Freedom of Choice in Education: the Origins of a Slogan

American Federation of Lecturers chief Randi Weingarten is presently taking warmth for her makes an attempt to revive an outdated smear in opposition to faculty vouchers. In a latest interview, the instructor’s union boss claimed that pro-voucher slogans about “alternative” had been actually coded canine whistles from the segregationist period.

Weingarten has an extended historical past of falsely claiming that vouchers originated as a part of the backlash in opposition to the 1954 desegregation ruling of Brown v. Board of Schooling. In actuality, the idea of faculty alternative traces again centuries prior. It may be discovered within the works of classical liberal philosophers Adam Smith, Thomas Paine, and John Stuart Mill, all of whom had been additionally outspoken antislavery males. As a matter of training coverage, the primary voucher applications got here to the USA within the late 19^th century, when cities in rural New England arrange a town-based tuitioning system that supplied college students a alternative in public education.

Voucher opponents have nonetheless pushed the road that the concept grew out of the segregationist backlash to Brown v. Board within the Fifties south. Along with its anachronism, this declare is at odds with historic proof. In Virginia, which adopted a voucher-like tuition grant system in 1959, a number of segregationist hardliners mounted a marketing campaign in opposition to this system. In accordance with their brazenly racist arguments, vouchers would open the door to the “negro engulfment” of previously all-white public colleges by giving African-American college students the power to switch colleges. This apply undermined among the fundamental segregationist techniques for slowing the implementation of Brown: using enrollment caps, geographic zoning, and different obstacles to impede the enrollment of black college students.

Weingarten’s personal union forebears had direct culpability in these racist actions. The Virginia Schooling Affiliation, the state’s largest academics’ union, linked arms with segregationist lawyer John S. Battle, Jr. to assault the tutoring grants. In 1961, the union launched a lobbying marketing campaign to limit their use after a Richmond newspaper reported that many dad and mom had been utilizing the grants to maneuver their kids out of segregated colleges and into built-in establishments.

On this case, Weingarten’s newest argument carries the added twist of a brand new historic falsehood.

In January of 1959 that yr, the Virginia meeting was thrown into chaos after a pair of courtroom rulings struck down the segregationist “Large Resistance” program of US Senator Harry Flood Byrd and his political machine. Seizing the chance to outflank Byrd, an uncommon coalition of average segregationist “cushioners” and anti-segregationists, the latter largely from the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington D.C., crafted a race-neutral tuition grant program as a part of a alternative for “Large Resistance.” Supporters dubbed the tutoring grant system a “freedom of alternative” program, which is the idea of Weingarten’s declare about language and the coding thereof.

As we dig deeper into the proof although, an added complication emerges. The schooling grant provision originated on a subcommittee of the specially-convened Perrow Fee on Schooling, which was tasked with a legislative response to the courtroom rulings. On that subcommittee sat Sen. John A.Ok. Donovan, an anti-segregationist from Northern Virginia. Throughout the Large Resistance period, Donovan offered one of many solely constant votes in opposition to the Byrd machine. He made a reputation for himself after Brown v. Board by denouncing legislative harassment of the NAACP by the Byrd machine.

Senator Donovan was additionally a voucher supporter with shut ties to the Catholic voucher advocacy group, Residents for Instructional Freedom (CEF). Information from the legislative proceedings point out that Donovan was one of many fundamental drafters of the tutoring grant invoice’s language

This historic element issues, as a result of in 1961 Donovan recounted these occasions in a letter to Father Virgil Blum, a priest at Marquette College who directed CEF’s nationwide voucher advocacy efforts. Blum himself was an outspoken anti-segregationist, and inspired his group – with Donovan’s help – to file amicus briefs within the ongoing courtroom battles in opposition to Prince Edward County, Virginia, a “Large Resistance” holdout that shuttered its faculty system to forestall integration.

Of their 1961 correspondence, Blum famous that he had made use of the “freedom of alternative” slogan to advocate for vouchers. As Donovan quipped in return, “by the way, I’m in charge for Virginia’s faculty plan being titled ‘freedom of alternative.’” He recounted that he used this phrase in a press assertion because the invoice was being unveiled. Thereafter, “the Governor and the press known as it the ‘freedom of alternative plan.’”

Blum responded to Donovan, stating “I’m pleased that you just equipped the title ‘freedom of alternative’ to the Virginia faculty plan. If this time period ought to obtain a common acceptance all through the USA, it might serve to level up the elemental situation of the civil rights of oldsters within the alternative of a college for the training of their kids.” Blum had a cause of his personal to understand the slogan. Across the similar time because the occasions in Virginia, he printed a brief guide entitled Freedom of Alternative in Schooling, laying out the philosophical case for college vouchers.

As these particulars reveal, the language of “alternative” traces again to a voucher-supporting state senator and a voucher-supporting Catholic priest. By the way, that state senator offered a lonely voice in opposition to the exact same segregationist “Large Resistance” motion that Weingarten invokes to smear voucher advocates at present. And the identical Catholic priest denounced the segregationist alliances that Virginia’s academics union embraced.