The Complex History of School Choice

[rangerrebew]

The Complex History of School Choice
 

By Andrew J. Rotherham | Opinion Contributor
July 25, 2017, at 10:10 a.m.

Even by the standards of the teachers unions' "burn the village to save it" approach to maintaining political power, it was a remarkably cynical ploy: In a speech last week, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten called school vouchers the "only slightly more polite cousins of segregation." It wasn't an offhand remark, but rather a calculated escalation of the school choice fight and an appeal designed to address politics within her union.

Given the current climate on race in America, it was Trumpian in its naked political opportunism. It also wasn't entirely wrong in its history. Too many school choice supporters suffer from a Trumpian historical amnesia about one aspect of school voucher history.

https://www.usnews.com/opinion/knowledge-bank/articles/2017-07-25/the-history-of-school-choice-is-complicated

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For his part, Coons blamed Friedman for hampering greater acceptance of school vouchers. One day I was leaving breakfast with Coons heading across the San Francisco Bay to interview Friedman for a project I was working on and Coons cheerfully snarked, "Don't forget to tell him he set the cause of choice for the poor back decades." It wasn't an idle barb. Like many, Coons believed the association of school choice with Friedman's ideas more generally turned choice into a right-wing idea.

How about we blame the evil leftists who turned the brilliant Friedman into a bad thing?