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Brandon Ruder is a communications intern at EdChoice, with his summer 2025 experience sponsored by the Stephenson Institute. His post originally appeared at EdChoice<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n Does school choice have racist roots? Critics claim it does, citing how Southern states misused vouchers after the 1954\u00a0Brown v. Board of Education<\/i>\u00a0Supreme Court decision to maintain segregation. But is that the full story?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n In\u00a0Episode 6<\/span><\/a>\u00a0of the EdChoice Chats podcast, Michael Bindas, a Senior Attorney at the Institute for Justice (IJ), joins EdChoice\u2019s Director of National Research, Mike McShane, to debunk this myth, drawing from his paper\u00a0School Choice is Racist (& Other Myths)<\/i><\/span><\/a>. Bindas argues that school choice predates these racist misuses and that today\u2019s programs promote integration, not segregation.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n To understand the racism claim, Bindas explores how opposition to school choice evolved. Bindas thinks about two periods of the movement: the broader school choice movement and the modern school choice movement. Bindas believes that this split happened in 1990 with the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program. \u201cThe public school establishments, as I like to call them, were determined to prevent these programs from ever being enacted,\u201d said Bindas.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Initially, the controversy surrounding school choice focused more on religion than race.\u00a0 According to Bindas, opponents argued that allowing students to use these programs to attend religious schools violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution (which prohibits Congress from establishing or favoring a religion, often interpreted to ensure the separation of church and state).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Opponents also argued that these programs violated the Blaine Amendments (state constitutions that denied the use of state funds for religious schools) and state constitutional provisions that stopped the public funding of religious and sectarian schools, emphasizing this idea of limiting choice using religion as their primary weapon.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n While this argument was the go-to for school choice opposition for many years, it became increasingly obvious that it wasn\u2019t going to work.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cIn 2002, the U.S. Supreme Court held a case called\u00a0Zelman v. Simmons-Harris<\/i><\/span><\/a>\u00a0that decided it\u2019s perfectly fine to have school choice programs that include religious options, so long as the program is neutral between religion and non-religion and operates based on the choice of parents,\u201d said Bindas, and added that this decision \u201ctook the Establishment Clause issue off the table.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Following the\u00a0Zelman v. Simmons-Harris<\/i>\u00a0case, which dealt with Ohio voucher programs allowing parents to use them for religious schools, several Supreme Court cases and lawsuits backfired on the \u201cpublic school establishments.\u201d These lawsuits and cases, paired with the\u00a0Espinoza<\/i>\u00a0and\u00a0Carson<\/i>\u00a0decisions<\/span><\/a>\u00a0which decided that a state cannot exclude religious schools from school choice programs as it violates the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment (Espinoza<\/i>), and that you cannot distinguish between religious schools and schools that teach through religious lenses (Carson<\/i>), made it clear that the religious argument was no longer viable for those in opposition to school choice.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n In 2017, the Center for American Progress published a paper that, Bindas said, \u201ctalks about the supposed racist origins of school choice as a concept or as a racist origins of school choice and the supposedly racist or segregative effects that these programs have today,\u201d marking the point at which \u201cthe public school establishment really pivoted from religion to focusing on race.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The actions that took place by Southern states surrounding\u00a0Brown v. Board of Education<\/i>\u00a0hold a \u201ckernel of truth,\u201d said Bindas, due to these states using vouchers to maintain segregation by closing public schools and funding discriminatory private schools. Bindas said, \u201cThis was a horrible episode in the 1950s and early 1960s, where the concept of school choice was used for horrible, horrible ends.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Yet Bindas pushes back, saying, \u201cThat\u2019s not the origin story of school choice; school choice as an idea preceded\u00a0Brown v. Board of Education<\/i>\u00a0by many years, in fact, by almost a\u00a0couple of centuries<\/span><\/a>. And number two, I would stress that these kinds of devious means that the Southern segregationists were employing to thwart the\u00a0Brown<\/i>\u00a0decision weren\u2019t really choice programs at all.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n These vouchers were often used in combination with the closing of public schools, leaving Black students with no public school to attend, no integrated public school, and no private schools. \u201cSo, it left Black students with no choice at all,\u201d Bindas said. \u201cTo claim that this is the origin story of choice is just false because the whole purpose of these schemes was to deny choice.\u201d Instead, Bindas believes that the origin of school choice can be seen in the writings of foundational classical liberal thinkers such as Adam Smith, Thomas Paine, and John Stuart Mill (Bindas, 2024). Furthermore, the oldest US choice programs in\u00a0Maine<\/span><\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Vermont<\/span><\/a>\u00a0were founded in the 1800s, preceding civil rights conflicts.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n As times have progressed, so have school choice programs. Today, no program is allowed to discriminate based on race, leaving no room for arguments that they have the same racial motivations as those in the 1950s and 1960s. Opponents no longer argue about the motives of school choice programs but their effects. Bindas explains that opponents often argue that school choice programs are used by more white students than Black students to leave public schools, leading to increased segregation in those schools as white students \u201cflee\u201d through these programs.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Yet, this is simply not true. Bindas said, \u201cThe\u00a0studies<\/span><\/a>\u00a0that have been done overwhelmingly show, number one, that choice programs lead to a more integrated environment for the children who use these programs,\u201d and although there are fewer studies, they \u201cstill show that these programs also have an integrative effect on the public schools that children leave.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Bindas, having a passion for law and spreading the truth, said, \u201cOne of the purposes of writing this paper was, as courts are forced to grapple with this issue, I wanted to tell the historical truth and the empirical truth about these programs\u2026 I really wanted to put something out there that courts could certainly turn to, but just as importantly, that the public could turn to.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n This podcast challenges anti-school choice arguments described in Bindas\u2019 paper. From exploring the roots of school choice to the present day, he proves that not only does school choice predate the racist misuse following\u00a0Brown v. Board of Education<\/i>, but it also helps integrate the school experience for those who use these programs and public schools.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n To learn more, tune in to\u00a0Episode 6 of the EdChoice Chats podcast<\/span><\/a>\u00a0featuring Michael Bindas and read his paper at the\u00a0Syracuse Law Review<\/i><\/span><\/a>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Brandon Ruder is a communications intern at EdChoice, with his summer 2025 experience sponsored by the Stephenson Institute. His post originally appeared at EdChoice. Does school choice have racist roots? Critics claim […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":203,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"iawp_total_views":14,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-85","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-internships"],"acf":[],"w_featured_image_url":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/stephenson-institute\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/49\/2025\/07\/premium_photo-1671070972518-1036c75cdb01-1024x769.avif","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/stephenson-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/stephenson-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/stephenson-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/stephenson-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/203"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/stephenson-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=85"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/stephenson-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":90,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/stephenson-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85\/revisions\/90"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/stephenson-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=85"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/stephenson-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=85"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/stephenson-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=85"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}