![]() ![]() It was part of a larger movement since the 1970s, one that linked liberal academics, urban minority parents and libertarian economist Milton Friedman, among others, in demanding that parents be given the power to take their children out of schools that weren’t teaching and to use schools that would try something better. Fitzpatrick extensively chronicles the effort by Milwaukee legislator Polly Williams, who settled on school choice as a way of empowering poor African-American families poorly served by the Milwaukee Public Schools. Virgil Blum, worked from the 1950s onward in urging that state aid follow children to religious schools as a way of preserving First Amendment liberty in a pluralist America. While she spends many pages on the fortunately short-lived attempts in the 1960s South to use vouchers to avoid integration, Milwaukeeans with honest motives figure large in her book.Ī Marquette University political scientist and Jesuit, Fr. Still, if Americans’ view of schooling really has expanded, I have one thing to say:įitzpatrick’s book is a 70-year history of the effort to give parents without the means to pay both taxes and tuition some say in the form of their children’s schooling. I’d say more accurate words are “deficient in,” “stripped of” or “bereft,” but a neutral “without” would do. “Free of”? One is free of chains or illness. It no longer is only, as she writes, schools that are government-run, tax-paid, answerable to voters and “free of religious instruction.” When her subtitle says, “How conservatives won the war over education in America,” she said, she means that boundaries have been blurred and the definition of “public education” expanded in Americans’ minds. Instead, “it’s sort of this war over ideas and definitions,” she told her interlocutor. The author, Cara Fitzpatrick, interviewed on stage, quickly conceded that public schools aren’t dead. ![]() Of the 866,000 Wisconsin kids getting a state-funded K-12 education as of this fall, 92.3% get one in a plain old public school, down only a tick from 92.7% last fall. You should note first that the corpse is missing. ![]()
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