Democrats weren’t always so resistant to private school choice

Editor’s note: Adam Emerson, who writes the Choice Words blog at the Fordham Institute, wrote a lot about the progressive roots of school choice when he was editor here at redefinED. Here is his latest piece on the subject.

The 2012 Democratic Party platform released this week calls for the expansion of “public school options for low-income youth,” a position that has appeared in varying language in every Democratic platform since 1992. But as Marc Fisher of the Washington Post reported this week, the Democratic platform historically has been “a jagged series of experiments” that once made room for more than just public-school choice.

Today, the national party fervently rejects vouchers for private and parochial schools, but that wasn’t the case thirty years ago. In 1972, Democrats sought to “channel financial aid by a Constitutional formula to children in non-public schools,” a position that reflected not only the influence of the Catholic Church at the time but also the drive, the values and the persistence of the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

Moynihan, who also crafted education planks for the Democratic platforms of 1964 and 1976, followed the party’s (and his own) guidance. Soon after his election to the U.S. Senate in 1976, he proposed a tuition tax credit for families with children in private and parochial schools. That bill was co-sponsored by an almost even number of Republicans and Democrats, and, as Moynihan defiantly wrote in Harper’s Magazine at the time, “Why should the anti-Catholicism of the Grant era be given a seat at the Cabinet table of a twentieth-century President.” But that president, Jimmy Carter, had come into office with the support of the National Education Association, which worked with H.E.W. Secretary Joseph A. Califano, Jr. to kill the bill.

Since then, the NEA and the American Federation of Teachers have exerted ever greater influence over the Democratic Party while the Catholic Church has wielded less. Full piece here.


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BY reimaginED staff