As communities across the nation are experiencing heightened tension and acrimony, including fights over “parents’ rights” concerning public school classroom curricula and library books, a wave of states are implementing “universal vouchers.” These allow public dollars to follow any student—not just children with disabilities or those in poor-performing schools—to private schools, among other uses. As of July 2023, seven states had initiated a universal voucher program. Nine more had expanded existing programs. According to Education Week, “Private school choice is not a new thing, but what we’re seeing now is very new.”
One prominent example from this past February is the Arkansas Learns Act, introduced by Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, which includes vouchers to provide up to $6,600 per student attending a private school. It is no accident that Deep South states are represented in this movement en force, as this is the very region where efforts to divert public dollars to private schools first began. Uncovering the racist legacy of the nation’s first major expansion of private schools—in the post-Brown V. Board of Education South—offers important context for parents as they weigh whether they should trade public for private schools and support the use of vouchers to do so.
Many Americans are familiar with images from Central High School in 1957, when President Dwight Eisenhower sent in the National Guard to escort the “Little Rock Nine” to class, integrating the school. What is less known is that the following year, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus retaliated, closing all Little Rock public high schools. The school board tried to lease the high school buildings to a newly formed group that intended to operate an all-white high school using public funds, a move successfully blocked by the NAACP. Undaunted, Faubus purchased buildings on the public dime to house the hastily formed Raney High School. The school enrolled 800 white students that year. Before the public schools reopened in 1959, state funding for displaced white students spurred the opening of two more all-white private schools, the first of what came to be known as “segregation academies”—private schools established with the express purpose of excluding Black students.
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Elsewhere across the South, resistance to public school integration dragged on for years. Securing public funding for all-white private schools was the go-to solution in the face of integration mandates. In 1964, the Mississippi legislature created a voucher program for students attending nonreligious private schools. Immediately, this prompted the founding of three private segregation academies. Hoping to spawn more schools, the White Citizen’s Council in its journal The Citizen offered step-by-step instructions, assuring anxious parents in 1964 that the State of Mississippi would “pay up to $185 a year to each child in a nonsectarian school for tuition purposes.” The Citizen opined, “[Parents] want their children to be raised and educated free from the tensions of racial conflict in the classroom, free from the frustrating drag of mass mediocrity, and free from the blight of self-styled progressive educators whose avowed aim is to turn young Americans from the established inheritance of their fathers to alien theories of collectivism and anti-white racism.”
After 1960, the fraction of students in private schools fell)" href="https://urldefense.com/v3/__https:/www.jstor.org/stable/1493324__;!!F0Stn7g!GD8oDAwep_j3m1RAkjYhAM79zYbLsKSeNSWRornncKfGtMYhm9TjFOB_4cosOYpG1VijAYCLMIbRE89MNgZfuIjONYE$">fell in all other regions but grew rapidly in the South. In Mississippi, for example, private school enrollment spiked from 3.5 percent of all students in 1967 to more than 10 percent in 1972, driven by the exodus of white students from public schools. By 1975, approximately 750,000 white students were attending segregation academies across the South. Public funds were “vitally important in the founding and support of many segregation academies,” per the Yale Law Journal. According to one historian, in some instances, “entire student bodies moved from formerly all-white public schools to new private schools,” built with public funds, legally and otherwise. Books and other school materials were transferred to the new schools, along with desks, blackboards, and even buses, secured via hastily organized “purchases” for pennies on the dollar.
Whites also tried to steal the identity and legacy of the local public schools. “They took along the trappings of the old school, its colors, its teams, mascots, symbols, its student newspaper, leaving behind the shell of the building,” write educational historians David Nevin and Robert Bills.
Even today, the link between vouchers and resistance to integration in the South is not a subtle one. Two months after Arkansas Governor Sanders announced the LEARNS Act, her attorney general filed motions in U.S. District Court to end decades-long federal desegregation orders in three school districts, orders which would have precluded students in those districts from participating in the voucher program.
Of the 82 non-special-needs schools that had been approved for the Arkansas LEARNS Act by Aug. 10, we uncovered at least 11 that were founded between 1964 and 1975, the best proxy for a former segregation academy. Many others not founded with racist intent also have predominantly white student bodies, including those in parts of the state with a substantial Black population. Typical of its peers, the former segregation school Pulaski Academy, in Little Rock, now has a non-discriminatory admissions policy but a student body that is 8 percent Black, in a city where Blacks are the majority.
Meanwhile, Mississippi is attempting to divert $10 million in American Rescue Plan dollars to private schools, a move that was ruled unconstitutional in October 2022 when a suit was brought on behalf of Parents for Public Schools. Mississippi’s attorney general appealed this ruling in May 2023, charging that the group had no standing, as it was the schools and students—not the parents—who would be adversely affected by funneling federal dollars to private schools. This challenge has not yet been resolved.
More and more Northern states are adopting the same strategies that their Southern counterparts used to evade Brown—diverting public dollars to private schools (eight non-Southern states to date have implemented universal vouchers) or implementing other schemes, such as Educational Savings Accounts (ESLs) or tax credits, to accomplish the same ends. In nearly every case, there has been strong opposition from practitioners and parents alike. Yet this has not slowed the trend.
Ongoing segregation and resegregation of America’s schools are colossal human and policy failures. In Arkansas and elsewhere, redirecting public funds to private schools will almost certainly perpetuate the very inequalities that so many of the post-Brown southern segregation schools were created to preserve. It is students—especially but not only students who are Black, rural, with disabilities, and from families with low income—who once again stand to lose the most from these radical state-level schemes.
Part of the push toward universal vouchers, no doubt, is that some parents are dissatisfied with the quality of the public schools available to them. Yet there is no evidence that universal vouchers will solve that problem. Improving public schools isn’t easy, but one strategy can significantly move the needle. There is strong evidence that increasing the pay of new teachers improves student outcomes. Higher starting salaries attract more talented people into the profession and keep them there longer. It can allow them to be more fully devoted to teaching rather than being forced to do odd jobs like driving for Uber or Instacart to get by. In addition to introducing universal vouchers to students attending private schools, the Arkansas LEARNS Act also increases the minimum salaries for new public school teachers to $50,000 per year.
In fact, a movement to increase teacher pay is sweeping across the South, but these efforts haven’t gone far enough. In some places, like Texas, conversations about universal vouchers are well underway while teacher salaries, which remain woefully low, are ignored. Honoring America’s public school teachers by ensuring they receive a fair paycheck for their labor is one strategy that can significantly boost children’s learning outcomes without running the risk of resegregating the nation’s schools. That is evidence-based policy that can have an impact on the education of all of our kids.
Kathryn J. Edin, Timothy J. Nelson, and H. Luke Shaefer are the authors of The Injustice of Place: Uncovering Poverty in America.
