Choice, of Schools

Emergence and Evolution

Although increasingly popular as a reform since the 1970s, school choice is essential to the private purchase of educational services, and the explicit notion can be traced back at least to the writings of Adam Smith and Thomas Paine. School choice emerged as a serious force in the post–World War II era with Milton Friedman's essay proposing government funding, but nongovernment provision of education. While Friedman was writing as an economist, the idea was also embraced by many White southerners seeking to thwart courtordered desegregation of schools by creating “White flight” academies. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the idea was adopted by some progressives who believed that choice would allow for the integrative selection of schools based on interest rather than on race, residence, or more coercive measures, such as busing. This use of choice to support desegregation plans appeared in the growth of theme-based magnet schools, which were also seen as a way of keeping White families in urban public school systems. Publicly funded vouchers for private schools were first advanced as a serious reform proposal in the 1970s. Vouchers would have been a boon to parochial schools facing declining enrollment of Catholic families but were also criticized on grounds of separation of church and state and for their potential of exacerbating the abandonment of urban public schools by White and affluent families. Results of a government experiment in the Alum Rock district of San Jose, California, on the efficacy of vouchers were mixed. More recently, state legislatures have created publicly funded voucher programs in Milwaukee, Cleveland, and Florida aimed at disadvantaged children or children in failing schools, who may then attend private and religious schools. In Zelman v. Simmons-Harris (2002), the U.S. Supreme Court found such programs to be constitutional, since the primary intention was not thought to be religious and funding was channeled through parents, rather than directly to religious schools. Since the early 1990s, and with the repeated defeat of voucher referenda by voters, choice advocates have turned their attention to charter schools—publicly funded schools managed independently of the local education authority. While less discussed, homeschooling is even more popular, with the parents of up to 1.5 million children choosing to forgo other educational options in favor of instruction in the family.

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