The School Voucher / School Choice Movement

The school voucher movement has two distinct genealogies that converged in the Religious Right's education agenda: a libertarian/economic origin in Milton Friedman's 1955 essay 'The Role of Government in Education,' and a segregationist origin in the post-Brown v. Board (1954) Southern 'massive resistance' movement, which used state-funded vouchers to maintain white-only private schools. This history — vouchers as a tool of segregation — was documented by historian Nancy MacLean and others, and is inseparable from understanding the policy's political function. By the 1980s, the Heritage Foundation had adopted school choice as a core policy agenda item, providing the intellectual infrastructure and legislative templates for voucher programs. Heritage's 1983 education policy papers framed choice as a free-market education reform, providing secular economic justification for a policy with explicitly religious motivations among its Religious Right advocates. The Religious Right's engagement with school choice had a distinct theological rationale. Leaders like James Dobson framed public schools as hostile to Christianity and promoted home schooling and private Christian education as acts of cultural resistance. But home schooling and private Christian schools were economically inaccessible to many evangelical families — they required a parent who could teach full-time, or private school tuition. Vouchers and tax credits would solve this access problem by making private religious education free or affordable using public money. Betsy DeVos gave the clearest articulation of the Religious Right's school choice motivation in a 2001 recording at The Gathering, an annual meeting of wealthy Christian donors. Describing her school choice advocacy, she said the goal was to 'advance God's Kingdom' and produce 'greater kingdom gain.' She described public education as having 'displaced' the church as the center of community life, and vouchers as a means to reverse that displacement. The recording makes a religious motive explicit alongside the policy case. Dick and Betsy DeVos worked for passage of Michigan's first charter-school law in 1993, then led the failed 2000 ballot initiative to amend Michigan's constitution to allow tax-credit scholarships. After that defeat, DeVos founded the Great Lakes Education Project PAC to continue the fight. Her family gave tens of millions in political donations, with school choice advocacy as a central priority. The movement achieved federal power when Donald Trump appointed DeVos as U.S. Secretary of Education in January 2017 (confirmed by Vice President Pence's tie-breaking vote, unprecedented in cabinet confirmation history). As Secretary, DeVos redirected the Department of Education toward expanding charter schools and voucher programs, reduced accountability requirements for schools receiving federal funds, and used federal regulatory power to advance religious school access to public funding — a project substantially completed by the Supreme Court's Espinoza v. Montana (2020) and Carson v. Makin (2022) rulings, which progressively dismantled state-level constitutional barriers to public funding of religious schools. The school choice movement's relationship to public education is not incidentally hostile — it is structurally so. Redirecting students and funding from public to private schools weakens public school budgets, reducing their quality and making private alternatives more attractive. Critics including Diane Ravitch documented that this spiral effect was a predictable — and for some advocates, intended — consequence of voucher expansion.

Themes this entry appears in

• Christian Nationalism
• Education
• Political Strategy
• Anti-Democratic
• Race & Civil Rights

Connections to The School Voucher / School Choice Movement

• Lynde & Harry Bradley Foundation influenced (1990) — The Milwaukee Parental Choice Program — the first publicly funded voucher program in American history, created by the Wisconsin legislature in 1990 — became the Bradley Foundation's model, and Bradley funded its national replication, directly driving the school voucher movement's institutional expansion. Bradley also funded the program's legal defense; the Wisconsin Supreme Court upheld the expanded program in Jackson v. Benson (1998), and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review it. (The 2002 U.S. Supreme Court voucher ruling, Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, concerned Cleveland's program.) Bradley then funded advocacy organizations, media campaigns, and policy research in dozens of states to replicate the Milwaukee model. This systematic investment made Bradley the intellectual and financial engine of the voucher movement nationwide.
• Betsy DeVos influenced (1993) — DeVos was the school choice movement's most powerful political operative and donor for three decades: championing Michigan's 1993 charter school law, leading the 2000 Michigan ballot initiative, founding the Great Lakes Education Project PAC, donating tens of millions to Republican causes (school choice as central priority), and finally wielding federal power as Education Secretary 2017–2021 to advance the agenda nationally.
• Richard DeVos Sr. influenced (1990) — Richard DeVos Sr. and the broader DeVos family were among the largest private funders of the school voucher movement, contributing tens of millions to voucher advocacy organizations and ballot campaigns across multiple states. The DeVos family funded voucher ballot initiatives in Michigan and other states, contributed to the American Federation for Children (which Dick DeVos Jr. helped found), and maintained relationships with every major voucher advocacy organization in the country. Critics see their investment in vouchers as tied to their Christian school agenda: vouchers would allow public money to flow to the network of Christian schools that the Religious Right had built as an alternative to secular public education.
• Heritage Foundation influenced (1983) — The Heritage Foundation provided the school choice movement with policy papers, legislative templates, and free-market economic framing — a secular free-market case that politicians could make without invoking religious goals, alongside the explicitly religious case made by DeVos and others.
• Republican Revolution (1994) influenced (1994) — The 104th Congress elected in 1994 made school choice a legislative priority as part of the Gingrich Revolution's Contract with America agenda. Republicans introduced federal voucher proposals and pursued legislation that would redirect federal education dollars toward private and religious schools. While the federal voucher bills stalled in Congress or were vetoed, the 1994 Congress's advocacy normalized school choice as Republican policy and produced state-level legislation in multiple states. The Bradley Foundation, DeVos family, and other school choice funders had been building the organizational infrastructure for vouchers for years; the 1994 Republican takeover gave that infrastructure unprecedented access to legislative power.

Sources

• Betsy DeVos: Education reform can 'advance God's Kingdom' — The Advocate (reporting Politico's release of 2001 audio) (2016)
• The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism — Katherine Stewart (2020), pp. 96–130
• How Milton Friedman Aided and Abetted Segregationists in His Quest to Privatize Public Education — Nancy MacLean (2019)
• School Vouchers and the Efforts to Undermine Public Education — Southern Poverty Law Center (2017)
• Thy Kingdom Come: How the Religious Right Distorts the Faith and Threatens America — Randall Balmer (2006), pp. 148–172
• Miseducation of Betsy DeVos — Dissent Magazine (2017)