America's Voucher Politics

Compared to what?: Setting American political development in comparative context

“…Some deploy case material primarily to propound theory or test hypotheses. Ursula Hackett (2020), for example, develops an account of the rise of school vouchers in American public education as a means of developing an argument about what she calls "attenuated governance," which has broader implications that extend beyond her case. Others are more interested in delving deeply into a particular case and less overtly concerned with the portability of their findings -Jeffery Jenkins and Justin Peck (2021) on post-Reconstruction congressional politics, for example.…”

Charting the Rise of School Choice across Canadian Provinces: A Policy Index

“…In Sweden, too, the desire to increase choice drove a series of controversial reforms including permitting for-profit entities to deliver education, albeit under a fairly robust system of public regulation and management (West and Bailey, 2013). The United States has also seen experiments in charter schools (Hackett, 2016) and an explosive growth in vouchers (Hackett, 2020), although as Zehavi (2012) notes, direct public finance of private schools has not expanded in the United States to the same extent as it has in other liberal welfare states such as Australia and New Zealand where governments direct a significant portion of public finances to private schools.…”

School Choice as Community Disempowerment: Racial Rhetoric about Voucher Policy in Urban America

“…For several years, Black students in the county went without any formal educational instruction before the Supreme Court ruled the move unconstitutional in 1964. 26 In the 1970s and 1980s, no major voucher programs were introduced, but they were revived in the 1990s by Republican state legislators (Hackett 2020). The new voucher programs were framed as providing an opportunity to African-American and poor children to "escape" poorly performing schools (Gooden, Jabbar, and Torres 2016).…”

“…The racialized crisis of urban education is not limited to Newark. The pattern of a predominantly White higher-level government imposing neoliberal "solutions," such as vouchers, on predominantly Black cities has persisted and intensified over the last 20 years (Hackett 2020;Morrell 2018). Neoliberalism entails the withdrawal of governmental forms of social welfare and public services and transferring public resources to private actors on the basis that competitive markets are more effective and efficient.…”

“…In a 5-4 ruling the court declared that vouchers, even those used for religious schools, were constitutional. While vouchers are now present in half of American states, in the early 2000s they were still only deployed in a handful of settings (Hackett 2020). The conflict in Newark was a sign of the policy and campaign battles to come.…”