"Parental Rights" as a Pro-Voucher Slogan

BY STEVE NUZUM

School vouchers have never been consistently popular in the United States. When Milton Friedman-style anti-regulation advocates and white supremacist segregationists found that they had a shared antipathy for taxpayer-funded American public schools, they branded school vouchers as a way for parents to take control of their children’s educations.

What they created, particularly in the post-Reconstruction South, were segregation academies, often under the umbrella of “independent schools”. 

As former segregationist Tom Turnipseed wrote in 2005, “SCISA’s [the South Carolina Independent Schools Association] stated purpose was to aid in the establishment of private elementary and secondary schools and to coordinate cooperative academic and sports activities. The unstated purpose was to avoid the federally court-ordered racial desegregation of the public schools.” 

Turnipseed, who helped to found SCISA during the school integration era, and who later became an anti-racism activist, explicitly tied “parental rights” rhetoric to the efforts to build a network of publicly-funded segregation academies: “We bristled with indignation when reporters referred to SCISA as an association of ‘segregated academies’. We preferred to emphasize that we were simply putting parents in charge and giving them a choice of more educational opportunities for their children.”

This echoes the “Southern strategy” of 1960s politics where, as one of its chief architects, Lee Atwater, would later admit, politicians would use coded messages intended to evoke anti-Black sentiments without explicitly making racist statements. In an interview published after his death, Atwater said by making references to busing and taxes in ways that harmed “Blacks worse than Whites,”  “I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract and that coded, that we’re doing away with the racial problem one way or the other, you follow me?” 

And, of course, in 2005, Turnipseed was explicitly responding to a “school choice” proposal under then- South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford. The proposed legislation, Turnipseed warned, was part of a long trend of the state neglecting the educations of “blacks and poor whites”. 

Of course, this doesn’t mean that everyone wielding the rhetoric of “parental rights” was, or is, a white supremacist. But it does demonstrate that much of the fuel for the voucher movement was, and is, tied up with unspoken ideological and political goals that would be unpopular with most Americans if stated directly. 

It’s no coincidence that contemporary efforts at passing school vouchers or other “school choice” policies similarly relies on coded messaging, or that many of its proponents also push racist, homophobic, misogynistic, and/ or transphobic rhetoric. 

The movement, until the past few years, made efforts to win over a broad coalition of supporters, even attempting to court minority groups by promising that “school choice” would lift all boats, and would give special attention to traditionally underserved groups, or to students with special needs.

In practice, multiple studies have found that “school choice” tends to disproportionately benefit wealthy families and/ or families which were already paying for private school tuition or other private educational services. Many voucher bills become, in essence, a government subsidy for people who could already afford private schools; they also don’t seem to incentivize the construction of a private educational infrastructure that brings lasting, quality programs and schools to communities that didn’t already have them. And despite the efforts of advocates for students with disabilities and students from minority groups, most voucher laws allow schools and educational service providers receiving voucher money to discriminate against students on the basis of religion, gender identity, sexual orientation, and other factors. 

So when voucher proponents attempt to draw an unfavorable distinction between “government schools” and “parental choice,” they’re making a distinction without a difference. After all, the system they envision is still funded by the government, and still at least tangentially directed by political forces, but without the public accountability or regulatory oversight required of public schools. 

Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership, whose policy goals have provided a pretty accurate blueprint for current federal executive educational policies, calls for the elimination of diversity, equity, and inclusion plans, the elimination of government regulation of gender identity, and other identity-based attacks on minority groups. And it also calls for “universal school choice,” something the new federal budget (the so-called “Big Beautiful Bill”) funds at an unprecedented level. 

So do parents have rights? Legally, their rights are real, but limited. The law doesn’t allow parents to abuse students, to exploit them sexually, to neglect them, or to deny them an education. 

Socially, I think most people recognize that parents acting in the best interest of their students have prerogatives that have to be weighed carefully against larger social interests. Parents, ideally, know their children better than anyone else. Ideally, they have a vested interest in their children’s well-being. 

(Crucially, even organizations with an explicit “parental rights” mission, like Moms for Liberty, have often pushed for systemic reforms in what and how schools can teach. In other words, they functionally believe that their policy preferences should transcend what many parents want. For example, in opposing what they call “gender ideology,” they are also opposing something that many parents, including parents of trans and gender-nonconforming students, have explicitly advocated for including in schools. Unless only some parents have “parental rights”-- which might very well be what Moms for Liberty actually believes-- parental rights must therefore be limited.)

But, of course, not all children grow up in ideal situations, and most parents are not equipped to provide for every academic need that a student in modern society needs. And so most people recognize a need to balance parental interests, the interests of children, and the interests of society.

This, of course, is why we have public schools, a product, in most states, of Reconstruction, made possible in states like South Carolina by majority- Black legislative delegations that represented a belief that public education could be not only a social equalizer but a safeguard for real democracy, where all citizens had rights and would be a part of national discussions about policy.

To be blunt, it’s doubtful the framers of our federal and state constitutions would take seriously the idea that simply having children gives people the right to significantly interfere with educational infrastructure. 

And it’s pretty clear that the authors of our current state constitution explicitly rejected public funding of private and religious schools precisely because they saw such funding as an existential threat to the system of free public schools required by the same constitution. 

When I was a teacher, I took the preferences and concerns of parents very seriously. Whenever it was possible to do so ethically, I deferred to parental requests. I changed reading assignments. I provided accommodations. I tried to structure my classes around both student needs and parental input. 

But I also taught students whose parents hurt them, physically or emotionally. I taught students whose parents disagreed with the fundamental principles required by the state standards. I taught students whose parents didn’t want them to be in school at all, and would have allowed them not to attend if the law didn’t require attendance. 

This doesn’t mean that those parents stopped being an important voice in deciding what educational opportunities and services their children got, but it put the lie to the idea that being parents automatically entitled them to opt their children out of the education their children need to be constructive members of society. And at times it meant that I had to file reports that could ultimately remove their right to parent their children at all, in the cases of unlawful abuse or neglect. 

I think anyone who has actually given serious thought to the idea of “parental rights” knows that to present them as absolutes is inherently ridiculous. Because, most importantly, children have rights, too. And society also has the prerogative to decide how and what we fund. 

It’s very possible that South Carolina’s current school voucher program-- which the SC Department of Education has claimed, without providing evidence, has already chosen recipients for all of its allotted money for the coming school year-- will be found to be unconstitutional in the coming months. (It certainly violates the explicit text of the state constitution.) 

But even if that happens, our country will still be facing a crisis over how we conceive, as a society, of public schools (and other public goods). If schools are supposed to be a social good, then the preferences of individual parents, while important, can’t be allowed to outweigh the larger goods provided by those schools. If giving a vocal minority of parents what they want in the form of government subsidies threatens to further defund our public schools, a mature democratic society will have to deny that vocal minority what it wants.