The Choice We Face

by John N. Hale

  When Bush appointed Lamar Alexander as his secretary of education, he solidified choice as an integral part of education reform discourse. Together they proposed funding both public and private school choice legislation, and they lobbied behind the scenes for federally supported choice legislation. Though their efforts never crystallized in any formal legislation, the Bush administration facilitated the rise of choice at the state level.45 Choice was no longer framed as a way to preserve Whites-only schools. Choice, as spelled out by George H. W. Bush, was race-neutral. It benefited everyone, regardless of class or race, and it could hold traditional public schools more accountable.

  Magnet schools—public schools with specialized curricula focusing on the likes of performing arts, languages, International Baccalaureate, or STEM, and intended to attract White students for the purposes of desegregation—continued under Bush’s term in office. Governor Tommy Thompson of Wisconsin signed into law the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program—the progenitor to the state’s controversial religious school voucher program that offered publicly funded vouchers to be used for private school tuition.46 Legislators in Minnesota passed the country’s first charter school law into existence in 1991 and established the first charter school—a publicly funded but privately run school—in St. Paul the following year.47 As states began adopting school choice plans for the first time since the “freedom of choice” of the 1960s, the federal government issued assurances. Governors like Lamar Alexander, who had advocated for choice since the 1980s, were now free to establish a choice agenda in their home states. Reinforcing a race-neutral policy in the best interests of all children, school choice earned national and bipartisan support. By the 1990s, school choice would become a central part of restructuring education.

  One of the more salient aspects of the school choice movement is its bipartisan nature, which explains how it has become so entrenched in the school system and ways of thinking about education reform. To this day, in a divided political world, school choice seems to be a rare issue that actually unites people across the aisle. Democratic administrations of Bill Clinton and later Barack Obama did not challenge school choice (and in fact expanded it) as the policy and the ideology behind it continued to attract bipartisan support and gain traction among the wider public. By the 1990s, both major parties could agree that choice was a mechanism to improve education. President Bill Clinton did not stray from his predecessor’s platform. Clinton was a proud product of public schools, and he advocated adamantly on behalf of them, yet he did so in a way that maintained the ideological underpinnings of previous Republican initiatives. At the same time, Clinton accelerated the availability of choice options across the country, effectively claiming school choice as a priority for the Democratic Party.

  As a governor, Clinton had been an active, energetic participant at the Charlottesville education summit. Then, as president, Clinton expressed an interest in actualizing the goals he had helped establish under the Bush administration. Appointing former governor of South Carolina Richard Riley—who had attended the Charlottesville summit—to serve as the secretary of education garnered bipartisan approval, including that of the outgoing choice advocate Lamar Alexander.48 Though the parties had shifted, many of the same educational policies and trajectories remained in play under Clinton. Building on the momentum of the preceding administration, Clinton ushered through Congress the Goals 2000: Educate America Act of 1994. He also reauthorized the influential Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), which codified the national goals in operation under George H. W. Bush and legislated the National Education Goals Panel and the National Education Standards and Improvement Council. It appropriated a relatively modest $2 billion that was to be distributed by way of grants that agencies competed for at the state level. Greater inroads were made in strengthening the states’ commitment to testing and accountability, which often meant linking state and local funding to assessment of the schools through a barrage of statewide and national tests.49

  Clinton was no mere placeholder for choice, however. He helped codify charter schools into federal law and served as a choice advocate, many times connecting options such as magnet schools to desegregation goals as the courts floundered. He also elevated charter schools as a way to meet the needs of communities of color. Clinton demonstrated that choice was the policy of the “left” too and ushered in other significant federal programming. In particular, the reauthorization of ESEA in 1994 established the Federal Charter School Program. The Clinton administration also passed the Charter School Expansion Act of 1998, which provided the first financial and legal support for charters and school choice at the state and federal level.50 Clinton actively promoted it as well, stipulating in Goals 2000 how funding should be used for “promoting public magnet schools, public ‘charter schools,’ and other mechanisms for increasing choice among public schools.” This included disseminating information to parents about choice and options available.51 It also established a free-flowing and expanding revenue stream for charter schools and school choice, beginning with a modest yet significant $4.5 million.52

  School choice—though framed as an avenue of reform in the best interests of all students—gained traction at a time when the national commitment to desegregation had dropped and previously integrated schools were beginning to resegregate. In the South—the region that showed enthusiastic support for choice—the percentage of African American students who attended majority-White public schools reached a high mark of approximately 44 percent in 1988. But within ten years, the number dropped to 32 percent. Across the nation, the percentage of Black students who attended schools that were 50–100 percent Black or Brown rose to nearly 80 percent by 1999.53 The political will to achieve desegregation had dissipated during Clinton’s presidency.

  Clinton did not sound too different from his Republican predecessors during his State of the Union Address in 1994. Silent about resegregation, he confirmed to a national audience that his education legislation was designed to “empower individual school districts to experiment with ideas like chartering their schools to be run by private corporations or having more public school choice, to do whatever they wish to do as long as we measure every school by one high standard.”54 Allowing for private entities to run schools, he still maintained that charters should be nonsectarian while also recruiting the support of parochial institutions. On a high-profile education tour toward the end of his administration, Clinton noted, “There is a role, a positive role, that faith-based groups can play. My goal is to get more money and more people involved in the charter school movement, to break down the walls of resistance among all the educators to it, and to get community people more aware of it.”55

  Bill Clinton may not be remembered as an “education president,” but choice was ushered in under his watch. There had been only one charter school at the beginning of his administration. By the end of his second term in office, over 1,700 charters existed. Federal financial support for them had increased every year of his presidency. Clinton wanted more, too, hoping to reach three thousand charter schools by the end of his presidency. He may not have achieved that goal, but he earned a lasting legacy as the “charter school president.”

  Though Clinton connected choice to civil rights initiatives in limited though influential ways, the courts throughout the 1990s and the early 2000s kept race out of the question in cases related to education. In Board of Education of Oklahoma City Public Schools v. Dowell (1991), the Supreme Court ruled that the Oklahoma City school district could terminate its preexisting desegregation plans after determining it had achieved a “unitary” or desegregated status in spite of evidence that the district would experience dramatic resegregation. Similarly, in Freeman v. Pitts (1992) and Missouri v. Jenkins (1995), the high court terminated other integration mandates, officially signaling the end of court-ordered desegregation attempts.56

  The case of the school district in Charlotte and Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, is particularly telling. The
district had been under federal court order to bus students to achieve desegregation since 1971’s Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg. In 2001, a federal appeals courts ruled that the district was unitary or sufficiently desegregated, and desegregation plans were dropped. The decision came after thirty years of busing and desegregation mandates staving off total racial segregation. Though not racially proportionate and not without its problems, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district had become a model of sorts, achieving a high degree of success in desegregating. But after the district dropped desegregation plans, the schools rapidly resegregated. By 2018, the North Carolina Justice Center’s Education and Law Project found the district to be the most segregated in the state, three decades of efforts having unraveled in a few years.57

  No other legislation ushered in school choice like the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act in 2001. Moving beyond proposals and lip service, NCLB legislated school choice as an alternative to failing public schools. When Congress passed the act with strong bipartisan support, they enacted sweeping policy change that both legitimated privatization and sanctioned its place in educational policy discourse. It was President George W. Bush’s signature education legislation and the crowning achievement for the school choice movement. The get-tough approach that capitalized on the “accountability movement” fit the bill of the Texan commander-in-chief. He provided a heavy hand to fix what by this time much of the nation believed to be a broken system. Drawing on if not co-opting civil rights ideals—such as focusing on the test scores of Black students and other students of color—NCLB also opened the door wider to competition through charter schools and vouchers while enforcing an unfunded mandate for test-based accountability. The legislation was an impressive feat and a milestone in the history of school choice.

  The most expansive federal education policy since the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, the No Child Left Behind Act built on notions of accountability that had percolated since A Nation at Risk. It required states to build stringent accountability systems, annually testing students in grades 3–8 (and once in high school) in mathematics and reading. Tests were to be aligned with challenging state standards. Annual progress was to be reported, and the new law required disaggregated test score reporting: test results would be published by subgroups defined by race, ethnicity, class, ability, and proficiency in English. It was expected that all students would reach proficiency in math and reading by 2013–14 (which was twelve years from when the bill became law). The bill received fervent bipartisan support, passing easily by a vote of 381–40 in the House and 87–10 in the Senate. Senator Ted Kennedy, a leader and staunch advocate of the landmark legislation, remarked that education reform encapsulated in the bill was “a defining issue about the future of our nation and about the future of democracy, the future of liberty, and the future of the United States in leading the free world.”58

  In addition to its rigorous (albeit unrealistic) expectations, No Child Left Behind mandated a series of punitive measures for schools. Part of “leaving no child behind” meant holding, once and for all, failing schools accountable for their results. Authorizing and establishing guidelines for how the $12 billion spent annually through Title I funds—federal dollars first authorized by LBJ in 1965 and directed to schools that enrolled student populations of whom 40 percent or more lived in poverty—carried tremendous weight. The law was designed to push schools to ensure that all students would make adequate yearly progress. If schools failed to make yearly progress toward established proficiency goals, they would suffer consequences or “corrective action” under the new law. They were labeled—with wide press coverage in many instances—schools “in need of improvement.” If a school continued to test below standards for a second year, that school had to cover the cost of transportation for students who elected to attend a different school of their choice or after-school tutoring. Persistently failing schools, or schools that did not meet progress goals for four or more years, were subject to closing or “restructuring” and a loss of federal funds.59

  Popular with venture capitalists and choice advocates, NCLB drew the ire of teachers and their unions. It heightened the animosity harbored between teachers and legislators as policy ultimately blamed schools and reprimanded teachers for the failure of schools. With the threat of budget cuts and school closures, teachers were pressured to “teach to the test” in unprecedented ways. Educators consequently curtailed their teaching and curricula to align with the test. This led to rote memorization, scripted teaching, and cutting material that was deemed irrelevant if it was not on standardized tests.

  Teachers were tasked with the impossible. With high expectations and little to no support to achieve it, teachers were expected to bring all students—regardless of background and previous educational experience—up to a level of proficiency. It was a daunting task for all teachers, but especially those with large classes, students with disabilities, students who were English-language learners, and other students who required additional support that was not forthcoming under the new legislation.60

  The threat of punitive action spread to public schools themselves as well, not just their teachers who were expected to teach to the test or face the consequences. No Child Left Behind incorporated school choice into federal policy to an unprecedented degree. By law, if a school was failing its students, it was first expected to offer its pupils funding (including tuition, if applicable) to attend a different school of their choice. If the school was determined to be failing and had to be restructured, it faced several additional options. Staff, faculty, and administration could be replaced. The school could be converted to a charter, or a private entity could run the school. States could also open charter schools, and were encouraged to do so, to turn around failing public school districts. During the first year of No Child Left Behind, the Supreme Court ruled that public funding could be used for religious schools through voucher programs, which opened the door even further.

  Stern repercussions for failing schools opened the door for school choice. By 2006, the Department of Education estimated that over 120,000 students had transferred to different schools, though nearly three million were eligible. By the same year, between nineteen thousand and twenty-five thousand schools—over 20 percent of all public schools in the nation—were identified as schools in need of improvement or restructuring. The number grew by 2008 to thirty thousand or over 35 percent of all public schools. Some estimates placed the number as high as nearly 40 percent.61 The choice option was ready to be exploited because tens of thousands of schools were failing, and charters, magnets, and private schools were viewed as a viable option among reformers to improve districts through competition or by enabling more students to enroll in them. School choice made significant legislative and ideological headway under the circumstances.

  Unlike teachers, wealthy business executives and philanthropists were both emboldened and courted by the Bush administration. A new wave of philanthropists emerged as the financial backers of education reform. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation alone were responsible for 25 percent of all funds contributed by top donors once the bill was signed into law. Another billionaire—Eli Broad, who founded the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation in 1999—joined the top contributors and became a significant player in the education reform game. Diane Ravitch, education scholar and former assistant secretary of education under George Bush, referred to them as “venture philanthropists” as they integrated the practices of venture capital finance and business management with education reform.62 One such plan among major funders included the NewSchools Venture Fund’s Charter Accelerator Fund, intended to establish more charters. The major donors collectively committed $40 million to education entrepreneurs who sought to expand choice options.63 Such ventures represented only the tip of the iceberg. Education was a lucrative industry, offering the opportunity not only to generate profit but also to significantly influence policy as well, if one had the means
to do so. A background in education or teacher certification was not required.

  Federal support through No Child Left Behind and the Zelman v. Simmons-Harris (2002) decision, which allowed public funding to fund private school vouchers, inspired a national movement of wealthy donors who supported school choice legislation. Though vouchers never proliferated to the extent that some predicted, voucher advocates across the political spectrum were emboldened.64 All Children Matter, one of the groups to sprout up to support the new choice movement, was a pro-voucher political action committee that raised millions to influence state elections. Funding came from backers across the country, including the Walton Family Foundation and Betsy DeVos, who was at the time an educational philanthropist from Michigan. The PAC helped defeat an anti-voucher gubernatorial candidate in Utah and elected pro-voucher candidates to the South Carolina legislature. The national Alliance for School Choice targeted legislation across the nation to promote pro-voucher and general choice options. Since the early 2000s, groups such as these cultivated a strong presence in states that eventually embraced strong choice models, including Florida, Indiana, Wisconsin, South Carolina, and Missouri.65

  Though studies pointed toward mixed results, burgeoning federal support institutionalized the idea that choice was a solution to failing public education. Charter schools more than doubled during No Child Left Behind, and policymakers and philanthropists were authorized to implement other choice options in a further abandonment of public education.66 Nearly fifty years after Milton Friedman had published his then-obscure ideas of market-based education reform, federal policymakers wrote his ideas into law with bipartisan and popular support.