Julie F. Mead

A Smart ALEC Threatens Public Education

Coordinated efforts to introduce model legislation aimed at defunding and dismantling public schools is the signature work of this conservative organization.

Dollars to Discriminate: The (Un)intended Consequences of School Vouchers

Some private, religious schools that accept vouchers have been accused of discriminating against certain populations of students through their admissions processes. Discriminating against disfavored groups (e.g., racial minorities, LGBT students, students with disabilities, religious minorities) in voucher programs raises both legal and policy concerns that have not been extensively examined in recent research. Employing legal research methods, this article examines state voucher statutes and discusses the potential for voucher programs to discriminate against marginalized groups. We argue that each state has an obligation to ensure that any benefit it creates must be available to all students on a nondiscriminatory basis—including the benefit of a publicly funded voucher for attendance at a private school. As this review of existing voucher statutes will demonstrate, legislators appear to have neglected to construct policies that safeguard student access and ensure that public funds do not support discriminatory practices. Without additional safeguards, states risk providing public money that can be used to promote discriminatory policies and practices.

The Implications of the Use of Parental Choice as a Legal “Circuit Breaker”

This study explores four instances where parental choice has been employed as a legal “circuit breaker”: (a) First Amendment Establishment Clause cases related to public funding, (b) Fourteenth Amendment Equal Protection cases regarding race-conscious student assignment, (c) Title IX regulations concerning single-sex education, and (d) a provision of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) related to parental refusal to consent to initial special education services. In each example, while the end result would not be legally permitted if directed by some governmental decision maker, the presence of parental choice produces a permissible indirect path to the same policy outcome. This study traces the legal underpinnings of each example and discusses their implications for policymakers and practitioners.

Revolution and Counter-Revolution: Network Mobilization to Preserve Public Education in Wisconsin.

The early months of 2011 found the whole nation tuning in to view a remarkable sight broadcasted fromMadison,Wisconsin. Scores of protestors occupied the state capitol rotunda, thousandsmore filled the square waving banners, listening to speeches, and singing protest songs. A group of Wisconsin State Senators fled to the neighboring state of Illinois. All of these actions were taken in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to stop a Republican legislature and the newly inaugurated Republican Governor Scott Walker from enacting sweeping changes that would gut the nation’s oldest public employee bargaining statute. The governor’s justification for the revisions was to provide public school districts with new “tools” to control labor costs and to shield schools from the influence of a powerful state teachers’ union (Martin, 2011). These events prompted a University of Wisconsin–Madison history professor, William Cronon, to comment in a blog that a little-known group called ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council) (see Anderson, this volume) was the likely source of the proposals causing such controversy. In response, the state’s Republican Party filed an open records request to identify and release Professor Cronon’s university e-mails that discussed events that used terms including “Republican, Walker, collective bargaining, union” along with others that may have elicited messages that prompted his blog post (Grafton, 2011). This reaction to ALEC’s mention caused the Center for Media and Democracy, also located in Madison, to take note and eventually led to the launching of a substantial research project on ALEC, its membership (both legislative and corporate), and its model bills, culminating in a website titled, “ALEC Exposed” (http://www.alecexposed.org; see also Fischer, 2012; Underwood & Mead, 2012). Fast-forward to February 3, 2015, when the governor proposed yet another significant cut in funding for public education, prohibitions on the use of the Common Core State Standards, elimination of teacher licensure requirements, and policies to significantly advance the privatization of public education, including removing all limitations to the statewide voucher program (Wisconsin Department of Administration, 2015).1 The response to these proposals marked a shift from the earlier protests, as educators and pro-education networks mobilized like never before to engage

Introduction: “The Legal and Policy Issues of Vouchers: Multiple Perspectives on Private School Choice”

This issue of the Peabody Journal of Education presents nine articles that examine publicly funded voucher and voucher-like programs established by states to provide monetary support for parents enrolling their children in private schools. Three types of such programs have evolved over the last two decades: (a) vouchers, programs that provide public funds to pay for private school tuition in whole or part; (b) tax-credit scholarships, programs that permit individuals and corporations to set aside a portion of their taxes for tuition scholarships for private school attendance; and (c) education savings accounts, programs that create individual accounts into which parents may request that per-pupil funds earmarked for public education be deposited instead so that parents may use the funds for a variety of educational expenses, including private school tuition (Prothero, 2015). Currently, 25 states have one or more of these voucher and voucher-like programs (Education Commission of the States, 2015). States have used vouchers for many years. Over a century ago, Maine and Vermont enacted laws to allow local school boards with small student populations to provide students with vouchers to attend public or nonsectarian private schools in neighboring communities rather than erect schools of their own. In the 1950s, Milton Friedman, an economist at the University of Chicago, began to champion the idea of using vouchers as way to create an educational marketplace as an alternative to funding public school districts (Chubb & Moe, 1990). It was not until the 1990s, however, that state legislatures began to adopt voucher and voucher-like programs. The following list provides a brief history of major hallmarks in the development of voucher and voucher-like programs that exist today: