Southern governors in the 1980s and 1990s established a foundation for school choice as they struggled to restore what they saw as a public school system struggling after desegregation. Education was a strategic issue around which they sought to address economic concerns and alleviate anxieties about the reality of desegregation to realize their vision of building, yet again, a New South. As part of this process, southern governors extolled the values of the free market in deracialized ways, effectively sidestepping the turmoil wrought by segregationists, yet with consequences that in essence maintained inequitable schools. Twenty-five years after the Brown decision, southern governors networked through associations like the National Governors Association and the Southern Regional Education Board to pass comprehensive education reform grounded in neoliberal ideologies, including individualism and colorblindness, to rebuild school systems that The Washington Post and others as saw the “most backward in the nation.”Footnote 1 Southern governors effectively cultivated local support to stay in office, and in some cases gained federal influence as they shaped new notions of school choice as a mechanism to improve all schools.
Governors of the New South like William Winter (D-MS), Lamar Alexander (R-TN), Richard Riley (D-SC), James Hunt (D-NC), Bill Clinton (D-AR), Reubin Askew (D-FL), Jimmy Carter (D-GA), and others aimed to rebuild struggling systems of education through comprehensive reform efforts in the 1970s and 1980s. The period was not unlike the period after Reconstruction, when southern reformers saw racially codified public education as a means, among others, to promote southern industrialization and economic growth for the “New South” they envisioned. Much like the previous century, southern governors in the post-Brown New South focused on reforming education to improve regional economies. But at the same time, these southern governors strategically moved away from questions of race and racism born of the civil rights movement and the massive resistance to it, and strategically worked to implement comprehensive education reform that ultimately included school choice.
Three salient themes emerge when using the history of school choice as a lens through which to examine New South governors who championed education reform during the 1980s and 1990s. First, it illuminates the perennial tensions and racist policies that have routinely underpinned the movement for school choice, revealing how a movement beginning in the 1950s evolved over time as opposition to legally mandated racial segregation was embraced across the nation and within both political parties. Race and racism remained determinative in the post-Brown era as governors employed race-averse language to distance themselves from both massive resistance to desegregation and the demands for integration from within the Black freedom struggle. As examined here, William Winter, serving the state of Mississippi as governor upon his election in 1979, illuminates how governors who came of age during segregation navigated politics and proposed race-averse policies to appease a majority of voters after Brown. Winter serves as a revealing example of how southern governors were proximate to and grappled with a changing education landscape that shifted from violently enforced segregated schools to schools that were more racially desegregated than those of any other region in the nation.Footnote 2
Second, the region embraced neoliberal ideologies, which permeated its educational discourse and intersected with the evolution of racialized education policy and, ultimately, school choice. School choice as it evolved in the 1980s and 1990s was part of a larger education reform movement intertwined with economic considerations and general anxieties about public education, especially after the publication of A Nation at Risk in 1983, a damning report of the state of public education released by the Department of Education. As scholars Jack Schneider, Deanna Michael, Sherman Dorn, R. Scott Baker, Judith Kafka, and others have found, the movement that resulted from this process, an approach to education reform anchored in accountability, fit into a neoliberal arrangement that supported public education for economic gains. Accountability policies such as standardized tests and teacher competency exams reflected the belief that market-driven solutions would improve educational outcomes. As explained in this article, Governor Richard Riley of South Carolina, who joined the ranks of other governors like Reubin Askew of Florida and James Hunt in North Carolina, embraced neoliberal and business-friendly practices through accountability measures that generated a disparate impact on Black teachers and students.Footnote 3 These legislative moves were part of a shifting set of education policy arrangements, which, as historian R. Scott Baker noted, “crafted a new racially neutral educational discourse that emphasized accountability and achievement rather than equality and access.”Footnote 4
Third, southern governors formed coalitions and expanded their influence through organizations like the National Governors Association (NGA) and the Southern Regional Education Board (SREB), which forged large networks, disseminated education reports widely, and met regularly to discuss educational issues of shared interest. The political career of Lamar Alexander demonstrates how southern governors maneuvered through the NGA and SREB and utilized these organizations to advocate for education reform as an issue brought forth by the states. Particularly, the NGA maintained a growing presence in Washington, DC, which helped catapult southern governors to positions of federal influence.Footnote 5 These alliances helped cultivate a corporate reform mindset couched in deracialized neoliberal values of individualism, economic productivity, and public-private partnerships that proved fruitful for school choice.Footnote 6 Other New South governors held influential national positions that institutionalized notions of school choice, namely Richard Riley as secretary of education and Bill Clinton as president.
The ways that New South education governors navigated this period provides a nuanced narrative about school choice and its political implementation through these actors that can be overlooked when focusing on a national narrative alone, or when focusing solely on historical actors like the economist Milton Friedman, union leader Al Shanker, or Rudy Perpich, the Minnesota governor who championed charter schools in the early 1990s. Looking at these southern governors expands our understanding of the evolution of school choice, revealing it as a national bipartisan coalition within a conservative and neoliberal context that produced lasting and often dysfunctional consequences.
New South Education Reformers in the Post-Brown Era
Following the Brown decision, Dixie governors—such as Orval Faubus in Arkansas, George Wallace in Alabama, Ross Barnett in Mississippi, and Francis Byrnes in South Carolina—seemed to define the South as exceptional. Indeed, massive resistance—violence against Black students who entered all-White schools under court mandate, the closure of public schools to defy desegregation orders, and the funding of “segregation academies” to create all-White private schools for families who wanted to avoid any semblance of integration—exemplified what resistance to desegregation looked like to the rest of the nation. Divided by desegregation and financially strapped to retain private alternatives to public school, southern states were additionally strained by a public perception that was bad for business. The desegregation struggles continued to define Dixie through the early 1970s when all schools were mandated to finally desegregate and vouchers for private academies were deemed unconstitutional in Green v. County School Board (1968) and Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education (1969).Footnote 7 The cohort of New South governors examined here were committed education reformers who sought comprehensive change in states that were sites of fierce resistance to desegregation as they grappled with creating unitary systems for the first time in history.
Southern governors of the 1970s and 1980s inherited a public system that was strained by decades of massive resistance and then federal mandates to desegregate and essentially unify two racially separate school systems. Though education had been a historic part of the southern gubernatorial platform since 1865, the reforms these governors passed during their administrations marked a symbolic departure from the era of massive resistance during the 1950s and early 1960s because they accepted desegregation. As Jimmy Carter noted in his gubernatorial address Georgia in 1971, “the time for racial discrimination is over.”Footnote 8 His counterpart in Florida, Reubin Askew, agreed, noting that “racial discrimination and democracy are incompatible.”Footnote 9 Both were stances that would have been branded as radical and unelectable just five years earlier. The political climate changed to such an extent that over 90 percent of Black students attended desegregated schools, and the Voting Rights Act (1965) compelled Whites running for office to address race in ways their predecessors had not. Additionally, southern governors were elected in a region unique in terms of the desegregation it experienced and the outcomes it produced. From maintaining complete segregation in 1954, the percentage of Black students who attended majority-White public schools reached a high mark of approximately 44 percent in 1988, with over 90 percent of Black students attending schools that were desegregated to some extent.Footnote 10 By the 1980s, nearly 75 percent of Black students were finishing high school, up from 25 percent during the 1950s.Footnote 11
As New South governors accepted the new order, they passed significant education reform across the region that captured national attention, which also reified perceptions of the South as a distinct educational region. As a journalist noted in 1983, there was a discernible widespread movement of southern states standing “in the forefront [to] begin an overhaul of [the region’s] public education system.”Footnote 12 State leaders across Dixie lived up to the perception that “southern Governors and southern legislators and southern educators have perhaps been working harder than anyone else to set higher standards and push harder to improve their schools.”Footnote 13
The legislation governors signed into law as part of their New South initiatives was indeed comprehensive, illuminating how education evolved as a strategic issue to secure votes and retain positions of influence after Brown. Their education reform packages directed resources into a public education system, and this reinvestment marked what appeared to be a moderate attempt at progressive education reform. William Winter’s Education Reform Act in Mississippi, signed into law in 1982, was far-reaching legislation. It established kindergartens and mandatory attendance, reading aides and teacher pay raises, and it bolstered standards in teacher education.Footnote 14 Lamar Alexander led the campaign in Tennessee to pass the Comprehensive Education Reform Act in 1984, which called for additional early childhood teachers and a “back to the basics” curriculum that focused primarily on reading and math skills.Footnote 15 Richard Riley passed the Education Improvement Act of 1984 in South Carolina, which increased academic requirements and school attendance accountability, appropriated more funding to students with special needs and disabilities, implemented a statewide basic skills assessment, and called for a teacher loan forgiveness program.Footnote 16 Bill Clinton ushered in reform legislation in Arkansas that created more courses in the sciences, foreign languages, and advanced mathematics. Clinton’s plan also mandated competency exams for teachers to retain licensure.Footnote 17
Additionally, greater statewide investment in public education marked these reforms as “progressive,” especially after southern legislators had enacted myriad policies to shut down public schools during the 1950s and early 1960s. Governor Reubin Askew’s successful legislative efforts in Florida demonstrated the New South’s commitment to increasing state coffers for public education, while also garnering national attention and statewide support for a plan to change the state constitution to appropriate more state funding. Working for reform after the Brown decision and to revitalize the state of Florida, Askew led Florida to adopt corporate tax reform as part of his “fair share” initiative in the state.Footnote 18 Governors in Tennessee, South Carolina, and Arkansas followed suit and provided these states with the comprehensive legislative reform needed to invest in public education, funded through one-cent sales tax initiatives.Footnote 19
Still, after these ostensibly progressive measures were passed that at least symbolically marked an end to massive resistance in education, race and racism remained determinative as southern governors avoided race and desegregation when possible and refocused anew on the economy. A cohort of southern governors in the 1970s and 1980s embraced education reform for what they saw as a “New South,” a renewed region that accepted racially desegregated schools while leaving racist structures intact. For those like William Winter of Mississippi who wanted to distance themselves from the vitriolic defense of Jim Crow, school choice evolved as a political solution to the divisive politics of massive resistance. School choice similarly was convenient for governors like Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, who publicly disavowed overt racism but opposed “forced busing” and other federally mandated attempts to desegregate schools.Footnote 20 Southern governors embraced the politics of school choice as they navigated a changing educational environment while advocating individual choice, statewide economic development, and local sovereignty in education. It also allowed them to avoid issues of racism while securing enough votes to retain their elected positions. When the southern governors who championed these values, notably Lamar Alexander, Richard Riley, and Bill Clinton, ascended to positions of national influence in the 1990s, they generated national impact and legislated the foundation for our current system of school choice.Footnote 21
Education remained a strategic issue around which governors and other elected officials gained necessary support from a majority of voters to stay in office. Public education was a significant issue before Brown, and it remained a salient political topic afterward. In recognizing this storied history, James Cobb, Lisa McGirr, Joseph Crespino, Matthew Lassiter, and others have articulated a “Southernization of America” to challenge the exceptionalism of the region.Footnote 22 Though northerners and much of the nation saw the South as a distinct region in how it racialized and segregated schools, northern representatives and their White constituents in cities like New York, Boston, and Chicago struggled with desegregation, too, demonstrating that racism was in no way exclusive to the South. “School choice” was not bound by constructed regional boundaries and in fact enjoyed growing bipartisan support from outside the former Confederacy, especially after the publication of A Nation at Risk. Though not within the scope of this article, northern governors like Rudy Perpich (D-MN), Richard Lamm (D-CO), and Tommy Thompson (R-WI) were instrumental as vocal advocates for school choice in the 1980s and 1990s, in addition to Ronald Reagan and a host of federal representatives outside the New South, a fact that disproves any regional exceptionalism regarding the South.Footnote 23 The dominant narrative about school choice in the South illuminates how the region helped shaped current understandings of choice and moved public attention away from its segregationist origins.
William Winter and the Racist Underpinnings of New South Education Reform
William Winter, like all southern governors of the 1970s and 1980s, was personally connected to de jure segregation and Brown, which indelibly shaped his political aspirations and education policy agenda. In recalling growing up in Mississippi, he described it as a place where “we emphasized separate but we didn’t emphasize equal.”Footnote 24 He remembered going to segregated schools, noting that “because I was white I could go to a good school and they [Black students] could not.”Footnote 25 Winter’s self-awareness and cognizance of the privileges his Whiteness entailed distinguished him from his predecessors—such as governors James Coleman or Ross Barnett, or the notoriously segregationist US senators James Eastland and John Stennis—who served as the architects of massive resistance to desegregation in Mississippi.Footnote 26 Winter was not an outspoken segregationist per se, but he was still complicit. He served in the state legislature between 1948 and 1956, which placed him in proximity to Mississippi legislators who employed extreme means to defy desegregation orders. He campaigned in the 1950s for the notorious segregationist Stennis and his election to the Senate. In his first run for governor, Winter even identified as a segregationist who wanted to discuss “nonracial” issues. He was lambasted for his “moderate” stance and lost two bids for governor in 1967 and 1975, before being elected in 1979.Footnote 27
Winter was not alone in his complicity in perpetuating racist education policy. Jimmy Carter began his political career on a local school board in Georgia immersed in the issues of desegregation and funding. Deanna Michael noted that Carter “remained silent … about his opinions on desegregation,” as Georgia legislators at that time sought to evade the Brown decision, and local school boards built new schools that perpetuated segregation and the unequal distribution of funds.Footnote 28 Governors like Winter or Carter were considered moderate—if not progressive—for not openly endorsing the violent ideology and policy of the far right. Yet their silence in the face of massive resistance paralleled how they evaded race and systemic issues regarding racism during the reform initiatives of the 1980s.
When Winter was finally elected governor of Mississippi in 1979, he continued his campaign to improve public education, something he had campaigned on since his first bid for governor in 1967. Winter spearheaded a push to pass comprehensive education reform to live up to his promise. Through letter-writing and door-to-door canvassing, Winter and his staffers participated in what they saw as a grassroots movement. He led constituents in Mississippi in showing up at the state capitol and flooding their representatives’ offices with calls, while the press afforded the campaign significant and ongoing coverage of his education efforts, which the state legislature signed into law in 1982.Footnote 29 His campaign did not rely on local mobilization alone. Winter and the New South also benefited from regional associations that formalized policy discourse and connected governors to one another, particular through SREB. The organization published policy briefs and annual reports, helping to build regional solutions to the states’ struggling public education systems. This focus on K-12 issues in the 1980s marked an expansion of the scope of SREB, which had been founded in 1948 to facilitate higher education policy.Footnote 30 Governors who led the association—which William Winter, Lamar Alexander, and Richard Riley chaired consecutively in the early 1980s—placed K-12 education and the sense of urgency for statewide reform demonstrated by campaigns like Winter’s at the center of debate, and disseminated research that supported cohesive education policy development and strategy for multiple states.Footnote 31
Winter also learned that education was a popular issue that could not be divorced from race. As Dick Molpus, who served on William Winter’s staff in Mississippi, candidly recalled about their campaign for education reform: “The whole issue was about race. Public education was seen as the domain of the Black student.”Footnote 32 But by the late 1970s and early 1980s, Winter and other New South governors distanced themselves from massive resistance, though they could still speak to issues of race through purportedly race-neutral policies such as student discipline—an issue that spoke to the anxieties of White families and teachers in desegregated public schools, but one that also illuminates the dysfunction of color-blind or race-averse policies of the era.Footnote 33
When he was lieutenant governor, William Winter had overseen new legislation in the state that established “peace officers,” a historical predecessor to school resource officers. In this legislation, peace officers were “vested with the powers and subjected to the duties of a constable for the purpose of preventing all violations of law on school property … and for preserving order and decorum thereon.”Footnote 34 Connecting to calls for “law and order” issued since the early 1970s from President Richard Nixon, student discipline measures also figured prominently in other southern governors’ education policy reforms. Student discipline and concerns over it were the first clauses in Richard Riley’s signature education legislation in South Carolina, the Education Improvement Act of 1984. His new law required the state to prescribe “minimum standards of conduct and behavior that must be met by all pupils as a condition to the right of pupils to attend the public schools of the State.”Footnote 35 In the Palmetto State, this meant enforcing a vague “disturbing schools” law, which authorized local and state law enforcement officers—not school officials—to remove children from school for certain transgressions.Footnote 36 In Tennessee, Lamar Alexander signed a bill that authorized teachers to hold students accountable for “disorderly conduct” and to use “corporal punishment” within parameters established by local school boards.Footnote 37 With disciplinary laws determined by (largely White) school officials after desegregation, southern school policy presented race-neutral and ‘objective’ criteria for enforcing the student conduct policies that were determined by school administrators and supported by their legislators, accelerating an expansion of the school-to-prison nexus across southern states.
Southern governors and the research used to support their policies, including SREB publications, perpetuated and left unchecked the policies’ racist underpinnings, which were signified by deficit notions of Black student achievement grounded in racist tropes. The influential 1981 SREB report The Need for Quality, for instance, stressed that education reform “must address the special needs of black students, many of whom have major deficiencies in academic skills.”Footnote 38 The report failed to mention ineffectual desegregation plans or the many new private schools left in the wake of the previous generation of southern legislators’ efforts to evade desegregation through privatization. Emulating SREB, statewide task force reports embraced the same deficit mindset in their assessment of local families. One report from Tennessee lamented, for instance, “the disinterest of the community as a whole in its schools both in terms of community and parental involvement.”Footnote 39 Another sought to eradicate drug use with a rigorous curriculum aimed only at “good citizenship.”Footnote 40 Such reports maintained a color-blind ideology that left unchecked structural inequities, as the nature of educational discourse in the 1980s shifted to also embrace values of individualism and profit.
Richard Riley and Neoliberal Education Policy in South Carolina
Governor Richard Riley of South Carolina traveled to Mississippi to study William Winter’s hard-fought campaign for comprehensive education reform, networking informally as well as working through SREB to further develop the New South coalition.Footnote 41 Governor Riley advocated for signature education legislation in South Carolina, a state often identified alongside Mississippi as one of the most backward in the nation. Emulating Winter’s successful push for reform, Riley and his team created a grassroots campaign to pass his signature education legislation, the 1984 Education Improvement Act. As one staffer recalled, they organized “county by county, rallying educators, business people, parents, and the public education community to aggressively promote passage.”Footnote 42 Supported by a historic one-cent sales tax increase, it was a legislative package Riley and others, including the RAND Corporation, viewed as the “most significant of education reform efforts in the nation.”Footnote 43
The education reform led by Richard Riley illuminates the shared neoliberal underpinnings that guided the evolution of school choice in the 1970s and 1980s. Riley reformed education in South Carolina on the premise that “one of the most effective ways of increasing support for education measures is to entice the business community into a partnership with educators.”Footnote 44 He elaborated on the premise of his education agenda in 1984, noting that “the business community understands that good schools support economic development.”Footnote 45 As a business-minded governor, Riley closely linked education reform to the larger economy and privileged policy reform and discourse. One function of the economic focus was that it allowed him and other legislators to discursively and politically move beyond divisive conversations around race or desegregation mandates. In tacitly accepting desegregated schools, Richard Riley and the governors of the New South emphasized education reform steeped in neoliberal rationale and corporate-style reform that privileged the rights of the individual and unequivocally linked schools to an amorphous economic market.
Riley was not alone. SREB published on the need to align education and educational needs, disseminating research and policy briefs steeped in market-based discourse. It noted in The Need for Quality that the “region aspires to a leading economic role in the nation [and] there is unprecedented need and opportunity to improve the quality of education.”Footnote 46 Governor Bill Clinton of Arkansas agreed with the regional approach, identifying what “many other leaders in the South have noted: that the key to economic growth is a strong education system.”Footnote 47 Lamar Alexander in Tennessee applied the principle in his legislative efforts and grounded legislation in the economic rhetoric of attracting and retaining business as well.Footnote 48
By focusing on the economy, Riley and the New South governors built on Cold War-era investment in the economic infrastructure that created pockets of private-public partnership, which prompted support for neoliberal education reform. The South was distinguished by these Cold War investments, which shaped a defense industry in the region. Consequently, it was the only region in which more people worked in defense industries than other traditional avenues, such as textiles, that had long dominated economic growth in the former Confederacy. Between 1950 and 1970, 90 percent of industrial growth that occurred in the South resulted from federal economic stimulus funding that invested primarily in the military-industrial complex.Footnote 49 In Riley’s home state of South Carolina, historian Kari Frederickson noted that locales “privileged modernization, innovation, efficiency, consumption, and civic involvement.”Footnote 50 Such communities jettisoned the politics of racist massive resistance, which was bad for business, and in the process facilitated an affinity between business, the economy, and education.
To facilitate growth beyond federal investments, Riley promoted the connection of education directly with the private business sector, laying foundations for a public-private partnership that evolved as a critical part of the neoliberal foundations of school reform in the 1980s and beyond. Riley laid bare the role of business and the private sector in his signature legislation, noting “the assistance of the private sector is indispensable.”Footnote 51 Riley pushed further, urging educators and school administrators to “embrace business concepts: productivity, efficiency, cost benefits, incentive pay programs.”Footnote 52 His contemporary in Tennessee, Lamar Alexander, embraced market-based principles as well, quipping: “Better schools mean better jobs for Tennesseans.”Footnote 53 To further help facilitate partnerships, South Carolina legislation created a steering committee comprised of business representatives that oversaw the state’s education policy.Footnote 54 Similarly, in Tennessee, Lamar Alexander courted investors like George Keller, vice president of Barton-Gillet Company, who based his company in Tennessee. As a popular education writer and consultant, Keller provided a platform for these ideas that complemented the recommendations of southern governors. He called for “new variety and experimentation” in education—a key premise of school choice—and connected the regional education system to economic growth.Footnote 55
Market-based education reform coincided with other economic policies across the South, including stimulating economic growth through right-to-work legislation. By blocking collective bargaining and strongly discouraging unionization, this legislation fostered anti-union sentiment. By the year of the Brown decision in 1954, every southern state except Louisiana had enacted right-to-work legislation. As the region’s leaders noted in 1959 at the annual meeting of the Southern Governors Conference, a regional offshoot of the NGA, right-to-work legislation was “vital to industrial development.”Footnote 56 Southern governors and legislators expanded upon right-to-work policies in Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina to prohibit teachers from entering into collective bargaining agreements and stymied their organizing efforts even as teacher unions grew dramatically in the North.Footnote 57 In the 1980s, when southern governors began presenting reforms unpopular with teachers, such as merit pay, extant right-to-work legislation undercut educators’ ability to resist these reform initiatives.
Richard Riley passionately attempting but struggling to connect with students in Columbia, SC. Riley’s neoliberal education reform resonated with other New South governors, which helped establish the foundation for federal bipartisan school choice policy when he later served as the secretary of education. Bill Henry, Richard Wilson Riley, March 1980, courtesy Furman University Historical Images, Greenville, SC.
Linking educational reform to the economy forged accountability measures in schools that manifested a belief in neoliberal reform. As Richard Riley baldly put it, “Good business practices are good for schools.”Footnote 58 To that end, he aimed to “provide valid and reliable assessment of student performance” not just to address student “deficiencies,” which carried racialized connotations, but to guide reform overall as part of a comprehensive education reform bill.Footnote 59 The nation was already concerned about student achievement after the release of the damning federal report A Nation at Risk in 1983. But as Jack Schneider and Scott Baker have noted, the South was particularly primed: Since the early 1970s, it had been home to the majority of states that embraced accountability measures such as minimum testing standards.Footnote 60 Assessments and testing had remained popular across the nation over that period, reflecting a fiscal conservatism in that the measures mandated accountability in return for increases in school revenue. In South Carolina and across the South, such revenue increases were achieved through the passage of state measures based on historic one-cent sales tax increases. Legislators ultimately enacted a testing regime that would define accountability measures for the next two decades.Footnote 61
The accountability plans celebrated across the South and the country contained controversial policy planks such as teacher competency exams and the linking of merit pay and promotion to standardized test scores. Bill Clinton introduced the Arkansas Educational Skills Assessment Test as a way to measure basic skills and hold the profession “accountable” for (limited) increased pay.Footnote 62 Reubin Askew signed into law the Florida Accountability Act, which mandated competency testing for teacher certification, and annual testing for students in the third, fifth, eight and eleventh grade, as well as mandating standardized graduation tests for high school students.Footnote 63 Lamar Alexander’s “Better Schools” program included standardized testing for students and focused on a professional “ladder” system for teachers based on incentive pay and testing. SREB also facilitated the use of data derived from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or the “nation’s report card,” to development data for statewide use across the South.Footnote 64
Although assessment was purported to be grounded in objective standards, it was an avenue that perpetuated racial inequity. As these governors accepted the reality of desegregated public schools, accountability and market-driven reform, in their view, had transcended race. Essential components of a racially discriminatory system, however, remained intact. New teacher certification mandates alone had a profoundly disparate impact on Black teachers. In the decade following the Brown decision, an estimated thirty-eight thousand Black teachers had lost their jobs in the seventeen southern and border states, and by 1972, at the start of educational reform in the New South, one survey concluded that almost forty thousand African American teachers were unemployed.Footnote 65 One report estimated that between 1984 and 1989, an additional 21,515 Black teacher candidates and teachers were eliminated from the profession due to new requirements regarding teaching certification and college of education admissions.Footnote 66 Teacher assessments in North Carolina eliminated 31 percent of Black applicants, compared with only 1 percent of White applicants.Footnote 67 In Arkansas, Clinton was forced to respond to criticism about the fact that the majority of teachers who failed the competency exams were Black teachers. Speaking on behalf of the New South, he still adhered to an economic rationale. “The bottom line,” Clinton emphasized, is that a “teacher must be competent in reading, writing and basic math in order to be effective.”Footnote 68
The “race-neutral” criteria and bottom-line economic rationale of accountability clearly produced racialized and disparate impacts for Black teachers, other teachers of color, and the historically disenfranchised communities they served. The criteria and the rationale maintained unresolved tensions and systemic racism that were masked by an evolving notion of school choice. They also undermined the notion of a public school system for the public good with a testing regime and narrative of failure that fostered a spirit of school choice.
Lamar Alexander and the Rebirth of School Choice
Lamar Alexander was the first of the New South governors to publicly endorse school choice. He shared the same passion for comprehensive education reform as his contemporaries, which he made evident when he championed the cause on the gubernatorial campaign trail in 1979. He orchestrated a historic 1,000-mile walk across the state as part of his campaign, a trek he often referred to after his election. “My 1,000-mile walk, my visits to sixty-three schools, and overnight visits with families of teachers,” he noted, “sharpened my sensitivity to the problems and opportunities of education in this state.”Footnote 69 Alexander sustained the momentum and retained an intimate connection to education reform, working closely with the State Board of Education, the board of trustees at the University of Tennessee, and the Tennessee Higher Education Commission.Footnote 70 In time he developed a reputation “as a governor with a real dedication to education,” earned a senatorial nomination to chair the Education Commission of the States, and, eventually, served as the US secretary of education.Footnote 71
Alexander’s connection to education was rooted in nostalgia for segregated schools of a bygone era. “I am a graduate of Tennessee public schools,” he noted. “Both my parents have been teachers in those school systems.”Footnote 72 During the desegregation process, however, he also made the choice to withdraw his own children from that system and enroll them in private schools, explaining that he wanted to avoid “the possibility that our children might attend four or five different elementary schools during their first eight grades because of forced school busing there.”Footnote 73 In using the term ‘forced’ busing and describing the remedy as ‘coercive’ and antithetical to the ‘American way,’ Alexander undercut the utility of busing as a means to help achieve desegregation.”Footnote 74 He embraced more “moderate” forms of resistance to busing, including what historian Ansley Erickson observed in Nashville, principally “property rights-based, purportedly color-blind conservatism.”Footnote 75 Alexander participated in this form of moderate resistance by removing his children from public schools and placing them in private schools.Footnote 76 It was part of a race-averse logic that underpinned school reform in the South after desegregation and, during Alexander’ tenures as governor and secretary of education, school choice.
Alexander exemplifies how choice took hold across the South, moving beyond personal connections to a rapidly desegregating school system and forging new connections to a regional reform movement. As the governor of Tennessee, Alexander embraced the same comprehensive education reform initiatives as his contemporaries. These policies included accountability measures that were ideologically grounded in individualism and economic principles, which ultimately facilitated school choice by the 1980s and 1990s. Corporate influence couched in neoliberal values of individualism, economic productivity, and public-private partnerships influenced a rise in accountability measures. Alexander and others rejected the racist “freedom of choice” plans of the immediate post-Brown era, but, like many of constituents, he grew weary of federal desegregation mandates, including, in Alexander’s case, “forced busing.”Footnote 77 Instead, Alexander and others drew from market-based reform and a lexicon of “choices” found within the educational reforms they passed.
As Alexander moved toward articulating and accepting school choice, he drew from public schooling options that already existed across Tennessee. School district officials were experimenting with options to implement mandated desegregation, including alternative schools to encourage “voluntary” desegregation—a remedy that courts accepted as an alternative to busing plans that Alexander personally contested. These legal options provided a choice for families to attend a school—often a magnet school—with a specialized curriculum that concomitantly maintained a desegregated student population. The Emergency School Aid Act in 1972 codified such options or choices like this into federal legislation. The act sought to “encourage the voluntary reduction, elimination, or prevention of minority-group isolation” to support the efforts of those who sought desegregation, but to assuage those who, like Alexander, opposed “forced” busing.Footnote 78 Alexander’s “Better Schools Program,” for instance, called for the creation of exemplary schools within districts by providing select schools with greater authority to make certain administrative changes.Footnote 79 In theory, such schools would be freed from bureaucratic processes that hindered positive change, which would then improve results and attract other families to enroll. Beginning in 1986, the city of Memphis ran an “optional school” program, the result of extended school desegregation litigation, which consisted of creating stand-alone magnet schools that focused on college preparatory courses or specific trades.Footnote 80 These choices or options for carrying out federal mandates were increasingly woven into the southern educational landscape.
By the start of the second term of his administration in 1984, Lamar Alexander earned the distinction of being the first of the New South governors to publicly advocate for school choice. This included advocating for vouchers, making him also the first of the southern governors to support vouchers since the Supreme Court struck them down in 1968. As he outlined:
Not only must you go to school, that’s coercive, you must go to a certain school, sit in an assigned classroom and take prescribed subjects from an assigned teacher. And sometimes forced crosstown busing comes on top of that. I believe we should try public school vouchers. I’m not talking more private schools. I’m talking about giving public school parents an opportunity in the spring, as much choice is possible, for the schools their children may go to. That is the American way.Footnote 81
Alexander notably differentiated the use of vouchers and choice that he advocated from previous models of the 1950s and 1960s, which directly benefited private schools. For the record, Alexander emphasized choice for public schools. He retained a support for public education and distanced himself from choice as a means to increase enrollment in private schools. He noted: “I believe we should try public school vouchers [and giving] as much choice as possible [emphasis added].”Footnote 82
Months after giving that address in Washington, and looking at the 1986 elections, Alexander more passionately promoted choice and explicated its link to the market. He urged legislators to consider choice by appealing to patriotism, drawing from market logic, and linking choice to decision-making at the local level: “Why not let parents choose the public schools their children attend?” he asked.Footnote 83
Maybe the reason no one wants to attend a school is because it is a lousy school. How fair is it to make any child go to that school? The honest thing to do is to close the school or re-organize it until it can attract a crowd. That uses a marketplace to keep local control of schools… . What can you think of more American than choice?Footnote 84
Grounded in localism, draped in market-based language, and devoid of concerns about race, school choice lent itself well to governors like Alexander who eagerly embraced corporate partnership to strengthen their states’ economies as they simultaneously sought to move away from the “coercive” nature of public schools and the threat that federal mandates posed.
Lamar Alexander also elucidates how southern governors positioned themselves to become national leaders in educational reform. Alexander chaired the NGA, an organization that historically functioned like a social organization but increasingly focused on policy issues of shared concern. Alexander maneuvered within the NGA and made education a top priority in 1985, the first time in the organization’s nearly eighty-year history that school reform received sustained attention.Footnote 85 He charged subcommittees with investigating reform options and reporting policy recommendations. In the process he helped shift the NGA to command more national influence and a presence in Washington, DC. The culminating report, Time for Results: The Governors’ 1991 Report on Education (in fact published in 1986), was influential in putting forth policies of accountability and standardized testing that would shape education reform for the next two decades. Alexander famously quipped that “The governors are ready for some old-fashioned horse-trading. We’ll regulate less, if schools and school districts will produce better results.”Footnote 86 The report galvanized a national agenda around education and established the rationale for accountability measures that would follow.
The bipartisan NGA brought school choice into focus, and it also illuminates how the nation’s governors began to embrace choice as part of their larger reform movement. Led by Alexander, the NGA recommended more schooling options in their report on education, arguing that “parents should have more choice in the public schools their children attend [emphasis in original].”Footnote 87 They created a “Task Force on Parent Involvement and Choice,” which discussed “consumer sovereignty” as the foundation for “true choice among public schools” that will “unlock the values of competition in the educational marketplace.”Footnote 88 With New South governors reshaping public education reform on the basis of popular race-averse market logic and a swelling support for accountability measures, school choice became an increasingly viable option at the federal level.
New South education reform achieved new heights, and school choice received more visible endorsements, when President George H. W. Bush appointed Lamar Alexander as the secretary of education in 1988. Building upon national momentum on education reform, Bush identified school choice as a critical area of reform to help schools that needed it the most. He connected school choice with accountability and a desire for “excellence”:
We can encourage educational excellence by encouraging parental choice. The concept of choice draws its fundamental strength from the principle at the very heart of the democratic idea… . It’s time parents were free to choose the schools that their children attend. This approach will create the competitive climate that stimulates excellence in our private and parochial schools as well.Footnote 89
With Alexander as the secretary of education, choice and the ideologies that underpinned it gained a foothold at the federal level, enabling sustained growth across the nation.Footnote 90
Bill Clinton and Institutionalizing School Choice at the Federal Level
As a former New South governor serving as president, Bill Clinton exemplifies how southern education reform influenced school choice as federal policy. He shared the same passion for public school reform as his contemporaries William Winter, Richard Riley, and Lamar Alexander. As The New York Times noted, Clinton and his partner Hillary “embraced education as a personal project.”Footnote 91 Clinton, a Rhodes scholar who attended public schools, passed comprehensive legislation in Arkansas that matched those passed across the New South. Embracing the principles of accountability, he raised teacher pay, expanded access to kindergarten, and mandated more courses in the sciences.Footnote 92
As governor of Arkansas Clinton had learned the strategic and national importance of education as a policy issue, much like his New South contemporaries. In 1989, Clinton attended a pivotal meeting of the nation’s governors on the University of Virginia campus in Charlottesville. A political culmination of sorts for New South education governors and the NGA, the Charlottesville Education Summit was the single largest meeting of governors organized for the purpose of discussing education reform ever. Summoned by President George H. W. Bush, who technically spoke for the New South as a former representative of Texas, the nation’s governors were called to reinvigorate education reform to match Jefferson’s historic vision for schooling to strengthen the Republic.Footnote 93 The meeting reflected a southern-led, bipartisan commitment to education reform to reaffirm a connection between education and the economy. As then Governor Bill Clinton noted, “This is the first time in the history of this country that we ever thought enough of education and ever understood its significance to our economic future.”Footnote 94 It was a theme he amplified during his presidential campaign, stating often, “Let me make this clear: Education is economic development.”Footnote 95
Benefiting from the New South coalition’s success in making education a popular issue, Clinton continued to build his southern network to facilitate reform. He appointed former governor of South Carolina Richard Riley to serve as the secretary of education. Riley was the second New South governor to serve in that position since the creation of the Department of Education a little more than a decade earlier, signed into law by President Jimmy Carter.Footnote 96 Mark Musick, president of SREB, celebrated the collaboration. “In Riley and Clinton,” Musick noted, “you have two guys who have been working this territory for years.”Footnote 97 With Riley serving as the secretary of education, federal education reform in the 1990s remained grounded in market ideology, evolved to draw from public-private partnerships, and enshrined values of competition and individualism.Footnote 98
Buoyed by a southern network and sharing commitments to accountability measures and market-driven reform with his contemporaries across the aisle, Clinton federalized support for school choice by expanding the use of charter schools, publicly funded but privately managed schools that he and other supporters maintained were public schools.Footnote 99 Once elected president, Clinton framed the use of charter schools as a solution providing marketable “options.” One policy document laid bare the market principles behind Clinton’s charter initiative, arguing that “charter schools expand choice in education for families, providing options for people dissatisfied with public schools.”Footnote 100 Clinton perpetuated the logic of his New South contemporaries’ policies, particularly their desire to hold schools accountable. The provision of alternatives for students in failing public schools was framed as giving families options in the education market, a hallmark of neoliberal reform. Through public charter schools, Clinton maintained a commitment to public education that he shared with Lamar Alexander, who consistently asserted the need for public schools, not just vouchers for private schools. By utilizing seed funding from venture capital to federally support charter schools, Clinton echoed Richard Riley’s call for public-private partnerships to improve public schools as well.Footnote 101
Clinton represented a new highpoint for this cohort of governors. Firmly grounded in a New South context of education reform, he established a federal infrastructure for school choice through charter schools. Toward this end and with bipartisan support, Clinton signed into law the reauthorization of and amendments to the Elementary and Secondary School Act in 1994 that established the federal Public Charter School Program.Footnote 102 It was the beginning of federal support for school choice, establishing it as a viable mechanism of school reform.
A trip Clinton made to Chicago at the start of his term illuminates how he elevated school choice discourse and ensured its firm position on a national level. Speaking to Mayor Richard Daley in Chicago in January 1997, Clinton congratulated the Chicago school board on its selection of a set of charter schools that were the first not just in the city but in the entire nation, which the school board carried out as part of its larger urban reform measures.Footnote 103 Chicago represented an evolution of school choice because it provided a much larger stage to promote the movement—and it did so in the North, not the New South. Clinton’s push for charters as a way to improve schools in the city of Chicago was also significant given that it was planned in concert with Mayor Daley, who aggressively embraced corporate reform and charter schools to hold public schools accountable. Chicago was the largest city to consider charters not just as a teacher-led experiment, as seen in Minneapolis, but as a means to turn around an entire urban school district by replacing what the school board saw as failing and irreparable public schools.Footnote 104 For Clinton, charters provided a “proven mechanism for turning failing schools into successful ones.”Footnote 105 The idea also inspired Arne Duncan, an education reformer who worked closely with Daley in Chicago and later served as secretary of education under President Obama. Although little research supported the claim, the idea of using school choice as a mechanism to turn around failing schools through charters inspired a nationwide succession of gubernatorial platforms and federal legislation.
During his second term, Clinton built on his charter school initiative and larger visions for charters, which constituted just a small part of the reauthorized Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Indeed Clinton announced in Chicago his intentions of “expanding public school choice and creating 3,000 charter schools.”Footnote 106 Soon after that, Clinton signed into law the Charter School Expansion Act of 1998, which extended financial and legal support for charters and school choice at the state and federal level.Footnote 107 Clinton’s signature school choice act stipulated that funds should be used for “promoting public magnet schools, public ‘charter schools,’ and other mechanisms for increasing choice among public schools.” It established a budget for charter schools of $4.5 million and drew from venture capital to help fund it.Footnote 108 Clinton made headway on his goal, and by his last year in office, the federal government supported over 1,700 new charter schools.Footnote 109
Conclusion
Southern governors deftly maneuvered to redefine education as a top legislative priority, and in the process they significantly influenced school choice policy in the 1980s and 1990s. Southern governors laid a foundation for school choice through their struggles to restore what they saw as public school systems struggling after desegregation. With the election of Bill Clinton and burgeoning federal support for school choice in the 1990s, governors across the nation continued to go about their work of reforming education by providing more schooling options for families and by placing pressure on school administrators to improve schools through competition and other accountability measures. Governors employed the coalition-building strategies cultivated in the New South to make education reform a serious issue at home that garnered them political clout. Enjoying support in their home states for the implementation of choice initiatives, their efforts gained traction through the scope and optimal timing of Clinton’s school choice proposals.
Indicative of a national movement, school choice and charter proposals grew in popularity by the 1990s. They resonated widely across the aisle and with representatives outside the New South, including NGA leaders such as Rudy Perpich (D.-MN), who ushered in the nation’s first charter school in Minneapolis in 1991; Richard Lamm (D.-CO), who chaired the NGA subcommittee on school choice under Lamar Alexander’s leadership; and Tommy Thompson (R.-WI), a staunch voucher champion in the early 1990s. School choice governors cultivated additional support on Capitol Hill, including Representatives David Obey (D.-WI), Frank Riggs (R.-CA), Tim Roemer (D.-IN), and John Porter (R.-IL), as well as Senators Joe Lieberman (D.-CT) and Dan Coats (R-IN).Footnote 110 Charter proposals also included initial support from the largest teacher unions, the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers.Footnote 111 The bipartisan, national coalition demonstrated the extent to which school choice reverberated outside the New South and moved the entire nation to embrace concepts like accountability, competition between schools, and the rights of individuals to choose which school to attend. It also demonstrated a repurposed coalition that, through the NGA and federal partnerships, was fused in the 1990s as a result of shared values in prioritizing market-based education reform.
This level of coalition-building in the 1990s, and the fact that school choice options were made available at an optimal time, moved the nation past original conceptions of school choice born from massive resistance to desegregation in the 1950s and’ 60s. Under Clinton and successive administrations—and with the support of governors—the enthusiasm about school choice translated into not just a national movement for charter schools, but a general and shared belief in the promise of market-based education reform grounded in competition, accountability, and individualism. The idea that competition spurred school improvement drove the bipartisan school choice “solutions” of Clinton’s successors, notably President George W. Bush, who embraced charters to turn around failing schools and hold school districts accountable in his signature education legislation, the No Child Left Behind Act (2001), which required significant state and gubernatorial investment. With state-level mechanisms already in place through SREB and NGA, together with a federal commitment to charters and choice under Clinton-era education legislation, governors could implement choice and other market-based school reforms with efficiency and resounding effect.Footnote 112
At the same time, governors employed the strategies of coalition-building to implement choice while maintaining power and privilege for White voters at the expense of communities of color. Their reform agendas thus encapsulate how choice reflected the intersections of race and education reform by the 1990s. As a “progressive” president, Clinton may have promised or tacitly supported racial equity but ultimately, like the New South reform initiatives, his national initiatives experienced a similar level of dysfunction and produced negative impacts. To be sure, charter schools inspired reformers grounded in historic struggles for civil rights and equality in education. Some reformers viewed charters as a solution to the structural racism and inequity that underpinned the entire school system. For instance, reformers such as Carol Lee, Howard Fuller, and Wyatt Tee Walker connected charters to the principles of a longer Black freedom struggle. But the Supreme Court under the Clinton administration dismantled desegregation plans and rolled back initiatives born from that movement. In the 1991 decision Board of Education of Oklahoma City Public School v. Dowell, the court ruled that the Oklahoma City school district could terminate existing desegregation plans after determining it had achieved a “unitary” or desegregated status. Similarly, in Freeman v. Pitts (1992) and Missouri v. Jenkins (1995), the court terminated other desegregation mandates, officially signaling the end of court-ordered desegregation attempts from the previous civil rights generation.Footnote 113 Stripped of judicial support, community-centered charter advocates were left alone to enforce basic desegregation mandates grounded in a historic freedom struggle, which ultimately signified a shift to race-averse measures to ensure equal access and resources. Left to a deracialized “education market” alone, corporate and market-based solutions like charters failed to address systemic issues of race, access, and resources, often to the detriment of poor and largely Black, Latine, or Indigenous communities.Footnote 114
A close look at the southern historical context of school choice since 1980 illuminates how southern governors played a distinct role in the evolution of school choice through building political networks of state leaders who prioritized education reform. Subsequent administrations benefited from this coalition, as exemplified in the NGA as governors helped implement legislation that included choice, such as the preference for charter schools in the NCLB-mandated efforts to turn around failing schools. The political paths of Clinton, Riley, Winter, and others illuminate a nuanced and regional history that provides deeper contextualization for and analysis of the school choice movement, in terms of their successors’ embrace of the movement as well as incipient resistance to it.
Jon Hale is a professor in the Department of Education Policy, Organization and Leadership at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He would like to thank HEQ reviewers and the Editorial Board for their time in reviewing this manuscript and offering patient, thorough, and insightful suggestions that improved this analysis. He would also like to thank Chris Getowicz and Callie Avondet of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign for their assistance in identifying sources, formatting, and revising this manuscript.
Disclosure statement
The author has reported no competing interests.
