Friday Feature: School Choice Milestones

Colleen HroncichAs we wrap up our National School Choice Week look at the history of school choice, I ’m going to explore some notable milestones in the U.S. over the years. For more in‐​depth coverage, be sure to check out our newSchool Choice Timeline.When we talk about school choice, we generally mean a program where public funding follows students to nonpublic schools. This becomes particularly important after the mid ‐​1800s, when state governments began to mandate taxpayers fund and children attend specific schools established and run by local government entities. Prior to that, education was typically a private or local concern —the domain of parents or small communities.The oldest school choice program in the U.S. is Vermont ’stown tuitioning program. Vermont ’s founding constitution, adopted in 1777, required the legislature to establish a school in each town. As the state grew and the population became more dispersed, some towns could not support a public school. In 1869, the legislature passed a law allowing students from a town without a public school to attend any public or private school in or outside of Vermont, with the sending town paying the receiving school ’s tuition. Originally, parents could choose religious private schools, but that option was removed by the state’s supreme court in 1961. The U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 decision inCarson v. Makinoverturned a similar ban on religious schools in ...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs