School Vouchers, state-funded tuition payments for students at private or public elementary and secondary schools emerged in the late 1900s as the most sweeping of the so-called parental choice reforms, and encompass divergent groups of supporters. The history of school vouchers dates back to 1792 when the revolutionary Thomas Paine proposed a voucher-like plan for England, but popular and legislative support in the United States did not begin until the early 1950s, when states in the Deep South and Virginia established tuition grants to counter anticipated school desegregation. In a 1955 article, economist Milton Friedman proposed vouchers as free-market education, to separate government financing of schools from their administration. Segregationists justified tuition grants on such grounds, but in a series of decisions between 1964 and 1969, the federal courts rejected them as evasions of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision. Vouchers gained favor outside the South in the 1960s, with advocates of alternative schools, liberals seeking educational equity, and defenders of urban parochial schools among the supporters. The U.S. Office of Economic Opportunity sponsored a 1970 study that recommended compensatory vouchers, culminating in a five-year, public school-only demonstration program in Alum Rock, California. In Committee for Public Education v. Nyquist (1973), the Supreme Court set aside a New York tuition reimbursement program for parochial school students. In the 1980s, with support from the executive branch, vouchers had resurgence, via alliances of free-market conservatives, local activists, and private school supporters responding to inadequate academic achievement in urban public schools. Although voters rejected school vouchers in several statewide referenda in the 1990s, legislatures established pilot programs in three states. Wisconsin established a program for students at private secular schools in Milwaukee in 1990, followed in 1995 by an Ohio program that encompassed religious schools in Cleveland, and a 1999 statewide program in Florida for students in low-achieving school districts that also included sectarian schools. In Zelman v. Simmons-Harris (2002), the Supreme Court ruled the Cleveland program constitutional, paving the way for expansion to religious schools elsewhere.
Bibliography
Friedman, Milton. "The Role of Government in Education." In Economics and the Public Interest, edited by Robert A. Solo. Rutgers, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1955.
O'Brien, Molly Townes. "Private School Tuition Vouchers and the Realities of Racial Politics." Tennessee Law Review 64, no. 2 (1997): 359–407.
Witte, John F. The Market Approach to Education. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000.
