The Center for American Progress (CAP), a leftist advocacy group, released last week a new report titled “The Racist Origins of Private School Vouchers.” The report, which was cheered by American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten and celebrated at its release by Bobby Scott, the ranking Democrat on the House Education Committee, plays fast and loose with the facts to offer a warped and historically inaccurate history of school choice.

The authors explain the oft-told story of Prince Edward County, Va., which sought to thwart desegregation by shuttering its public schools and then issuing vouchers that families could use at segregated private schools. Ford et al. note that, by the late 1960s, there were 200 or more voucher-supported segregation academies in the South, enrolling perhaps 100,000 students. This history is real, problematic, and part of the school-choice story. Of course, in a region that enrolled millions of students and where the overwhelming bulk of “massive resistance” was carried out using strategies that had nothing to do with vouchers, the narrative is wildly incomplete, at best.

One certainly should credit John Stuart Mill for spelling out the rationale and mechanics of vouchers a century before Brown.

Read the full article at aei.org

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Frederick M. Hess is a resident scholar and the director of Education Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, where he works on K–12 and higher education issues.