In the early 1970s, the conservative University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman and the left-leaning Harvard researcher Christopher Jencks (who had earlier coauthored The American Negro College, a scathing assessment of Historically Black Colleges and Universities) both supported America’s first voucher experiment in the Alum Rock School District in San Jose, California. The experiment, funded by the federal government’s Office of Economic Opportunity and conducted in a low-wealth school district primarily populated by minority children, produced inconclusive results.

However, vouchers were utilized as a buffer against the implementation of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision by which the U.S. Supreme Court desegregated America’s public schools. During that period, several white state legislatures in the eleven states of the old Confederacy quickly passed laws which provided funding for all-white segregated academies, the earliest vouchers, to prevent white children from having to attend public schools with their African American peers. Later, in 1990, the Wisconsin Legislature passed the first modern day voucher bill targeting the Milwaukee Public Schools, a majority-minority district where the students were mostly poor.

This time, the advocates of vouchers included low-income African American parents and their black legislative representatives. Since that time, vouchers and broader school choice—privately operated virtual and bricks and mortar charter schools, publicly-funded religious schools, and a host of corporations given contacts to manage under-achieving public schools—have arrived at the trough of public education funding to “wet their beaks.” These new advocates for the privatization and undoing of public schools and public education, in general, have used a bevy of euphemisms to make their collective ravaging of K-12 public education more palatable.

The names include Opportunity Scholarships, Achievement Districts, and a System of Schools, the latter coined by the premier African American school choice advocate, Dr. Howard Fuller, who has been a front for both Republican and Democratic elected officials from coast-to-coast and presidential administrations. To facilitate these efforts in minority communities, right-wing foundations and corporations have established and funded national non-profit organization, i.e., Black Alliance for Educational Options (BAEO) and Hispanic CREO (Council for Reform and Educational Options) to give the appearance of minority involvement in this policy.

These efforts have continued to be carried out at an increasing rate as the moneyed elite have mutually decreed that unrestrained school choice is what is best for low-income students of color and for the profit margins of corporate America. The school choice crusade has included left- and right-wing scholars, politicians, and presidential administrations that have been on both sides of the issue. For example, former Presidents Bush, 41 and 43 (R), were strong proponents of vouchers and charters: 41 proposing the first federal voucher bill and 43 implementing it. Presidents Clinton and Obama (D) eschewed vouchers but avidly promoted charter schools, with Obama putting them on steroids with his Race to the Top bill in 2009 which was one of his first educational initiatives.

The latest dustup, between school choice backers who have been on both sides of the debate, is between Dr. Linda Darling-Hammond and her colleagues and Dr. Diane Ravitch and her allies who are viewed as strong supporters of public education. Darling-Hammond former Dean of Stanford University’s School of Education, and an internationally known expert on teacher education and Ravitch is former Assistant Secretary of Education in the H.W. Bush Administration who was in the room when some of the most radical school choice schemes were proposed and which she supported in the early 1990s.

Darling-Hammond has recently released a controversial report, “The Tapestry of American Public Education: How Can We Create a System of Schools Worth Choosing for All?” by the Learning Policy Institute. It asserts that all elements of school choice can be incorporated in this educational framework. Ravitch and her colleague Carol Burris take exception to that view, emphasizing that charter schools and their patrons will never acquiesce to equity and fairness in their operations because they have no consistent, overall history of doing so.

They note that the choice examples, magnet schools to encourage school desegregation, themed schools, and other public school choice strategies, are of a different ilk than the corporate-focused school choice which is the prevailing type today. To get a true picture of school choice, one only has to follow the money. Despite the phony positive findings of non-scientific studies perpetrated by the conservative right which they have used their public relations staff to market in their own academic journals and in the popular print and broadcast media, charter schools and vouchers have not worked for the masses of poor minority students for whom they were allegedly designed to serve.

There is unlikely to be a fair and equitable establishment of a school choice model as proposed by Darling-Hammond because the activists behind it have no power to dictate the terms. School choice is about money; it always has been, and the evidence suggests that it always will be.