The History of School Choice in American Education
By Classic Learning Test
Reading time: 15 minutes
The following transcript is taken from an episode of The Anchored Podcast in which Soren Schwab sat down with Dr. James Shuls, Head of the Education for the Liberty Branch of the Institute for Governance and Civics at Florida State University. Dr. Shuls is a nationally recognized expert on education policy and school choice. His research focuses on K-12 finance, teacher policy, and education reform. He has published widely in both academic journals and major national media outlets. Before joining the Institute, he served as the Department Chair and Associate Professor of Educational Leadership at the University of Missouri, St. Louis. He earned his Doctorate in Education Policy from the University of Arkansas, and is a regular speaker on the future of school choice and educational innovation. He recently published a book with Neil McCluskey, Fighting for the Freedom to Learn.
To hear more about Dr. Shul’s work at the Institute of Governance and Civics, you can watch the full podcast episode via the YouTube link provided at the end of this post.
The Origins of Public Education
Soren Schwab: Thinking back to the founding of America, was education public or private? When did we even start using those terms for education?
James Shuls: Neil McCluskey and I edited a volume, Fighting for the Freedom to Learn. The impetus for that book, Neil likes to say, is that we were both frustrated. Supporters and opponents claim the 1950s as the genesis of school choice. The critics look at it and say, “Look what happened in the South after Brown vs. the Board of Education: Those terrible racists created voucher programs.” For them, vouchers today are still elements of racism. So that’s the critic’s view.
And the proponents say Milton Friedman in 1955 wrote “The Role of Government in Education” and it was a brand new idea that came out of nowhere. I don’t want to demean Milton Friedman. I’m a huge Milton Friedman fan. But the market-oriented, school choice folks point to that as the genesis.
Neil and I were doing all kinds of research and saying, there’s a lot of other stuff going on that people don’t realize. But when we think of school choice today, we tend to think about leaving the public education system. The vast majority of kids are in traditional public schools. We think of school choice today as taking away from–going somewhere else, providing options elsewhere. But that concept doesn’t make any sense. Going back to the Founding, nobody thought about school choice or leaving a public sector, because there wasn’t a public sector. There wasn’t a system of public education. There were all kinds of different arrangements, a variety of different types of schools.
Some were operated by churches. Dame schools operated out of households. There was a whole plethora of different arrangements where people were trying to educate their kids. And sometimes these were completely privately funded. Sometimes they were publicly funded. Oftentimes there was a mixture where the government might give land for a school to be developed, but people paid tuition. There was not a clear demarcation between public and private.
And this isn’t to say that it was perfect. We know, obviously, through American history, there are periods of time where we didn’t educate black people. We didn’t educate women, at least not to the extent we educated men. So it’s not to say the model was perfect. But these conceptions of public and private did not exist. And education at the time of the Founding was more of a private matter.
Parents directed the upbringing of their children, and this idea that the state played a critical role was almost non-existent at the Founding. But it grew over time to where now many people think of the state as the primary actor in education
The Origins of School Choice
S.S: So you mentioned Friedman and what most people conceptualize as the beginning of school choice. Wasn’t that a response to education becoming more centralized in the late 1900s, early 20th century? What happened during that time where Friedman and others felt like there had to be a response to decentralize education again?
J.S: I think when you look at history, you see all these different forces that are operating. There’s not one thing, it’s a variety of things that happen. In the 1800s, we have this tremendous movement for common schools. The common school movement is the public school movement, led by Horace Mann out of Massachusetts, but others are involved. It spreads rapidly.
And I think one thing we sometimes fail to acknowledge is that part of the reason it spreads rapidly is it generally had a lot of support. People generally liked the idea of public schooling because the public schools were very local. You still had enclaves of communities where they were predominantly German in one area, Irish in another area–whatever the nationality was. Also they were similar in religion in many cases. And the school district was the smallest political unit. It was why we had one room school houses, right?
So we start developing these common schools. We start developing state education systems that start to regulate these things. And part of the push for this, of course, is the influx of immigrants–those “terrible, dirty Catholics” that came in. Others as well. People were concerned about that. There was a nativist push for education.
There was also the Industrial Revolution where, at one point later on, we want to get kids out of the factories. So we start seeing, first, these pushes for common schools. Then, as the common schools get established, we see start seeing pushes for greater regulation. We have the advance of technology like busing that allows for consolidation. We get into a time period where there’s a push for efficiency and progressive ideals.
We start consolidating schools into larger political units, more regulation. All of this stuff is happening. And throughout this period, private education comes under attack. And really (this is Neil McCluskey’s chapter in the book) there was a period of time where we don’t think much about school choice because private schools are fighting for their survival. Like in the early 1900s, we see, first, compulsory education laws coming into play. And then states trying to satisfy the compulsory education laws by making kids go to public school.
And so this is where the famous case Pierce vs. Society of Sisters comes from, where the state said you can’t go to a private school, you have to go to public school. And they challenge that. It goes to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court unanimously says the child is not the mere creature of the state and protects the existence of private schools. But you have this period of time where you have the growth of public education, again, shifting the locus of control from the family to the state. You have greater regulation. You have greater pressures trying to tamp down the influence of private education.
And you have that consolidation, a progressive sort of movement. I’m glossing over a huge swath of history here, but then you have, as you approach the fifties, these contests with Russia and we have this increased pressure from the federal government to start funding education, which hadn’t really happened before.
The Evolving Case for School Vouchers
S.S.: You mentioned Friedman. What did he advocate for in “The Role of Government in Education” and why?
J.S.: This is 1955. He says that just because we have decided we’re going to have public education, it doesn’t mean the government has to operate public schools or that government has to operate education. So we could have the system, this idea of public education, where every kid will be educated. And we will allow private schools to operate and serve kids at public expense.
I think part of what Friedman does is he coalesces things around a type of voucher idea. That you could take a voucher for a certain dollar amount and send it to a private school. Now, I would say his ideas even then were somewhat nascent. He thought that they should be done at the local level rather than at the state or federal level. But his idea was that public education doesn’t require public provision of education. They don’t have to operate the schools. We could take the voucher dollars. We could allow choice and competition. And that’s Friedman’s argument: choice and competition allow for market forces to come to bear on the education system. It allows for a rising tide to lift all boats, because that’s what choice and competition do. So he brings that free market idea to education and, really, I think tries to help crystallize the idea around a voucher as the way to do it.
S.S: One of the other books Neil McCluskey wrote with Corey DeAngelis was School Choice Myths. And one of the myths they discuss is that school choice disadvantages minority populations. You mentioned earlier the Civil Rights era and the vouchers as essentially just a way to segregate. That is probably my favorite chapter in the book. Can you give us a little teaser for that chapter and its history of school choice and civil rights?
J.S.: Who wrote your favorite chapter of the book, I wonder? I should be a little bit more humble, but I appreciate that.
The chapter I wrote was really about Father Virgil Bloom and Citizens for Educational Freedom.
Bloom wrote a book in 1959, Freedom of Choice and Education. He makes a school choice case, but a different school choice case than Friedman was making. Friedman, like I said, made the market argument, whereas Bloom was making the religious liberty argument and the civil rights argument, essentially saying school choice is a right. Public education is a welfare benefit and every single person, rich or poor, is entitled to this public welfare benefit of education. But if you want a religious education, if you want to choose that for your kid, you are discriminated against on a religious basis. So the public education welfare benefit is lost when you choose to educate your kid according to your values.
And so Bloom made this religious argument, but he was also inspired by what was going on in the black community at the time. Looking at their civil rights wins, he was saying: we need to learn from this. We need to take lessons from this because this is the same thing that’s going on with religious communities. We’re being discriminated against. We need to advocate for our rights. So a group of parents in St. Louis, Missouri get really interested in Bloom’s writing. May Dugan and her husband and a few other people formed this group called Citizens for Educational Freedom in 1959. And that goes on to have thousands of members all across the country, but primarily in the North. Critics say that vouchers and school choice start in the South.
There’s a table in the book where I show all of the activities that Citizens for Educational Freedom were engaging in. And they’re engaging in helping get funding for buses, tuition, reimbursements, textbooks–all sorts of things, all across the country, almost all in Northern states. And if you look at their membership roles, almost all of them are in Northern states. If you add up the numbers across the South, I think it was less than 100. I can’t remember the exact number, but there was a quote that I highlight where Virgil Bloom was writing to May Duggan. She was thinking about getting out of the game and Bloom was encouraging her and he said something like, ‘Not a week goes by that the New York Times doesn’t mention Citizens for Educational Freedom.’
So you think about all the school choice stuff that was happening. It was happening all across the country, particularly in Northern states. What happens in the South? In the South, in Virginia for example, the legislature said––because of Brown vs. the Board of Education, because they’re now required to integrate schools–they passed a law that said if a school is required to be integrated, we’re going to close the school. And so a black student would apply to a school.
The school would reject them. The student might appeal it, and when the court comes back and rules in the student’s favor, then the school is shut down. Now parents have to have a choice between no school or private school.
There’s a great book, and I’m blanking on the name of it right now. But he basically says people weren’t choosing between integrated schools and private schools; they were choosing between no school and private school. And so the voucher programs that came around are oftentimes afterthoughts.
If people say school choice benefits the rich or that it increases segregation–Compared to what? Nothing was worse than the public education system, which deliberately drew boundaries or deliberately discriminated against black people. That was way worse than a system of choice that may or may not have any of these negative implications.
So the goal of the Southern states was not choice. It was not educational freedom. The goal was segregation, segregation of public schools. They fought tooth and nail to keep it and they lost. And every voucher program that was created in the South lost in court. They were found unconstitutional. In fact, Citizens for Educational Freedom wrote a brief in opposition to Virginia’s law. The nation’s largest school choice organization opposed it because it didn’t allow religious schools to participate. So the whole history that says school choice started in the South is a farce in my opinion.
The State of School Choice Today
S.S.: Well, in listening to the history of vouchers in that time period, it’s understandable that it was controversial–even though the basic premise is that the parent is the primary educator and they should be able to direct their child. It seems pretty common sense, right? But today, school choice is mostly viewed through a partisan lens, and you sometimes probably read that it’s a red states issue. What do you think is the reason for that, and has that been the case historically that one party was advocating for choice and the other was against it? Or is that also a recent development in our polarized society?
J.S.: I went through lot of Virgil Bloom’s archives. There was a funny quote in one of them. He said something like, ‘We’re in danger of having too many Democrats support us and not enough Republicans.’ So at that time, there was pretty strong Democrat support for school choice. School choice used to be in both Republican and Democratic party platforms.
And Ron Mattis has a great chapter about the progressive push for school choice in the seventies and eighties and how people were looking at the abysmal quality of schools and saying, ‘This is terrible for our poor black and brown kids. We’ve got to give them options.’ And so you see a tremendous push for school choice during that time period among progressives.
Now, part of the problem– and the reason that you don’t see much from the sixties through the early nineties, when we start getting our modern school choice programs–is a loss of court cases. If you look at Lemon vs. Kurtzman, which is where we get the Lemon test from, or the Nyquist case (and these are cases about school choice in the North), the Supreme Court strikes them down and basically finds them unconstitutional. And Virgil Bloom and Citizens for Educational Freedom say, we can’t raise any money now because people don’t think it’s a viable option. The courts were hostile for a long period of time. So you see Citizens for Educational Freedom start to wane. You see this pickup of progressives who start supporting school choice. And in the early nineties, what you get is a combination of two groups that are really advocating for school choice.
You get the free market Republicans–the Friedman types–latching onto those arguments, and you get the social justice Democrats. And those are the people that start to push these ideas early on. And almost all of the early choice programs were small, targeted programs that were oftentimes limited by geography, or they were limited by income. They were designed for poor communities.
And you see most of the language at that time making one of those two arguments. Even the market argument was a social justice argument because it was “the rising tide lifts all.” It was about how market competition is going to help kids in these failing schools. But what happens is we’re getting these small school choice victories over time. We’re trying to build this coalition. But what people like Jay Green start to notice, and Jason Bedrick, who wrote a chapter in our book, and others, is that even though there’s this coalition, so to speak, almost every vote to pass school choice bills is by Republicans and could have passed without any Democrat support. And so essentially what Jay Green and Jason Bedrick and others start to argue is that we don’t need to make the progressive argument. It doesn’t get us the support we need in red communities, in red states, to pass school choice. They start saying, we need to make red state arguments.
Jason Bedrick describes the red state strategy as a deliberate strategy to target red states with messaging that is really about values. And to be honest, the Left made it easy, right? When you look at what has happened in recent years, whether it was transgender issues related to sports or bathrooms or other sorts of things, they gave a lot of red meat for the right to latch on to and say schools are pushing things that are contrary to our values. And then you start to get more Republican support.
Now, in the past, when you had the market arguments or the social justice arguments, what does a rural Republican gain from that? They’re not social-justice-oriented and they have very little choice in competition in their area. So you try to get a rural Republican to vote for something when they see no benefit and all of their local superintendents and teachers are against it, and you find it hard to get rural Republican support. But when you make it about values, freedom, religious liberty, then you start to get more of those rural Republicans on your side. I would say that has really been the shift in recent years.
S.S. Fascinating. Read the book, Fighting for the Freedom to Learn. It is really good. I’m excited for everyone to get hands on it. Your work at Florida State University is incredibly encouraging to so many of us in the movement. Thanks for all you do brother.
If you enjoyed this piece, be sure to check out The Anchored Podcast. For more Journal content, check out our blog post about the role of civic education in the liberal arts. From all of us at the Journal, thanks for reading and have a great rest of your week.
Published on 3rd June, 2026.