The Neo-Malthusian Tribulation

The only hope for the inner city is vouchers, so that all the churches can go in and plant Christian schools in the inner cities and capture these fatherless young people for Christ and teach them biblical discipline and so forth. It's either God or it's ruin for our country, I do believe.

Jerry Falwell, The 700 Club, September 3, 1996

Conservatives often claim that the reason they support school vouchers is because they want to save little black kids in the inner cities. Since when did conservatives give a rat's ass about little black kids in the inner city?

The real intended beneficiaries of vouchers are white, mostly Republican, parents in the suburbs who send or want to sent their children to private and religious schools. Many of these parents resent the fact that they are shelling out money for their own kids' tuition and also have to pay taxes to send other people's kids to public schools.

Whether vouchers would actually help middle income parents send their kids to the most exclusive private schools is highly questionable. Many of these schools already charge tuition in the $20,000 per year range. It is highly unlikely that any vouchers that are offered will be that high. And if, for example, vouchers in the $10,000 range were offered, the most exclusive schools would simply adjust their tuition accordingly, to $30,000 per year. Parents who can already afford a $20,000 tuition would simply take the voucher and pay the difference. They want and will pay to send their children to exclusive schools, where they will not have to mingle with the hoi polloi.

Conservatives have a litany of complaints against the public schools, many of which they are reluctant to openly discuss, that go all the way back to Brown v. Board of Education. An old segregationist saying in the South says that the Supreme Court, under Earl Warren, "Took the Bible out of our schools and put the Negro in," only they didn't use those exact words. Conservatives resented racial integration, school busing, the absence of overt Christian instruction, the presence of instruction in evolutionary biology, and the liberal political influence of public school teachers' unions, which traditionally support and contribute to the Democratic Party.

Conservatives generally attribute the idea of vouchers to the late libertarian economist Milton Friedman, who wrote Capitalism and Freedom in 1962. Friedman's ideas were frequently controversial, but he was intellectually respectable and he was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science in 1976.

Friedman surely did advocate school vouchers in Capitalism and Freedom, and he may have discussed the idea in the 1950s, but was he really the first? A little known Virginia school desegregation case, Griffin v. County School Board, 377 U.S. 218 reached the United States Supreme Court in 1964. As part of the campaign of massive resistance against the Supreme Court's 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, the school board of Prince Edward County simply shut down the public schools altogether and adopted a voucher or "freedom of choice" plan, explaining that

The School Board of this county is confronted with a court decree which requires the admission of white and colored children to all the schools of the county without regard to race or color. Knowing the people of this county as we do, we know that it is not possible to operate the schools of this county within the terms of that principle and, at the same time, maintain an atmosphere conducive to the educational benefit of our people.

Prince Edward County initially adopted the "tuition grant" or voucher policy in 1956, but the case makes clear that the Virginia's tuition grant program began in 1930 to aid to children who had lost their fathers in World War I.

The Prince Edward County plan was not fully implemented until 1959 due to various challenges in the federal and Virginia court systems, and various actions by the Virginia legislature, but eventually the public schools were closed, school taxes in the county were not levied, and a private organization, the Prince Edward School Foundation operated private schools for white students only. From 1959 until the Supreme Court ordered the school board to reopen the public schools, black students in Prince Edward County were effectively deprived of educational opportunities.