in 1991, appealed to conservatives because of their autonomy and to moderate Democrats because they could help block the drive for vouchers, keeping funds in the public sector.53 They had the advantages of little additional cost and none of the threat to the middle-class status quo that desegregation efforts posed, although the press often treated them as successful attacks on the status quo.54 During the three Bush and two Clinton terms, as noted above, the priority in funding and advocacy shifted from magnets to charter schools, with funding for the former frozen during much of the George W. Bush administration. This continued under the Obama administration, in spite of the popularity of magnet schools and significant research showing that they resulted in gains on test scores even after controlling for the differences between their students and similar ones in regular public schools. In contrast, a series of major studies of charter schools conducted by the federal government, the Hoover Institute at Stanford, and other researchers showed no such advantage for charters, as discussed in chapters 6 and 7.55
Minnesota wrote charter schools into law in 1991, which, by coincidence, was the same year the Supreme Court authorized the termination of all kinds of school desegregation plans and segregation began to climb steadily across the country.56 The first U.S. charter school opened in St. Paul, in 1992. The idea rapidly spread, and by the 2009-10 school year there were more than five thousand charter schools in the United States.57
The charter movement gained great popularity both because its basic assumptions were in tune with the times and because it avoided much of the political conflict produced by a long and futile fight over vouchers. Conservatives wanted choices outside the regular public schools and liberals wanted to protect the separation of church and state and avoid subsidizing private schools, four-fifths of which were religious. Charters were a new form of nonsectarian autonomous public school outside the established public school system, managed by nonprofit or for-profit groups. At first they represented a modest movement that strongly appealed to business executives and their foundations, which had started playing a large role in education policy, but nonetheless appeared to pose little threat to the regular system. One reason why this experiment seemed marginal was that research, even from conservative institutions such as the Bush administration's Department of Education and the Hoover Institution at Stanford, found no evidence of significant educational benefits in charters. In a period when conservatives placed enormous pressure on schools through test-driven accountability measures including No Child Left Behind and many state reforms, the failure to show benefits should have mattered greatly. NCLB produced a vast amount of data showing the poor performance of segregated impoverished schools, and many charters fell directly into that category and had similar outcomes.
As the charter movement grew, however, the owners and operators of these schools emerged as a highly organized and effective political lobby. Some talented and charismatic young educators had been attracted to the movement, and their schools were widely publicized. The charter drive received extensive philanthropic support, and the lobby was influential in a number of states and highly successful in Washington, most spectacularly in the Obama administration, some of whose top staff in the Department of Education were drawn from this movement. They wrote pro-charter priorities into the heart of the new policies for both NCLB accountability and the massive stimulus package designed to help pull the country out of the Great Recession. With the federal government in control of a vast amount of emergency money and school systems in desperate need of funds, the conditions were ideal for federal leverage to expand the charter movement. Most states rapidly yielded to the very strong incentives to lift state limits on charter school creation.58
Other factors favored charters. They often cost less than regular public schools and left completely untouched the well-regarded regular public schools of the middle and upper classes in the more affluent suburbs. They promised big successes without disturbing anyone but the vilified old bureaucracies and rigid unions, whose power had declined greatly by the mid-1990s as suburbia's demographic and political domination had increased. With some clearly excellent schools, limited accountability, and effective political mobilization, it did not matter much that the charter movement's educational outcomes were largely unimpressive.
Vouchers
Probably no major choice-based reform proposal in recent American history has generated a more passionate debate with fewer real consequences than the movement for school vouchers. It received a substantial impetus from a number of sources beginning in the 1960s. The federal War on Poverty sponsored an early experiment in a California district. One of the nation's most prominent sociologists, James Coleman, became a strong advocate for private schools, as did some other scholars.59 The California law professors John Coons and Stephen Sugarman championed an expansive vision of vouchers with civil rights protections—an idea that the pure market proponents in the conservative movement did not adopt.60 The Catholic hierarchy in the United States saw vouchers as an issue of basic fairness with regard to their system, which included schools in poor urban communities. They argued that millions of Catholics were taxed for a public system they did not use. This position, supported by many urban Democrats from Catholic areas in Congress, had destroyed President John F. Kennedy's effort to direct federal aid to education.61 The business community also supported vouchers (for instance, a business leader in Indianapolis funded a private voucher program), and they became a major goal of the Republican Party, which has controlled the White House for five terms since 1980. After more than thirty years of active advocacy, many political battles, and the famous Supreme Court victory in Zelman (discussed below), however, only a tiny fraction of 1 percent of U.S. students use vouchers, and half of the areas where they were adopted had discontinued the policies by 2010. Their failure has revealed the limits of the choice movement.
Vouchers have spurred intense discussion since the 1980s, including the claim that opening up private schools, most of which are religious, to poor minority children would create more-integrated and better schooling opportunities. This was a successful argument in persuading the Supreme Court to permit vouchers to be used for religious schools in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris.62 The decision allowed public subsidies to go to Cleveland-area religious schools willing to take transfer students from the city's public schools.
Unlike charter schools, vouchers have been a bitterly partisan issue. The support of five GOP presidents beginning with Richard Nixon, the national GOP, and many religious educators has had little impact. George W. Bush offered a typical statement of conservative support during his presidential campaign: “Let poor people choose their schools, like rich people do. Nowhere in the Constitution does it say that parents should not be able to choose where to send their children to school. Nowhere does it say that only people who can afford it should be able to choose to send their children to schools with quality academics and sound discipline, but poor people should not. We must say, clearly and emphatically, that the people who need help should not merely be passive recipients of a handout, but should have the freedom to choose where they receive services.”63 But vouchers have been defeated because of public opposition, the strength of public school and teacher organizations, and the lack of persuasive evidence that they would make a substantial difference for poor children or that there would be a good supply of high-quality spaces available at a reasonable cost if they were authorized. Since four-fifths of private schools are religious, voucher programs face serious legal barriers in the laws, including constitutions, of dozens of states that prohibit the use of public funds for sectarian institutions. (The Zelman decision made vouchers possible if states wanted them but did not overturn prohibitions against them in state law.)
When the conservatives were in power in the George W. Bush era, they persuaded Congress to adopt vouchers both in Washington DC, where Congress is often tempted to play city council and school board, and as part of the massive legislation to rebuild New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. The exodus of families caused by the historic hurricane virtually wiped out the flooded city's public school system and gave voucher supporters in the Louisiana state government and the Bush administration a chance to work with billions of federal rebuilding dollars, as chapter 8 discusses.
Advocates of vouchers
