In 1958, three years after the Brown v. Board of Education order to integrate American schools, the Texas Legislature debated a plan that would offer vouchers to parents who opposed the idea that their children would learn in diverse racial settings.
Josh Cowen
Echoing similar efforts throughout the South, the Texas bill left no ambiguity about the voucher’s purpose. “Such aid,” the legislation read, “should be given only upon affidavit that the child was being withdrawn from the public schools due to the parents’ dislike of integration.”
That voucher bill failed, and 67 years later — 70 years this month after the Brown decision itself — Texas still has yet to pass a voucher system. But I think about this piece of legislation every time I hear the claim, from Donald Trump on down, that vouchers and related school choice bills are “the civil rights issue of our time.”
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No. They are not.
In the early days of modern voucher systems that use taxpayer funds for private K-12 tuition — 1990 through roughly 2010 — vouchers were largely limited to students in a handful of urban settings such as Milwaukee, Cleveland, and Washington. Combined with firm albeit slowly lifting caps on income for participants, that meant that vouchers went disproportionately to children of color.
A handful of studies through 2002 showed those students realized some academic gains as a result. But over the past decade, as vouchers expanded into statewide systems in places such as Indiana, Louisiana, Ohio and again in Washington, those results became negative.
In Louisiana, the main culprit was that the best-run private schools didn’t take vouchers or the students who had vouchers at the time. Louisiana’s system pushed students of color largely into poorly-rated private schools, and the results showed. That’s why I’ve called vouchers the education equivalent of predatory lending: all promise, no results.
Today, as voucher systems grow in number and scope, the warning signs for children of color are changing into something else. With income caps lifting, and now 10 states and counting with “universal” vouchers for all children, the vast majority of new users are white and coming from wealthier communities. We’ve seen this pattern in new data from Ohio and North Carolina, as well as in Arizona.
Strong evidence suggests many of these students were already in private school before getting the voucher. And new data shows many private schools raise tuition once taxpayers begin picking up some of the tab.
Even when they do use vouchers, students of color are disproportionately likely to leave their private schools. These students are also the most likely to be struggling academically. So vouchers may provide a temporary coupon to change schools, but they are hardly a long-term solution to problems of racial inequality that persist across schools and communities.
Many of the same people pushing the claim that vouchers are a civil rights issue are also those who want to ban teaching about racial inequality in public schools. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who signed the nation’s largest voucher bill last year, has also said that slavery had some benefits for African Americans. In Arkansas, home to some of the most important moments in actual civil rights history, the same legislation that created vouchers in that state also put strict limits on the teaching of race in public schools — and removed African American history from the state’s list of approved AP courses.
When we look beyond claims and slogans about vouchers providing a new civil rights agenda, the results suggest entirely the opposite.
Saying something doesn’t make that something so.
Josh Cowen is a professor of education policy at Michigan State University, and author of the new book The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers (Harvard Education Press). He wrote this for InsideSources.com.
