Conservatives' vision of the future of Texas public schools.
The Texas legislature is in session, something that should invoke fear and terror in anyone who cares about such things as logic, ethics, fairness, and human rights. A consummation devoutly to be wished this session, as every session, is the defunding and ultimate destruction of public schools, since of course a child's exposure to facts is fatal to the basic tenets of conservatism. Lt. Governor Dan Patrick made "school choice" a top priority of his campaign, and the home-schooling movement is bound to make greater strides under his stewardship.
This means school vouchers are back again. No less than two house bills and three senate bills have proposed implementing some form of school vouchers into law. Now, conservatives are sneaky devils. They've been introducing voucher bills in Texas for decades, and yet they always fail to pass. A lesser person, or a pragmatic one, would simply give up the fight and move on. Not conservatives. All their battles being tectonic struggles between good and evil, they must soldier on against all odds. Liberals cannot be allowed to destroy America. And so the sneaky devils have now taken up the fight for “taxpayer savings grant programs” (SB 276) and "franchise or insurance premium tax credits" (HB 895) with public education tax dollars, which they think they've fooled everyone into thinking are not vouchers. Clever, eh? Except no one is fooled.
This got me thinking: what was the origin of the school voucher movement? Did it have anything to do with Brown vs. Board of Education, perhaps? A brief bit of research turned up a few "interesting" quotes.
It would be profitable to study how many Southerners supported school vouchers prior to the 1950s. My guess is few to none. "School choice" simply wasn't an issue. Since public schools were segregated by law, tax dollars flowed freely (mostly to whites-only schools). No one in the South questioned the validity of public education. But storm clouds were ahead.
Foreseeing a push toward desegregation in public schools, South Carolina got ahead of the game in 1952 by repealing a constitutional requirement that the state maintain a school system. This was the first indication that a radical break from past assumptions about education was afoot in the South. Then came the bombshell of Brown vs. Board of Education on May 17, 1954. The floodgates opened. Between 1955 and 1957 alone, 120 pieces of legislation were enacted in the South in reaction to Brown. Suddenly, once inviolable state constitutions needed heavy redacting. The complete abolition of the public school system -- unthinkable just a few years before -- was now discussed as a live option.
The Richmond News-Leader wrote at the time: "To acknowledge the Court's authority does not mean the South is helpless. It is not to abandon hope. Rather, it is to enter into a long course of lawful resistance ... let us pledge ourselves to litigate this thing for fifty years. If one remedial law is ruled invalid, then let us try another; and if the second is ruled invalid, then let us enact a third."
The voucher ethos was thus born. Public school funding must now be privatized. If we submit a bill calling such a scheme "vouchers," and that bill fails, re-submit the same bill and call the scheme “taxpayer savings grant programs.”
Tom P. Brady, Circuit Judge of the 14th Judicial District from 1950 to 1963, and later a member of the Mississippi Supreme Court, wrote, "We have already, by Constitutional amendment, authorized our legislature as other Southern states will do, to abolish the public schools if the Negro and white children are ever integrated therein. Make no mistake about it, we will abolish our public school system and establish private schools for our white children..." ("Segregation and the South" [1957])
Herman Talmadge, Georgia governor from 1948 to 1955 and Senator from 1957 to 1981, had this to say: "Lawyers thought (the Brown decision) was a judicial rape of the Constitution, and I concur ... they couldn't send enough bayonets down to compel the people to send their children to school with Nigras.
"I sponsored a constitutional amendment to enable the General Assembly to close the schools at its discretion and to pay a subsidy to children, both white and Negro, out of state funds to enable them to go to private schools ... there is no requirement for a public school system -- we changed that in November, 1954. Furthermore, if a court ordered a Georgia county to integrate, the state would withhold funds from that entity. Then we would be required to proceed with the private school system." (as quoted in John Barlow Martin, The Deep South Says Never (1957)]
So, yeah. Vouchers are a direct product of the Old Confederacy's reaction to Brown. That's pretty clear. (Also notice the similarity to conservatives' current solutions to marriage equality: just abolish state-sponsored marriage.)
In the 1970s, a strange thing happened. Jim Crow met Milton Friedman, and the old, overtly racist language of people like Brady and Talmadge was retired in favor of "school choice," "competition," and stopping the terrible "monopoly" of public schools and teachers' unions. This was a message far more appealing to the new generation of emerging white Southern conservatives, since it achieved the same objectives with no overtly offensive epithets. And of course along with this language came sympathetic tones of great concern for the plight of brown-skinned people, supposedly yearning the loudest for vouchers. "Every poll has shown that the strongest supporters of vouchers are the low-income blacks," Friedman said, "and yet hardly a single black leader has been willing to come out for vouchers." Brown vs. Board of Education was never mentioned again.
I don't believe the people sponsoring the current voucher bills in the Texas legislature are racists. Like most of their peers, they are simply ignorant of the voucher movement's actual origins in the desegregation of public schools that began in 1954. They are products of the Milton Friedman-Reagan era "re-branding" of white supremacism into something that sounds more palatable and marketable. Most contemporary conservatism begins during the Reagan era. But its roots aren't too difficult to dig up.
