It’s curious: Both opponents and proponents of school choice—government funding myriad options families select, not just government schools—often write like the educational freedom movement started in the 1950s. Advocates often point to Nobel laureate Milton Friedman’s 1955 essay “The Role of Government in Education,” which called for decoupling government education funding from provision, as the launch point for the school choice movement. Opponents, as we recently saw again, point to reactions to 1954’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision striking down racial segregation in public schools. It spurred “massive resistance” in Southern states, including in some the shuttering of public schools and creation of choice programs to support attendance at “segregation academies.”
As the brand new Cato book Fighting for the Freedom to Learn: Examining the Nation’s Centuries-Old School Choice Movement explains, neither side is doing justice to school choice history with its focus on the ‘50s. Education funding grounded in choice goes much farther back than the decade of doo-wop, and after the 1950s the choice movement had numerous thrusts beyond unleashing market forces or an ugly desire to maintain racially segregated education.
Featuring contributions from leading scholars and school-choice advocates, Fighting for the Freedom to Learn takes readers on a journey through American education from colonial days to the school choice explosion of the last few years:
Chapter 1, by historian Jane Shaw Stroup, catalogs the many ways education was delivered and consumed at wide scale before the common school movement of the 1830s, including for-profit schools, religious institutions, and more.
Chapter 2, by Prof. William Jeynes, tackles how the religiously and ethnically diverse people of the middle-Atlantic colonies maintained a largely peaceful coexistence: the pursuit of common goals, and leaving heavily values and identity-laden education to individual communities.
Chapter 3, penned by Prof. Dick Carpenter, is a catalog of the diverse ways education was paid for before common schooling, including significant government funding of what we would call “private” education, but people at the time would have just seen as education.
Prof. Charles Glenn writes about the emergence of “Common School Ideology” in chapter 4. The common schooling movement spearheaded by Horace Mann sought to replace the pluralist, community-based education provision then dominant with government uniformity and the distancing of children from the ideas of their parents.
Chapter 5 looks at centuries of arguments against common schooling. Prof. Ashley Rogers Berner consolidates them into four major strands:
The impossibility of values neutrality
The importance of non-state institutions for democracy
Democracy requires equal access to excellence
Common schooling’s empirical record
In chapter 6, Prof. Cheryl Fields-Smith examines the horrendous treatment of black Americans by public schooling, and the many ways that black people historically used private initiative to help themselves.
My chapter—7—asks why there was a lull in school choice efforts—both provision and advocacy—between roughly 1880 and 1955. It argues that major influences in the country, including a greater national identity, progressive scientism, and major immigration, were putting the very existence of private education in jeopardy. After that, depression and war made resources scant.
In chapter 8, Prof. Matthew Lee examines the evolution of Protestant and Catholic thought on school choice, including why for much of American history Protestants generally supported common schooling, Catholics tended to advocate for shared government funding, and why more Protestants eventually joined the educational freedom fold.
In chapter 9, Prof. James Shuls discusses the rise of religious civil rights arguments for choice contemporaneous with Milton Friedman’s argument for greater market forces. Shuls looks at the Citizens for Educational Freedom and Father Virgil Blum. Starting in the late 1950s and through the 1960s they vigorously campaigned to end discrimination against religious families by sharing public funds with religious institutions.
Ron Matus, with the Florida scholarship organization Step Up for Students, lays out the progressive movement for school choice in chapter 10. It had its heyday in the 1960s and 1970s, as it became clear that American public schooling was much more responsive to powerful special interests than low-income families, not to mention averse to progressive pedagogy. The solution: let families control education funding.
In chapter 11, University of Notre Dame professor Nicole Stelle Garnett takes readers through the evolution of school choice jurisprudence, from saving private education’s existence in 1925’s Pierce v. Society of Sisters to 2022’s Carson v. Makin ruling that religious schools that do religious things cannot be excluded from school choice programs.
Finally, in chapter 12, Cato adjunct scholar Jason Bedrick argues that the primary reason for the explosion of school choice since 2021 is not that the COVID-19 pandemic made parents aware that without choice their children could, literally, be locked out of education. It was more that Red State parents increasingly perceived that public schools were hostile to their political and moral values, and choice could protect them.
Grounding education in choice, not government schooling, is not a new idea. It certainly goes farther back than the 1950s. Indeed, as Fighting for the Freedom to Learn explains, it is older than public schooling itself.
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