studies in Florida. Gender identity in Texas. Sex education in New Jersey. Merit and equity in Virginia. Native American history in South Dakota. Ethnic studies in California. And on it goes.
The institution that was supposed to foster unity among diverse people – public schooling – is instead a constant battleground. Why? Because it leaves people with opposed values little option but to battle for supremacy. And the losers either fail to get what they believe their children need with the tax money they are required to pay, get something unwanted imposed on their children, or both.
Enabling all diverse people to access the education they believe is right, but that others might find unacceptable, is a major argument for school choice, and one that Cato CEF has long emphasized. It is also a major reason that people have advocated for education funds to either follow children to chosen schools, or go directly to diverse institutions, for more than two centuries, as you can see in a new resource officially launching today: Cato’s School Choice Timeline.
The Timeline, which features dates, descriptions, and links to deeper reading on the history of school choice, is needed first and foremost so that people can see the evolution of the choice idea. But it’s also needed to dispel a pernicious myth propagated by choice opponents: that choice began with White families trying to dodge racial integration after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling ending legally mandated segregation long established in many states’ public schools.
Forced racial segregation is, of course, the most glaring example of public schooling failing utterly to treat diverse people equally. But it was hardly the only one.
Keeping in mind that American public schooling as we know it – government-funded, established, and run schools for all – only traces its beginning to around 1837, when Horace Mann became the first education secretary in Massachusetts, it should be no surprise that public funding enabling numerous private options, versus only for government schools, is not an especially old idea. Government schooling had to exist before choice became an alternative.
That said, the School Choice Timeline begins in 1780, with the Massachusetts Constitution, heavily influenced by John Adams, calling on “legislatures and magistrates” to support “all [italics added] seminaries” that teach “literature and the sciences,” and to “encourage private societies and public institutions…for the promotion of agriculture, arts, sciences, commerce, trades, manufactures, and the natural history of the country.” That this was in the constitution of the state that, as a colony, had arguably the first public schooling law, is telling: Before Mann’s crusade, many governments helped fund a variety of educational options. As the Timeline itemizes, for instance, in Georgia, Virginia, Delaware, and New York City, funding in the late 18th and early 19th centuries went to numerous types of schools.
Once Mann’s “nonsectarian” – meaning lowest-common-denominator Protestant – public schooling started taking hold, no group demanded choice more vehemently or widely than Roman Catholics. Reading from the Protestant King James Bible, sometimes learning religiously hostile lessons, missing Roman Catholic doctrine, was not acceptable. Hence, the Timeline is awash with Catholic calls for choice, including in New York in the 1840s, from American Catholic bishops assembled in Baltimore in 1852, from national Catholic publications in the 1870s, and from the Vatican itself in 1929.
But Catholics were not alone in asking for choice after the 1830s. In 1845, the New Jersey Presbyterian Synod called for allowing taxpayers to designate the religious denomination that would receive their school taxes. In 1859, John Stuart Mill wrote that government could help parents pay for education, and that “the objections which are urged with reason against State education do not apply to the enforcement of education by the State, but to the State’s taking upon itself to direct that education; which is a totally different thing.” In 1948, the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which pronounced that all children are entitled to free and compulsory education, and that “parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.”
All of this, crucially, occurred before Brown v. Board, as people dealt with government schooling forcing zero-sum conflicts over basic values and worldviews, and as groups including the Ku Klux Klan sought to wipe out private schooling that it believed was not creating proper Americans.
Religion has remained the most influential flashpoint in education, at least in driving school choice, in large part because religious freedom is specifically enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. That has enabled many lawsuits (which CEF’s Colleen Hroncich will discuss in a post later this week) over choice that have culminated in precedent, so far, that states do not have to provide choice, but if they do religion cannot be excluded. Meanwhile, it has become increasingly clear, including to retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, that public schooling, which must be secular, inherently discriminates against religious Americans. Breyer has not advocated for such a legal finding, but has seen the logical end point of jurisprudence based on government religious neutrality: public schooling, at least absent choice for religious families, is itself unconstitutional.
Of course, the other major source of diversity-based conflict has been race. It has not been as big a driver of choice as religion has been, in large part because for much of U.S. history, the basic race-based battle has been getting minorities access to public schooling at all, then in the same buildings as White students. The latter battle did not peak until the 1960s or 1970s, as states and districts found numerous ways to resist integration, including choice plans, but also flat-out refusal to integrate. Indeed, the battle continues today, with seceding districts, continued effects of redlining, and more, stymieing public school integration.
While most attention was on the more basic battle, we did start to see choice invoked to empower racial minorities to get what they thought was right. The first “modern” voucher program – the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program – was championed by African-American state legislator Annette “Polly” Williams and Howard Fuller, who in addition to serving as the Superintendent of Milwaukee Public Schools from 1991 to 1995, founded the Malcolm X Liberation University in 1969.
As we begin National School Choice Week, it is crucial that people know the true history of school choice, especially diverse people desiring equal treatment in education. As the week goes on, we will focus on different aspects of, and milestones in, school choice. And if you see something on the Timeline that needs correction, or notice something missing, feel free to contact me.
History is clear: Freedom, not force, is what we need in education.
