Advocates of “school choice,” or using public funds to pay for private school, often call it the civil rights issue of our time.
That’s a special kind of gaslighting, not only because numerous studies have shown how little academic progress students make with school vouchers, but also because the school choice movement was actually born out of the horror that parents and politicians had toward the 1954 Brown v. Board decision that would end legal segregation in schools.
That resistance was bolstered by Nobel prize-winning economist Milton Friedman’s book “The Role of Government in Education,” which objected to any government oversight of any kind, and first suggested some kind of tax code changes to subsidize private education.
“It was this idea — what became school vouchers — that allowed segregationists to frame a racist response to the Court’s desegregation orders as an issue of markets and what we would call today parental choice,” writes Josh Cowen in his timely new book, “The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers.”