alternatehistory.com

Just a thought. Not sure how much traction the idea will get.

Here's an article from Philadelphia Magazine in an alternate 2018

Philadelphia Magazine
In Pennsylvania, a Choice over School Choice looms over Harrisburg

10 April 2018

HARRISBURG. Pennsylvania’s public school system is one of the oldest in the country, and it served as the model for public schools for nearly two centuries. Now Pennsylvania is weighing the decision to join the 33 other states that have adopted a decentralized approach that has gained favor since the Brooke Administration.

To understand how the state arrived in this situation it is necessary to explore how the choice-based system arose. Following the Brown vs the Board of Education decision in 1954, schools were officially required to desegregate. However, a ruling a year later stated that this must proceed with “all deliberate speed,” a vague phrasing which in essence allowed segregated schools to stay that way indefinitely.

Wavering on the part of then-President Stevenson compounded matters. Stevenson’s decision to not federalize the Arkansas national guard to enforce Brown sent a signal to the South that no actual progress on integration had to be made. It was this decision that many people believe ended the period from 1932 to 1960 in which the black vote was up for grabs, pushing black voters back into the arms of the Republican Party. Victories by Republicans in urban areas such as Philadelphia’s own Arlen Specter cemented this transition.

The Administrations of Richard Nixon and Margaret Chase Smith both pursued integration as a policy goal. However, Republicans in the North, eager to press their advantage in that region, were reluctant to press the issue at the federal level lest they risk their recent gains in the Northeast and Midwest. Instead, it would be the Supreme Court nominations of Presidents Stevenson, Nixon, and Smith that had the greatest effect.

Regardless of his waffling on enforcement, President Stevenson was undoubtedly a liberal in his appointments to our nation’s highest court. Nixon and Smith similarly saw the center right as the furthest right they would go. Consequently when the South’s lax enforcement of integration came before the court there was no doubt that the court would now demand its enforcement. A year later the Court went a step further, ruling in Milliken v. Bradley that segregation via creative drawing of district lines was also verboten.

This decision came amidst the contentious presidential election of 1972. The Democratic party, increasingly dominated by the southern wing and eager for a win that would absolve them of the scandal-ridden Kerner administration, nominated firebreathing governor George Wallace as their candidate. Wallace, taking advantage of the contentious atmosphere as Northern voters became aware of the implications of Milliken for them, quickly rose from longshot successor to a disgraced predecessor to serious contender. Former Vice President George Romney, once the prohibitive frontrunner but lacking Wallace’s ability to relate to ordinary Americans, saw his electoral fortunes dwindle.

In his inaugural address President Wallace quoted another Democratic president a century and a half earlier, saying proudly that “Justice Dewey has made his decision, now let him enforce it.” It was a shocking statement, and the 1973 bill to prohibit the Supreme Court from interfering in matters of “state determinations” would itself be struck down in Wallace vs the Brookings Institute. His sentiment, however, was echoed by a number of Americans.

Wallace’s narrow victory and a flailing economy would prove a drag on his administration, and in 1974 the Republicans, now supported by urban blacks as well as almost all Northern and Western liberals, made serious gains n the midterms, taking the House and coming within a hairsbreadth of taking the Senate. In 1975, with the signing of the Bangkok Agreement ending the Thai Civil War and the passage of the National Medicare Act, the Wallace Administration seemed to get a second win. The Arabian Islamic Revolution and the resulting oil shock and stagflation put a kibosh on that.

And so it was that when Senator Edward Brooke of Massachusetts defeated Wallace with over 400 electoral votes in 1976, propelling the GOP to a majority in both houses of Congress. While the 1978 midterms would quickly put Democrat Jim Wright in the Speaker’s chair, the first two years of the Brooke Administration, 1977 would be the year the school crisis would end.

The National Education Integration and Innovation Act would pave the way for the adoption of a decentralized choice-based system in most states. It established block grants for participating states to help allow the states to set a contract with private schools in which, in return for teaching a state-approved curriculum, the state would give parents vouchers with which to pay for their child’s education. Participating schools must accept these vouchers regardless of race or ethnicity. Busing would remain in public schools,

Over the course of the 1980s, 22 states signed onto the system, while 14 more would follow suit in the 1990s and early 2000s. Proponents stated that allowing parents a choice in where they sent their child to school would encourage innovation and competition in education. Detractors claimed that it allowed for the creation of so-called “segregation academies,” private schools that charged money on top of the voucher, leaving them out of reach for low-income and in particular African-American students.

Where does the system stand today? The proposal in Harrisburg, the product of a Democratic trifecta in the state house and counterintuitively Republican strength in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, is the first new voucher proposal since Vermont officially adopted the system in 2004. Since the system’s peak in 2002, three states, Virginia, Kentucky, and Michigan, have switched from a voucher system back to a local district-based system.

The statistics do indicate a racial disparity. In Alabama, only 11% of private school students are African-American, compared to 28% of school-age students statewide. When income is considered the disparity is even greater, with only 8% of students in private schools living below the poverty line, compared with 34% of school age children statewide.

Geography is often the biggest segregator. While areas such as downstate New York and the Boston area, both endowed with excellent public transportation and state transportation vouchers for parents, have shown significant improvement, states with poorer transportation such as Oklahoma and Arizona have some of the highest levels of educational inequality in the country.

Is a voucher system worth it for Pennsylvania? Surprisingly, the areas that would benefit most also elect state legislators who would oppose it. Apart from pockets of Democratic control in Northeast and South Philadelphia, the Philadelphia area, with its world-class public transportation infrastructure, might see similar benefits to New York and Boston, with students in West Philadelphia having the option of taking advantage of schools in neighboring Lower Merion and Havertown, and students in the Southwest part of the city able to attend schools in Media and Springfield.

Students in North Philadelphia, however, would see minimal benefits, as budgetary woes have forced parochial schools to raise tuition and cut costs, leaving many schools in the archdiocese little better-off than city public schools. Private schools like St. Joseph’s Prep charge far more than any voucher would cover.

Outside of the Philadelphia area, the benefits would be marginal at best. Distances between schools in the central part of the state are far, and most parents simply don’t have the time to drive their children to distant private schools.

Even the party that created the system seems to be having its doubts. President Herring recently states that she thought that the system “did very little” to address the educational crisis in her home state of Oklahoma, and that in her experience as president of the public university system in that state applicants still struggled to transition from inadequately-funded schools to the rigors of a university education.

Overall, the failure of the voucher experiment is a story of compromise with the devil (in this case segregationists,) a Faustian bargain that failed to produce the results that were promised to sell it to a skeptical North and West. As legislators in Harrisburg weigh whether to buck the gradual trend against voucherization is yet to be seen, but for the people at large, the verdict is simply that school vouchers didn’t make the grade.
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