The Roots of School Choice

The modern school choice movement began in 1990 with the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, led by Black superintendent and education reformer Howard Fuller. The program came about from decades of Black parents and activists pushing back against the segregated, under-resourced schools their children were forced to attend due to school zoning rules. To give these children the opportunity to have an excellent education, Milwaukee’s program took public funds to pay for private schooling.

“I’ve always seen school choice from a social justice framework as opposed to a free market framework,” Fuller said in a 2019 interview with Jon Hale, an education professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. 

As Hale wrote, however, “The Republican Party seized on the new voucher plan and pushed it through the state legislature. Ever since the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, when the Supreme Court declared school segregation unconstitutional, the Republican Party has increasingly aligned itself with school privatization efforts through vouchers and ‘freedom of choice’ plans.”

From his conversations with Fuller, he (Hale) came to understand the legendary education reformer “believes ‘mom and pop’ charter schools are more emblematic of the long history of the Black freedom struggle than schools proposed by national charter school networks, as these grassroots schools are more often driven by the demands of historically marginalized communities.” 

Read the full article at Word in Black...