In her most recent newsletter post, education writer Jennifer Berkshire explains how school choice changed from a bipartisan movement for educational equity into a right wing movement about a whole bunch of non-education issues. She starts by responding to a recent unfavorable review of The Education Wars, the book she co-wrote with Jack Schneider.
Alas, reader, the reviewer, Anna Egalite, an education professor at North Carolina State, was not a fan. And while there were many, many areas in which our analysis was found to be wanting, the main critique was this: we paint school choice as a right-wing cause when it is a bi-partisan, multi-racial movement.
First of all, it is absolutely the case that many unlikely bedfellows have rallied around the cause of choice over the decades, from hardcore southern Segregationists, to liberal Catholics, to civil rights advocates. For a thorough (and I mean THOROUGH) look at how much this coalition has transformed since school vouchers became a thing in the 1950’s, I highly recommend Cara Fitzgerald’s book, The Death of Public School: How Conservatives Won the War Over Education in America. (I reviewed it here last year.)
But here’s the thing – while our book contains plenty of history (thanks Jack!), it picks up with the present-day state of the coalition supporting “education freedom,” and what we find is this: today, vouchers, education savings accounts, tax credit scholarships etc are a right-wing cause. Our argument, that conservatives have been stoking the flames of culture war in order to seed the ground for school privatization, is based both on our observations of what’s been happening in red states as well as what voucher proponents have been announcing.
Back in 2021, EdNext, the same publication that complained about our insufficient acknowledgement of bipartisanship, ran a piece authored by a trio of prominent school choice advocates, urging their fellows to abandon bipartisanship. It’s in another book, though, that the logic of the ‘Red State Strategy’ truly blooms into full flower.
The Red State Strategy
This summer, self-proclaimed school choice evangelist Corey A. DeAngelis, PhD, published a book entitled The Parent Revolution: Rescuing Your Kids from the Radicals Ruining Our Schools. The book got a bit lost, first because of a glut of ‘radicals ruining’ tomes that appeared around the same time, then by revelations regarding the author’s personal life. Which is a shame, because DeAngelis’ description of voucher proponents’ intentional shift in political strategy is genuinely enlightening as well as potentially useful to those who are trying to stem the tide of school privatization.
The first part of DeAngelis’ argument–that the pandemic turbocharged parent activism, unleashing a school choice revolution–is by now the stuff of myth. But the evolution of what he calls the Red State Strategy is less familiar. The school choice movement, he argues, had spent decades trying to win over Democrats, using messaging about civil rights and disadvantaged kids, and what it had gotten them?
“[T]he school-choice movement writ large was avoiding the very arguments that might appeal to conservative, rural Republicans out of a concern that those arguments would turn off Democrats. But if the Democrats weren’t on board anyway, what did we have to lose?”
Read the full post here (and subscribe).
