Conservatives abandon their support for school vouchers.
By Greg Anrig
n 1955, the libertarian economist Milton Friedman proposed what was, for its time, a radical idea: that schoolchildren be given government-funded vouchers to enable them to attend private schools. As ubiquitous as the notion of "school choice" has since become, Friedman's suggestion didn't immediately catch on, remaining mostly confined to academia for well over a decade. Then, in the 1970s, Lyndon Johnson-era liberals connected with President Nixon's Office of Economic Opportunity suggested that generous vouchers be provided to low-income students, hoping to increase funds available for poor students and promote racial integration. But a coalition of teachers unions and school administrators strenuously objected, and the idea went nowhere.
It wasn't until Ronald Reagan's election to the presidency in 1980 that the modern school voucher movement took shape. Reagan's own relatively modest voucher proposals were repeatedly rebuffed by Congress. However, his ascent unleashed a torrent of money into conservative think tanks and advocacy groups promoting policies that would advance the movement's agenda of weakening the government, and, by extension, the Democratic Party. Conservative activists like William J. Bennett, Jack Kemp, and Clint Bolick seized on vouchers as a particularly potent example, in part because they struck at the heart of the nation's most deeply established governmental activity—public schooling. If conservatives could show that private schools worked better than public ones, and that the introduction of competition improved entire school systems, that would advance their arguments for welfare rollbacks, Social Security privatization, and other initiatives to replace government programs with the free market.
Based on such thinking, the John M. Olin and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundations led the way in pouring millions of dollars into institutions and activities that promoted vouchers and school choice. By 1987, the notion of vouchers had become sufficiently commonplace that Bennett, who had become Reagan's secretary of education, observed: "When I started talking about choice a couple of years ago, it was still regarded as somewhat heretical. Now it seems to be the conventional wisdom." In 1990, the Wisconsin legislature launched the nation's first publicly financed voucher initiative to include private schools in Milwaukee, backed by Tommy Thompson, the reform-minded Republican governor; Annette "Polly" Williams, a liberal African American state legislator; and the pugnacious Michael S. Joyce, the head of the Milwaukee-based Bradley Foundation. The voucher idea received a further infusion of legitimacy that same year from a hugely influential book called Politics, Markets, & America's Schools, by the scholars John E. Chubb and Terry M. Moe. Although the book was funded by the Olin and Bradley Foundations, it was published by the liberal Brookings Institution, where Chubb was a senior fellow. This affiliation suggested, misleadingly, that their argument wasn't rooted in right-wing ideology.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2008/0804.anrig.html 
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