Voucher Left

The Grassroots Free School in Florida, a democratic "free school" with roots in '60s counterculture, supports school choice and accepts tax credit scholarships for low-income students.

Escuela de la Raza Unida sprang from a fight for educational freedom in the Hispanic farmworker community in southern California. It's yet more evidence of the politically diverse roots of school choice in America.

This is the latest post in our occasional series on the center-left roots of school choice. More than 30 years ago, liberal activists working to get a revolutionary plan for school vouchers on the California ballot approached labor leader Cesar Chavez, according to one of those activists, Berkeley law Professor Jack Coons. The co-founder of the United Farm Workers (Si Se Puede!) told Coons he liked school choice, but as far as supporting it publicly, No se puede. Doing so would put the teacher union’s generous financial support for his union at risk, he said. Other evidence suggests Chavez wasn’t just politely telling...

The Netherlands is one of the most liberal nations on the planet. It also has one of the world's most robust systems of parental school choice.

Not long ago, progressives like Harvard sociologist Christopher Jencks, once a leading light of the Voucher Left, strongly supported school choice & dismissed now-popular arguments against it.

No less an American hero than Rosa Parks supported school choice. She proposed a charter school in Detroit to help black children in some of the toughest neighborhoods.

This is the latest in our series on the Voucher Left. Five years after his death, we’re still talking about Steve Jobs. The 2015 movie about him just won two Golden Globes, including one for Aaron Sorkin’s script. His quotes still spur stories. His connection to the San Francisco 49ers somehow inspired an angle for Super Bowl 50. So now seems as good a time as any to highlight (as other folks rightly did after his death) that Jobs, the Apple visionary, was a passionate supporter for school vouchers, and to add what hasn’t been explicitly noted, which is that he was,...

How the left almost pulled off a school choice revolution This is the all-in-one version of our recent serial about efforts to put school vouchers on the 1980 California ballot. It's part of our ongoing series on the center-left roots of choice. The woman stopped the professor as they were leaving church near campus. It was the fall of 1978 in northern California, and Jack Coons was a local celebrity. Or at least as much a celebrity as you can be if you’re a legal scholar who specializes in education finance. He and Stephen Sugarman, a fellow law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, had...