How School Choice Became a Right-Wing Cause

Making sense of the Red State Strategy

Dear reader: should you ever have the privilege of writing a book, inevitably there will come a day when you find yourself on the receiving end of a review that is, well, not so nice. When this day arrives, you have two choices: ignoring said nasty review, the approach favored by my co-author, education historian Jack Schneider. Or there’s my approach: read, re-read, and discuss endlessly with a loved one. (Though ‘discussion’ here implies a two-way exchange!)

So when our new book, The Education Wars: A Citizen’s Guide and Defense Manual, was reviewed in the conservative-ish journal EdNext, I had to know the verdict. For one thing, EdNext, which I think of as the centrist education reform organ (charter schools are great! Get tougher on teachers and kids!) is a serious publication. In other words, whatever the ‘take,’ it’s flattering to make it onto their radar.

Alas, reader, the reviewer, Anna Egalite, an education professor at North Carolina State, was not a fan. And while there were many, many areas in which our analysis was found to be wanting, the main critique was this: we paint school choice as a right-wing cause when it is a bi-partisan, multi-racial movement.

First of all, it is absolutely the case that many unlikely bedfellows have rallied around the cause of choice over the decades, from hardcore southern Segregationists, to liberal Catholics, to civil rights advocates. For a thorough (and I mean THOROUGH) look at how much this coalition has transformed since school vouchers became a thing in the 1950’s, I highly recommend Cara Fitzgerald’s book, The Death of Public School: How Conservatives Won the War Over Education in America. (I reviewed it here last year.)

But here’s the thing – while our book contains plenty of history (thanks Jack!), it picks up with the present-day state of the coalition supporting “education freedom,” and what we find is this: today, vouchers, education savings accounts, tax credit scholarships etc are a right-wing cause. Our argument, that conservatives have been stoking the flames of culture war in order to seed the ground for school privatization, is based both on our observations of what’s been happening in red states as well as what voucher proponents have been announcing.

Back in 2021, EdNext, the same publication that complained about our insufficient acknowledgement of bipartisanship, ran a piece authored by a trio of prominent school choice advocates, urging their fellows to abandon bipartisanship. It’s in another book, though, that the logic of the ‘Red State Strategy’ truly blooms into full flower.

The Red State Strategy

This summer, self-proclaimed school choice evangelist Corey A. DeAngelis, PhD, published a book entitled The Parent Revolution: Rescuing Your Kids from the Radicals Ruining Our Schools. The book got a bit lost, first because of a glut of ‘radicals ruining’ tomes that appeared around the same time, then by revelations regarding the author’s personal life. Which is a shame, because DeAngelis’ description of voucher proponents’ intentional shift in political strategy is genuinely enlightening as well as potentially useful to those who are trying to stem the tide of school privatization.

The first part of DeAngelis’ argument–that the pandemic turbocharged parent activism, unleashing a school choice revolution–is by now the stuff of myth. But the evolution of what he calls the Red State Strategy is less familiar. The school choice movement, he argues, had spent decades trying to win over Democrats, using messaging about civil rights and disadvantaged kids, and what it had gotten them?

“[T]he school-choice movement writ large was avoiding the very arguments that might appeal to conservative, rural Republicans out of a concern that those arguments would turn off Democrats. But if the Democrats weren’t on board anyway, what did we have to lose?”

What he calls the “hyperpartisan” approach would also dispose of another perennial frustration: the rural GOP holdouts who’d consistently managed to hold back the education freedom revolution. Now, instead of trying to win over Democratic lawmakers and their supporters, the school choice movement would go hard at rural Republicans, knocking out any of those who were insufficiently loyal to what was now a “litmus test” issue for the GOP.

If you’re in Texas, Tennessee or Iowa, for example, you know exactly what this looks like. Incumbent rural GOP lawmakers suddenly found themselves swamped by mailers and ads paid for by an alphabet-soup’s worth of school choice PACS. And the strategy quickly proved effective. In Iowa, four rural Republicans who’d opposed vouchers were ousted. In Texas, six of eight anti-voucher incumbents lost their races.

Shifting right

A clear mandate for school vouchers, yes? Well, not exactly. You see, when DeAngelis expresses frustration that school choice advocates are too focused on tired arguments about civil rights, now downgraded to “Left wing racialist orthodoxy,” when they could be learning into the sorts of arguments that appeal to rural conservatives, he’s not talking about education issues. It turns out that however much Fox News and the right wing mediasphere may focus on the school or teacher outrage story of the day, vouchers are not a priority for GOP primary voters.

So how do you oust GOP holdouts over an issue that voters aren’t particularly inflamed about? Here’s where yet another book comes in handy. In Hostages No More, the author, one Betsy DeVos, describes her frustration that GOP voters didn’t share her same passion for ‘education freedom,’ in this case charter schools.

“So we made the strategic decision that our communications with voters–mostly direct mail and radio in these rural districts –wouldn’t be limited to education. We would highlight any relevant issue to help our friends and hurt our opponents.”

Which neatly sums up the Red State Strategy. Knock out rural Republicans, but by focusing on issues that have nothing to do with the issue they’ve been holding on. The state reps who were ousted in Texas, for example, were painted as RINO open-border types. In Wyoming, anti-voucher Republicans found themselves on the receiving end of a barrage of big money mailers and ads, funded by out of state PACS, alleging that they were guilty of—well, no one could say exactly. Barry Crago, a Wyoming state senator who was targeted but survived a primary challenged, described the tidal wave this way:

“These mailers are not based in fact at all. You spend all of your time refuting lies that these people know are lies. And so instead of just having conversations about real things, about real policies, about problems affecting Wyoming, we're talking about some made up lie that someone from Virginia or Texas made up.”

Which brings us, at last, to what’s so truly disturbing about the shift in school choice strategy. By aiming to eliminate opposition to vouchers by whatever means necessary, the school choice lobby and its deep-pocketed donors are driving the GOP in an ever more extreme direction, all because their “litmus test” issue doesn’t actually rank as a priority for the party’s own voters.

In Parent Revolution, Corey DeAngelis describes presenting the Red State Strategy to a number of what he refers to disparagingly as ‘legacy education reform groups’:

[B]ut we didn’t not find a receptive audience. Even if it worked in a few deep red states, this hyperpartisan strategy was going to backfire in the long run. Tying school choice too closely to one party would make it impossible for anyone associated with the other party to embrace it.

This is the year that we’ll find out if they were correct.

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