Nancy Loome is the executive director of The Parents’ Campaign. In this guest op-ed at the Mississippi Clarion Ledger, she notes that the arguments in favor of school choice keep changing.
The “school choice” crowd can’t seem to get their story straight.
The first iteration of their campaign to use state tax dollars to subsidize private schools came in 1954 in response to Brown vs. the Board of Education.
Segregationists made no bones about the fact that “tuition grants” (private school vouchers) would provide a way for white parents to evade the public school integration newly mandated by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Since then, elite billionaires still pushing to fund private schools with public dollars have attempted to bury that ugly history, promoting an ever-changing narrative as they’ve struggled to find a storyline less offensive to the broader public.
Early voucher proponents theorized that, if parents lost faith in public schools, they would support vouchers as an alternative.
They adopted the mantra: “Public schools are a failure, private schools are superior” and urged lawmakers to slash funding for public education. So confident were they that public schools were inferior to private that they agreed to test voucher students, but that accountability was short-lived, as voucher students fared poorly. School choice adherents were shocked by the data, which show that public schools outperform private schools.
