Vouchers - The Right's Final Answer to Brown
The BLACK Commentator
May 27, 2004
Issue 92
Excerpts:
“The crusade for vouchers actually has its roots in an effort to continue segregation,” said Cynthia Tucker, editorial page editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, in a July 7, 2002 column. “By the time of Jimmy Carter's presidency, the parents of segregation academy students were campaigning for tax breaks for private school tuition. They formed the early core of what later became the voucher movement.” "....Racists always find a “freedom” to mask their hatreds. Segregationists in Virginia devised a “freedom of choice” policy in the mid-Fifties to allow white students to transfer out of schools slated for integration. When Prince Edward County whites finally exhausted their legal bag of tricks in 1959, they shut the public schools down and set up a foundation to support the education of whites.
In 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court cracked down on backdoor subsidies to segregated private schools in Mississippi. The court ruled, in Norwood v. Harrison, that “free textbooks, like tuition grants directed to students in private schools, are a form of tangible financial assistance benefiting the schools themselves, and the State's constitutional obligation requires it to avoid not only operating the old dual system of racially segregated schools but also providing tangible aid to schools that practice racial or other invidious discrimination.”
In their review of the racist roots of voucher politics, People for the American Way note that President Nixon toyed with the idea of federal aid to parochial schools – “parochiad” – in 1971. Four years later, the far-right Heritage Foundation made its first foray into vouchers, sponsoring a forum on the subject. But it was not until the Reaganites came to power in Washington that the Heritage Foundation proposed attaching vouchers to federal education legislation, in 1981. The problem was, vouchers were still firmly (and correctly) associated with die-hard segregationists. Memories of white “massive resistance” to integration remained fresh, especially among Blacks, who had never demanded vouchers – not even once in all of the tens of thousands of demonstrations over the previous three decades.
Former Reagan Education Secretary William Bennett understood what was missing from the voucher polistryitical hem: minorities. If visible elements of the Black and Latino community could be ensnared in what was then a lily-white scheme, then the Right’s dream of a universal vouchers system to subsidize general privatization of education, might become a practical political project. More urgently, Bennett and other rightwing strategists saw that vouchers had the potential to drive a wedge between Blacks and teachers unions, cracking the Democratic Party coalition. In 1988, Bennett urged the Catholic Church to “seek out the poor, the disadvantaged…and take them in, educate them, and then ask society for fair recompense for your efforts” – vouchers. The game was on.
The Heritage Foundation was soon joined in voucher agitation by the young, hyper-aggressive Bradley Foundation, of Milwaukee. Bradley and its allies steamrolled through the Wisconsin legislature a voucher program for Milwaukee’s schools, and spent millions of dollars to buy a Black constituency to support it. In 2000, the Bradley, Heritage and Walton Family Foundations unveiled their African American front group: the Black Alliance for Educational Options (BAEO), whose job is to put a Black face on a rich, white man’s creation.
http://www.blackcommentator.com/92/92_cover_vouchers.html
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