New Research: Vouchers— schools do the choosing | Cloaking Inequity

New Research: Vouchers— schools do the choosing | Cloaking Inequity:

New Research: Vouchers— schools do the choosing

The racist history of vouchers is very clear and apparent. What was the origin of the school voucher movement? The Daily Kos wrote in the piece Jim Crow and school vouchers

The Richmond News-Leader wrote at the time: “To acknowledge the Court’s authority [in Brown v Board] 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 

New Research: Vouchers— schools do the choosing | Cloaking Inequity: