Writing for The Progressive, NPE Executive Director Carol Burris explains what is really going on with the school choice movement.
In 2017, PBS released School Inc., a rightwing billionaire-funded documentary created by the late Andrew Coulson, a conservative author and former director of the libertarian Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom. School Inc. showcased Coulson’s theory that for-profit schooling, funded by parents without government involvement, is the best delivery model for education. In a review for the long-running Answer Sheet blog in The Washington Post, the education historian Diane Ravitch and I criticized Coulson’s romanticization of the era of American schooling before public education, during which children were homeschooled, church-schooled, or taught by private tutors—except for the poor, who, if they were lucky, were trained in charity schools.
The “school choice movement,” which Coulson’s documentary promoted, has always been a classic bait-and-switch swindle: Charter schools were the bait for vouchers, and vouchers the lure for public acceptance of market-based schooling. While narrow debates about accountability, taxpayer costs, and the public funding of religious schools raise important concerns, the gravest threat posed by the school choice movement is its ultimate objective: putting an end to public responsibility for education.
This goal is not a secret. The libertarian right has openly dreamed of ending public education for the past seventy years—the economist Milton Friedman advocated for school choice as early as 1955, and his acolytes have continued to do so ever since.
And they have made extraordinary progress. During the past few years, the traditional voucher model championed by the right has morphed into the Education Savings Account (ESA). In exchange for promising not to enroll their child in public schools, parents receive funds to “shop” for services, including private school tuition, tutoring, and luxury purchases, including trips to Disney World, televisions, and waterskiing lessons. Nearly all recent state ESA programs have either no or high-income caps, and few have sensible protections.
The libertarian right embraces this flagrant waste because it helps them achieve their ultimate objective of shifting all of the responsibility and costs to families. By approving universal ESA programs, they are creating a vested interest among middle and upper-income families in pay-as-you-go education. Frivolous spending is tolerated because it aligns with Friedman and Coulson’s objective of putting parents in charge of education without government responsibility or concern.
