The big money bankrolling the school voucher movement
by Aaron Lake Smith
Darrell Allison, president of Parents for Educational Freedom in North Carolina, believes that a publicly funded program of school vouchers to send low-income, underachieving students to private schools could break the cycle of poverty.
"Odds are if you're a minority—with 50 or 60 percent of minority homes being single parent—the idea of homeschooling or receiving a big check to send your child to private school is a wish, a dream," he said.
Allison was a mentee of the late civil rights leader Julius Chambers and has been the key lobbyist in the passage of North Carolina's "opportunity scholarship" amendment last year.
But Chambers' daughter, Judy, is a plaintiff in a lawsuit seeking to have this legislation declared unconstitutional. "Julius Chambers himself might have been on the other end of this," Allison said. "There will be those from the Civil Rights era that are still with us today that will find this hard because they struggled so hard to be able to break through that barrier of public school."
Allison started PEFNC in 2005. "When I say we were grassroots, I mean grassroots. We didn't have an office, a staff. Our board was a board of the willing." However grassroots their beginnings, in the last two years PEFNC and its political action committee, Partners for Educational Freedom in NC, have become one of the central conduits for big "school choice" money in North Carolina politics.
Allison's group and similar ones nationwide are funded by libertarian and right-wing billionaires, who, using philanthropic foundations, nonprofits, PACS, and hefty individual donations, have poured money into state pushes for controversial voucher programs in Florida, Louisiana, Ohio, Wisconsin—and now North Carolina.
Though the talking points of the "school choice movement" are populist and no-nonsense—that parents have the right to choose the kind of