In Praise of Vouchers

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Most current voucher programs target specific groups, particularly poor families. For instance, the best-known voucher plan is the Milwaukee program, open since 1990 to low-income households. Still, court challenges and bitter legislative fights have largely hindered the spread of vouchers.

Yet, in much of the controversy surrounding vouchers, a strong progressive narrative has been largely forgotten. It has been illuminated in a fascinating scholarly paper by Georgetown University law professor James Forman Jr., son of the famed civil-rights leader. In "The Secret History of School Choice: How Progressives Got There First," Forman argues that school choice has deep roots in the civil-rights movement and black nationalism.

Common Goal: Better Schools

He traces that theme back to the schools created by freed slaves for themselves and their children; then to the schools set up during the Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964; the Northern free schools of the late 1960s and 1970s; the community control movement of the late 1960s; and school vouchers designed by leading progressive educators during the Johnson Administration. Much of this history was in opposition to the Education Establishment. (Click here to read the paper.)

The most intriguing part of the paper deals with the vouchers designed during the Johnson Administration. As now, there was widespread dismay at how inner-city public schools failed to teach most black children "to read and write or to add and subtract competently," as pioneering liberal sociologist Christopher Jencks wrote in a New York Times Magazine article in 1968. "This is not the children's fault," he added. That same year, progressive educators Ted Sizer and Phillip Whitten railed that a "system of public schools which destroys rather than develops human potential now exists.…It does not deserve to survive."

These progressive thinkers may have had little if anything in common with Friedman's economics, but like him they wanted to improve educational equity. And they came to the same solution: vouchers. Jencks and colleagues designed a voucher system that included both public and private schools. The basic value of the voucher was around $7,000 (in today's dollars), but for the poorest families that sum doubled to some $14,000. That compares to the current $6,500 Milwaukee voucher and the $2,250 for the one offered in Cleveland.

Joint Opportunity

Politics killed off progressive vouchers. There was a brief-lived experiment with a modified version of the Jencks plan in a town in California, but it was eliminated early in the Nixon Administration. The program never gathered a committed liberal constituency, and conservatives were always stingier with money.

That dynamic could change, however. Today, there are well-organized conservative backers of vouchers that have achieved limited success. And there are plenty of liberals dismayed at the state of education in inner cities. Perhaps a coalition is possible, taking parallel routes to the same destination, with conservatives backing vouchers and liberals backing higher spending limits. Writes James Forman: "Because progressives have by and large focused on the evils of vouchers, insufficient thought has gone into whether a modern-day progressive vision of vouchers is possible. Instead of asking whether vouchers are good or bad, progressives might do well to consider that vouchers are neither and both—it all depends on how the plan is constructed."

Competition may be anathema to many local school boards and statewide teachers' unions. But business is fed up with the failings of America's elementary and secondary public school system. So are parents, especially in the nation's inner cities. It's time to give vouchers a bipartisan chance.

Farrell is contributing economics editor for BusinessWeek. You can also hear him on Minnesota Public Radio's nationally syndicated finance program, Sound Money, as well as on public radio's business program Marketplace. Follow his Sound Money column, only on BusinessWeek Online.