In recent years, anti-voucher activists have advanced the argument that the school choice movement emerged in the 1950s & 60s as part of an attempt to work around the court-ordered desegregation of Brown v. Board of Education. In this presentation, Professor Phillip Magness will explain that an examination of the writings of early voucher theorists such as Milton Friedman suggests this interpretation is backwards, and in fact Friedman saw vouchers as undermining southern resistance to Brown. Furthermore, neglected historical records show evidence of how public sector unions allied with segregationists to shore up public school monopolies by defeating the mutual threat posed by vouchers.
School Vouchers in the Civil Rights Era: The Economics of Educational Choice and Its Segregationist Opponents
School Vouchers in the Civil Rights Era: The Economics of Educational Choice and Its Segregationist Opponents
May 21, 2018, 12:00 PM-1:00 PM
John Locke Foundation, 200 W. Morgan Street, 2nd Floor, Raleigh, North Carolina 27601