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 in other states thought that the public would embrace them in jurisdictions where decisions could be made by referenda, but they were wrong. Referendum campaigns to initiate voucher programs in California, Michigan, and Utah failed by large margins.
Voucher programs also came up against resistance in the courts. There was a fierce fight to create vouchers for needy students in severely inadequate schools in Florida, but the results were disappointing both educationally and legally. Florida scholars report that “in the most segregated districts the failing (F) schools or near-failing (D) schools enroll the great majority of each district's Black students. ... However, few private schools have been willing to enroll students from the F schools.”64 This experience suggests that neither was there a good supply of options for the students—most of whom were black—in weak schools nor did all who were able to transfer find the choice a good one, since some quickly returned to public schools. The Florida Supreme Court ruled that the vouchers violated the state constitution, which forbade use of public funds for private schools, generating a battle to amend it.65 In Wisconsin, civil rights lawyers challenged a voucher program for discriminating against handicapped students.66 Voucher programs in general have faced problems because the schools were selecting students, not providing access to all equally, and recruitment and information requirements set by state law were minimal.
A major review of the evidence on vouchers by the economists Cecilia Elena Rouse and Lisa Barrow in 2008 concluded: “The best research to date finds relatively small achievement gains for students offered education vouchers, most of which are not statistically different from zero.”67
Vouchers have no real significance in terms of impact on either segregation or educational opportunity, as many schools will not take them.68 Further, many independent schools have tuitions far higher than the value of any proposed voucher. Even the theoretical value of voucher programs is limited because private schools educate only a tenth of U.S. students, and 82 percent of private school spaces are in religious schools created to provide appropriate religious education as well as regular instruction. This is unlikely to change, because the capital and other costs of creating large numbers of new schools are prohibitive.
So far U.S. voucher experiments have been limited, and there is no way to estimate what the impacts of a large expansion would be. Six significant programs have been initiated, but state courts overturned the Florida and Colorado laws, and Congress ended the Washington DC plan after Obama's election but reinstated it in 2011 as a part of a budget deal after conservatives took over the House of Representatives after the 2010 election. The best evidence on the possible impacts of large-scale voucher systems comes from countries that have experienced them, such as Chile and New Zealand. The experience of the former, which made a massive commitment to vouchers as a basic educational treatment, suggests that the impact would be to increase overall ethnic and class segregation.69 In fact there were massive student protests in Chile in 2011 against educational stratification.70
After the 2010 U.S. elections, with the victory of conservatives in the House and in many state governments, the voucher issue came back on the education agenda not only in the agreement to renew the Washington DC program but also in a referendum scheduled for 2012 in Florida, a battle in Pennsylvania, and a variety of other initiatives. Although vouchers have had little impact in the United States