Heather Cox Richardson, one of America’s foremost historians, recently turned her attention to the story of school vouchers, connecting the dots between Nat Turner to modern school vouchers.
Then, in 1954, after decades of pressure from Black and Brown Americans for equal access to public schools, the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren, a former Republican governor of California, unanimously agreed that separate schools were inherently unequal and thus unconstitutional.
Immediately, white southerners lawmakers launched a campaign of what they called “massive resistance” to integration. Some Virginia counties closed their public schools. Others took funds from integrated public schools and used a grant system to redistribute those funds to segregated private schools.
Within years, these segregation academies would dovetail neatly with the religious schools organized after the 1962 Engel v. Vitale decision in which the Supreme Court struck down state-mandated prayer in public schools, and the 1963 Abington School District v. Schempp decision prohibiting teachers from leading students in prayer and Bible reading. The Supreme Court decisions against prayer in schools reinforced the idea that the government opposed “family values,” and fundamentalists pulled their children out of public schools and created alternative religious schools. Fundamentalist leader Jerry Falwell began to suggest that public schools should be abolished entirely.
Both of these developments provided constituents for Ronald Reagan’s rise to political power with a message that public employees had gotten too powerful and that public enterprises should be privatized.
After Reagan’s election, his secretary of education commissioned a study of the nation’s public schools, starting with the conviction that there was a “widespread public perception that something is seriously remiss in our educational system.” The resulting report, titled “A Nation at Risk,” announced: “the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.”
Although a later study commissioned in 1990 by the secretary of energy found the data in the original report did not support the report’s conclusions, Reagan nonetheless used it to justify school privatization. He vowed after the report’s release that he would “continue to work in the months ahead for passage of tuition tax credits, vouchers, educational savings accounts, voluntary school prayer, and abolishing the Department of Education. Our agenda is to restore quality to education by increasing competition and by strengthening parental choice and local control.”
The drive to push tax dollars from public schools to private academies through a voucher system remained a top priority for those on the right. In his first term, Trump asked Congress to fund “school choice for disadvantaged youth, including millions of African-American and Latino children. These families should be free to choose the public, private, charter, magnet, religious or home school that is right for them.” His education secretary, Betsy DeVos, was a staunch supporter of school choice and the voucher system; she and her family gave $600,000 to promote school choice ballot laws in the decade before 2017.