EdWeek: Democrats warming to school vouchers

We here at redefinED love to thump that drum, so it was nice to see the nation’s education paper of record picking up the beat this week. Three takeaways from Sean Cavanagh’s even-handed piece on the politics of school vouchers:

The big picture:

This year’s presidential campaign offers at least one unequivocal contrast on education issues: The Republican candidate supports private school vouchers, and the Democratic incumbent does not. But at the state and local levels, Democrats’ views on vouchers are more diverse and nuanced than what is suggested by the party’s national platform …

The Florida example:

When Florida’s GOP-controlled legislature in 2010 approved an expansion of a program that gives corporations tax credits for awarding needy students private school scholarships, the measure had significant backing from Democrats. When the original program was launched almost a decade earlier, only one Democrat in the entire legislature voted for it.

State Rep. Darren Soto, an Orlando Democrat (pictured above), said he supported the recent tax-credit expansion because it would help needy families in his district seek out Roman Catholic schools and other options.

“Religious education is very important and popular to a lot of my constituents,” Mr. Soto explained in an interview. “There’s room for a strong public education system, as well as private options.”

The historical context:

Vouchers are perhaps most famously associated with the late economist Milton Friedman, who saw private school choice as the embodiment of a thriving free market in education.

Yet Democrats’ interest in vouchers dates back at least as far as the 1960s, notes Adam Emerson, the director of the program on parental choice at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute in Washington.

George McGovern, the Democratic Party’s nominee for president in 1972, publicly backed creating tax credits to cover families’ private school costs. The party’s platform that year supported directing “financial aid by a constitutional formula to children in nonpublic schools.”

Another influential backer of that idea in the party was the late U.S. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York, who had a strong interest in helping Catholic schools and argued that distinctions between public and private schools mattered little to families.

For those Democrats, private school choice was part of a “social justice movement,” said Mr. Emerson, who supports vouchers for poor families.


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BY Ron Matus

Ron Matus is director for policy and public affairs at Step Up for Students and a former editor of redefinED. He joined Step Up in February 2012 after 20 years in journalism, including eight years as an education reporter with the Tampa Bay Times (formerly the St. Petersburg Times). Ron can be reached at rmatus@stepupforstudents.org or (727) 451-9830. Follow him on Twitter @RonMatus1 and on facebook at facebook.com/redefinedonline.