The late Democratic Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan once crafted a tuition tax credit measure with Republican Sen. Bob Packwood that garnered 50 co-sponsors, including Sen. George McGovern and 23 other Democrats.

Editor's note: This op-ed appeared over the weekend in the Huffington Post.

At least three more red states -- Texas, North Carolina and Tennessee -- will push for school vouchers in the coming months. But the familiar showdown between Republican lawmakers and teachers' unions masks a more intriguing political development on parental choice: Democrats are increasingly siding with parents.

Count me in the parent camp. I'm a lifelong progressive Democrat, former president of two local teacher unions, and current president of a Florida nonprofit that is the country's largest provider of tax credit scholarships for low-income students to attend qualified private schools. This year the Florida scholarship will serve more than 50,000 economically disadvantaged students who are mostly of color, and it aligns directly with the core Democratic Party values of social justice and equal opportunity.

For a host of complicated reasons, low-income kids are not generally doing well in traditional public schools. In 2011, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the reading gap nationally between low-income and higher-income fourth-graders was 22 percentage points. Florida has seen encouraging progress with its disadvantaged students, yet startling gaps persist. Last year, 45 percent of low-income third graders scored at grade level or above on the Florida reading test, compared to 77 percent of higher-income students.

One way to combat the challenges faced by students in poverty is to give their parents more options. Affluent parents can buy homes in neighborhoods with preferred school zones, navigate the other public school choices, home school or pay for a private school. But low-income parents don't have these opportunities. Expanding choice is a way to help level the playing field.

This expansion is not either/or, and it's not public versus private. Educators understand that different children learn in different ways, and to that end, education is increasingly becoming customized. In Florida, we now have 1.5 million students -- about 43 percent of the total -- enrolled in something other than traditional neighborhood schools. Last year, there were 341,000 who chose through "open enrollment," 227,000 who picked choice and magnet programs, 180,000 in charter schools, 203,000 in career academies and 8,000 in full-time virtual instruction. Vouchers and tax-credit scholarships are not an invasive species on this fast-changing landscape, where lines between public and private are blurring. They're simply two more peas in a public education pod.

That's one reason the politics are changing. (more…)

This month, former Senator George McGovern frames his beau ideal of the crusading and committed progressive in his new book, What It Means to Be a Democrat. Addressing issues as varied as education, defense spending and universal healthcare, McGovern reminds the reader that “if there ever was a moment to define ourselves boldly, to stick to our ideals, it is now.” But now, McGovern’s ideal Democratic defense of public education is much narrower than it was when he ran for president 40 years ago.

“Yes, I’m sure that some private academies offer students more one-on-one attention and perhaps more intellectual stimulation than the neighborhood public school,” he writes. “But that doesn’t change my strongly held view that public funds should be invested in public education … Voucher programs that use public money to send kids to private school only divert money away from the overall goal of making U.S. public schools as robust as possible.”

When he ran for president in 1972, however, McGovern’s support for education was drawn more broadly. As Election Day neared, McGovern proposed his own tuition tax credit plan to help the parents of elementary and secondary schoolchildren offset the costs of a private or parochial education, just as advisers to Richard Nixon had done. Politically, McGovern wanted the Catholic vote, but this pretends that he was a maverick among liberal Democrats in wanting to aid families choosing a private, even faith-based, education. He was not.

Hubert Humphrey proposed his own tuition tax credit plan when he ran against Nixon in 1968. And McGovern joined 23 Democratic senators in 1978 to co-sponsor a plan championed by one of the nation’s most prominent Democrats, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, offering $500 in tax credits to families paying private school tuition.

“We cannot abandon these schools and we will not,” McGovern announced to a throng of Catholic high school students in Chicago in the fall of 1972, according to the Washington Post. Catholic schools, McGovern added, are a “keystone of American education," and without government help, families would lose the right to give their children an education in which spiritual and moral values play an important role.

Presidential candidates were born to flip-flop, but McGovern’s newest manifesto reminds us how far Democrats have strayed from a movement they once breathed life into. Moynihan was prophetic in 1981 when he wrote that as vouchers become more and more a conservative cause, “it will, I suppose, become less and less a liberal one.”

If that happens, he added, “it will present immense problems for a person such as myself who was deeply involved in this issue long before it was either conservative or liberal. And if it prevails only as a conservative cause, it will have been a great failure of American liberalism not to have seen the essentially liberal nature of this pluralist proposition.”