"Parental Rights" as a Pro-Voucher Slogan
This piece made possible by the Center for Educator Wellness and Learning (CEWL). (Click here to read the full piece for free.)
To get universal school choice, you have to operate from the premise of universal school distrust.
-Chris Rufo, “Laying Siege to the Institutions” (Hillsdale College, 2022)
School vouchers have never been consistently popular in the United States. When Milton Friedman-style anti-regulation advocates and white supremacist segregationists found that they had a shared antipathy for taxpayer-funded American public schools, they branded school vouchers as a way for parents to take control of their children’s educations.
(A Heritage Foundation piece co-written by Lindsey Burke, author of the Project 2025 chapter on the Department of Education, frames the overlap this way: “By the time Friedman wrote ‘The Role of Government in Education,’ [in 1955, the year after the Supreme Court ruling in Brown v Board of Education] state governments essentially had developed monopolies on education, with children assigned to public schools within the district boundaries where they lived. This iron triangle of public schooling—government administration, compulsion and financing of education—had weakened important market forces and limited parents’ power to control their children’s education.”)
What they created, particularly in the post-Reconstruction South, were segregation academies, often under the umbrella of “independent schools”.
As former segregationist Tom Turnipseed wrote in 2005, “SCISA’s [the South Carolina Independent Schools Association] stated purpose was to aid in the establishment of private elementary and secondary schools and to coordinate cooperative academic and sports activities. The unstated purpose was to avoid the federally court-ordered racial desegregation of the public schools.”
Turnipseed, who helped to found SCISA during the school integration era, and who later became an anti-racism activist, explicitly tied “parental rights” rhetoric to the efforts to build a network of publicly-funded segregation academies: “We bristled with indignation when reporters referred to SCISA as an association of ‘segregated academies’. We preferred to emphasize that we were simply putting parents in charge and giving them a choice of more educational opportunities for their children.”
This echoes the “Southern strategy” of 1960s politics where, as one of its chief architects, Lee Atwater, would later admit, politicians would use coded messages intended to evoke anti-Black sentiments without explicitly making racist statements. In an interview published after his death, Atwater said by making references to busing and taxes in ways that harmed “Blacks worse than Whites,” “I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract and that coded, that we’re doing away with the racial problem one way or the other, you follow me?”
And, of course, in 2005, Turnipseed was explicitly responding to a “school choice” proposal under then- South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford. The proposed legislation, Turnipseed warned, was part of a long trend of the state neglecting the educations of “blacks and poor whites”.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that everyone wielding the rhetoric of “parental rights” was, or is, a white supremacist. But it does demonstrate that much of the fuel for the voucher movement was, and is, tied up with unspoken ideological and political goals that would be unpopular with most Americans if stated directly.
