By Paul Horton. Part two of three.
In the twenty-five years after the Civil Rights Act of 1868, most whites abandoned the Democrats in the South as white flight and the Southern Baptist Convention sought public support for private schools that were created in suburban areas like Cobb and northern Gwinnett counties that ring Atlanta, Georgia. Conservative Republicans demanded vouchers from President Carter, and his rejection of vouchers to protect public schools so outraged a Christian Coalition led by Richard Viguerie, that he organized a letter writing campaign to organize against Democrats for their support of public schools. When Ronald Reagan kicked off his Presidential campaign in the town of Philadelphia, Mississippi, the site of the murder of three Civil Rights workers, sent a not so covert message to the Christian Coalition and the Southern Baptist Convention that any Republican support for school desegregation, equitable funding for schools, and exclusive support for public schools was over. Reagan hinted that Freedom Summer had led to lawlessness in the South, and that if religious southerners wanted public monies for private schools, schools did not teach secular humanism and evolution, he was their man. So, under Reagan, the Republican base, the former conservative Southern Democrats, were reassured that evolution, secular humanism, and school integration could be avoided with Federal support for private schools in the forms of vouchers. But when Reagan’s voucher proposals were rejected by Congress, money flowed into conservative think tanks to create rationales for school privatization based on Milton Friedman’s idea of vouchers, according to journalist Greg Anrig in a Washington Monthlyarticle (“An Idea Whose Time Has Gone”).
Indeed, the consensus of peer reviewed studies of the country’s most ambitious voucher program in Milwaukee indicates that it is a failure: that voucher schools fare no better than pubic schools, but cripple public school finances. In a 2011 study that compared voucher school students with public school students, public school students performed significantly higher (Wisconsin State Journal, March 29, 2011, “DPI: Students in Milwaukee voucher program don’t score better in state tests,” for example).
Charter schools have become another reform alternative that have received increasing levels of state and federal support since the early 1990s. Heavy funding of private charters really took of in 2006 when President Bush asked for a total of $306 million to support the growth of the charter movement when many public Part Two: Why is the Obama Administration Waging War on Teachers? | Living in Dialogue: