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The Reinvention of Vouchers for a Color-Blind Era: A Racial Orders Account

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 May 2019

Ursula Hackett*
Affiliation:
Royal Holloway, University of London
Desmond King*
Affiliation:
University of Oxford

Abstract

Historically, vouchers, which provide a sum of money to parents for private education, were tools of racist oppression; but in recent decades some advocates claim them as “the civil rights issue of our time.” This article brings an analytic-historical perspective rooted in racial orders to understand how education vouchers have been reincarnated and reinvented since the Jim Crow era. Combining original primary research with statistical analysis, we identify multiple concurrent and consecutive transformations in voucher politics in three arenas of racial policy alliance contestation: expansion of color-blind policy designs, growing legal and political support from a conservative alliance, and a smorgasbord of voucher rationales rooted in color-blind framing. This approach demonstrates that education vouchers have never been racially neutral but served key roles with respect to prevailing racial hierarchies and contests.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019 

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References

1. We use the term “voucher” to refer to all types of programs that offer a sum of public money to parents to spend on their children's education at a private school of their choice, whether they are “tax credit scholarship” vouchers, “tuition grants,” or “educational savings accounts.”

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27. Grants were not distributed until 1962.

28. After being struck down as unconstitutional, the program was repackaged by state legislators in 1959.

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33. Ibid.

34. Ibid.

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36. Coffey v. State Educational Finance Commission, 296 F. Supp. 1389 (S.D. Miss. 1969).

37. Ibid.

38. Ibid.

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41. There are slight differences between different sources in reports of the exact number of vouchers issued for the years 1959, 1961, and 1964, but in each case the number is small. We have taken the source that cites an issuance figure alongside a more exact financial outlay (e.g., “$1,034,392” as opposed to “over $1m”) as the more reliable. There are no precise figures for 1968 and 1969. Contemporaneous news sources tell us only that “nearly 14,000” vouchers were issued in Virginia in 1967 and “more than 13,000” in 1968.

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82. Polls during this period generally showed that African Americans were more supportive of vouchers than other racial groups: 76 percent support in a 1992 National Catholic Education Association poll; 62 percent support in a 1997 Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup poll (compared to 47 percent among white respondents); 57.3 percent support in a 1997 Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies poll (compared to an evenly divided white response) (Millicent Lawton, “Gallup Poll Finds Wide Support for Tuition Vouchers,” Education Week, September 23, 1992, https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/1992/09/23/03-3cho.h12.html?qs=african+american+support+vouchers; Adrienne D. Coles  “Poll Finds Growing Support for School Choice, Education Week, September 3, 1997; David Hill, “Class Action,” Education Week Teacher, April 1, 1998, https://www.edweek.org/tm/articles/1998/04/01/07denver.h09.html?qs=african+american+support+vouchers+daterange:1981-07-01..2000-01-01.). However, exit polls in California and Michigan voucher ballot initiatives showed no difference or lower support for vouchers among blacks than among whites, and other nationwide polls displayed greater skepticism of vouchers by African Americans: for example, 41 percent of African Americans strongly opposed vouchers in a 2001 Zogby International poll, compared to 32 percent in the whole sample (Karla Scoon Reid, “Poll Finds Support for Vouchers Wanes If Public Schools Affected,” Education Week, October 3, 2001; Leal, David L., “Latinos and School Vouchers: Testing the “Minority Support” Hypothesis,” Social Science Quarterly 85, no. 5 (2004): 1227–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar). Voucher opinions are highly sensitive to question wording.

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85. Ibid.

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92. There are no statistically significant effects for a justice's race or sex likely due to the small proportion of justices that are either nonwhite (5 percent of cases) or female (14 percent of cases)

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96. Forman, “The Rise and Fall of School Vouchers.”

97. Ibid.

99. Forman, “The Rise and Fall of School Vouchers,” 551.

100. Zelman v. Simmons-Harris.

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109. Forman, “The Rise and Fall of School Vouchers.”

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114. Forman, “The Rise and Fall of School Vouchers.”

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116. Eric Brunner, Jennifer Imazeki, and Stephen L. Ross, “Universal Vouchers and White Flight” (Department of Economics Working Paper Series, University of Connecticut, 2006), http://digitalcommons.uconn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1038&context=econ_wpapers; Halley Potter, “Do Private School Vouchers Pose a Threat to Integration?” Report: School Integration, The Century Foundation, 2017, https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/production.tcf.org/app/uploads/2017/03/22102646/do-private-school-vouchers-pose-a-threat-to-integration.pdf; Carl, Freedom of Choice, 2.

117. Robert T. Garrett, “Texas House Passes Budget with Provision Banning School-Voucher Funding,” Dallas News, April 7, 2017, https://www.dallasnews.com/news/texas-legislature/2017/04/06/texas-house-fight-funding-ban-vouchers-social-issues-marathon-budget-wrangle.

118. Opposition to vouchers in Texas comes from an alliance of Democrats and Republican lawmakers with rural and suburban constituencies. For example, in the 2017 votes on SB1, a failed voucher bill, 62 percent of Republican lawmakers from less urbanized districts (those with an urbanized population of less than 80 percent according to the U.S. Census Bureau (2010 Census Urban and Rural Classification and Urban Area Criteria, https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/geography/guidance/geo-areas/urban-rural/2010-urban-rural.html) voted against vouchers, while 67 percent of Republican lawmakers from more urbanized districts (greater than 80 percent urbanization) voted in favor. In short, Texan Republicans from less urban districts helped scupper voucher bills, alongside Democrats. This opposition may be related to practical questions about the viability of school choice in less-populated areas and concern about loss of public school jobs as much as fears of government regulation of private religious schools or perceptions of racial threat to white suburban school districts.

119. Zeus Rodriguez, “School Choice Students Are Not Pawns,” The Wisconsin Journal Sentinel, January 27, 2011; Will Bunch, “Pennsylvania: Voucher Ground Zero,” The Philadelphia Daily News, May 23, 2011.

120. We exclude the Colorado Douglas County school board voucher pilot, launched in 2011, as it is the only program created at the local school district level. All other programs were passed by state legislatures.

121. MRP scores estimate the mean ideology of each state legislative district. They are based on the 2008–2014 Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES). For more information on the methodology used to estimate district ideology scores, see Tausonovitch and Warshaw, “Measuring Constituent Policy Preferences”; C. Tausanovitch and C. Warshaw, “The American Ideology Project,” 2015, http://americanideologyproject.com/.

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129. O'Brien, Molly T., “Private School Tuition Vouchers and the Realities of Racial Politics,” Tennessee Law Review 64 (1996): 359408Google Scholar; Gooden et al., “Race and School Vouchers.”

130. Gooden et al., “Race and School Vouchers,” 523.

131. Newspaper coding procedures: Analyzing Factiva for newspapers with thirteen programs in the twelve states in which voucher scholarships were passed during either 2011 or 2012, we created an original database of 526 broadsheet newspaper articles. Articles were drawn from 65 state newspapers and nine additional online news sources in these thirteen states. Identification and coding involved all named actors and groups that took a stance on vouchers expressed by lobbying, attacking, defending, or ruling for or against the scholarships in court, sponsoring legislation or voting for or against the scholarships in the legislature, vetoing or signing a scholarship bill, articulating an editorial opinion, releasing a press statement, or otherwise making a public declaration in favor of or in opposition to scholarships. A total of 835 separate actors were individually identified and logged in our database. Newspapers in more than half of the case study states had no reporting of explicit racial claims for or against vouchers at all.

On at least three separate occasions during this period, explicit race-conscious arguments made by elites for and against vouchers attracted such criticism that they needed to be re-articulated in color-blind terms: (1) the allegations made by both proponents and opponents of the expansion of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program that the other side is racist (Marley, Patrick, “Past School Voucher Advocate Rips Gov. Walker's Plan,” The Wisconsin Journal Sentinel, May 16, 2013Google Scholar; Marley, Patrick and Stein, Jason, “Walker: Budget Could Expand School Choice to Other Cities,” The Wisconsin Journal Sentinel, May 10, 2011Google Scholar); (2) re-articulation of voucher support in color-blind terms in North Carolina (Lynn Bonner, “Two Views of GOP Agenda,” News Observer, April 29, 2011; Jamica Ashley, “CHCCS Joins Suit against State over Vouchers,” The Herald Sun, January 11, 2014; J. Ravitch, “Vouchers Undermine Public Education System,” Chapel Hill News, March 14, 2014; Gregory Childress,  “Local Groups to Rally against GOP Policies,” The Herald Sun, May 26, 2013); (3) remarks about African American families by the Racine Unified School District superintendent about the Milwaukee voucher program that surfaced during the 2013 debates about vouchers (Trevor Tenbrink, “Superintendent's Shocking Comment Reminds Us That School Choice Is an Uphill Battle,” Education Action Group News, April 9, 2013).

Addressing bias: We addressed the dangers of bias rising from newspaper selection and coding procedures through comprehensive searches and transparent coding methods (Franzosi, Robert, “The Press as a Source of Socio-Historical Data: Issues in the Methodology of Data Collection from Newspapers,” Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History 20, no. 1 (1987): 516CrossRefGoogle Scholar). We examined all of the state newspapers in the Factiva database for each of the twelve case study states, searching in each case for the terms “education voucher/tax credit scholarship,” separately and in conjunction with the name of the relevant bill and the bill number. Our analysis included all state newspaper articles mentioning the relevant piece of legislation, however briefly: its formulation, passage, implementation, effects, and, in some cases, litigation. Certain newspapers may have chosen to cover education vouchers more frequently than other sources, and these editorial choices may be related systematically to ideological stance, support for vouchers, or other relevant variables. Indeed, we expected this to be the case. Given that we are concerned with how the media typically frames voucher arguments, any systematic biases of these kinds do not invalidate inference.

132. Mark Walsh, “Louisiana Vouchers, Desegregation Case Prove Volatile Mix,” Education Week, September 18, 2013, https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2013/09/18/04louisiana-2.h33.html.

133. Marley, “Past School Voucher Advocate Rips Gov. Walker's Plan”; Marley and Stein, “Walker: Budget Could Expand”; Bice, Daniel, “School Voucher Battle Erupts with Charges of Racism and Religious Bigotry,” The Wisconsin Journal Sentinel, May 29, 2013Google Scholar.

134. Mettler, Suzanne, The Submerged State: How Invisible Government Policies Undermine American Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009)Google Scholar.

135. Eckes, Suzanne E., Mead, Julie, and Ulm, Jessica. “Dollars to Discriminate: The (Un)Intended Consequences of School Vouchers,” Peabody Journal of Education 91, no. 4 (2016): 537–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar, https://doi.org/10.1080/0161956X.2016.1207446.

136. Joy Resmovits, “Betsy DeVos Would Not Agree to Bar Discrimination by Private Schools That Get Federal Money,” Los Angeles Times, May 24, 2017.

137. Andrew Ujifusa, “Ed. Dept. Has No Plans for a ‘Federal Voucher Program,’ Let's Break That Down,” Education Week—Politics K-12, May 31, 2017, http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/campaign-k-12/2017/05/federal_voucher_program_no_plans_education_department.html?cmp=SOC-SHR-FB.

138. Kruse, White Flight, 171.

139. Skowronek, Stephen and Orren, Karen, “Pathways to the Present: Political Development in America,” in The Oxford Handbook of American Political Development, ed. Valelly, Richard, Mettler, Suzanne, and Lieberman, Robert, Oxford Handbooks (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2016), 29, 2747Google Scholar.