“Other Conceptions, Both Powerful and Exotic”: School Choice Visions from Voices from the Political Left

In 1968, Theodore Sizer, then the Dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and colleague Phillip Whitten wrote an article in Psychology Today called “A Proposal for a Poor Children’s Bill of Rights.” Their chief concern was that poor children be guaranteed access to a good education. Social and economic inequality, they argued, had remained persistent despite the best attempts of the courts, legislatures, and social programs like Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty.” The key, they argued, may be largely in empowering poor families to choose how their children are educated from the marketplace of competing firms.

Ours is a simple proposal: to use education—vastly improved and powerful education—as the principle vehicle for upward mobility . While a complex of strategies must be designed to accomplish this, we wish here to stress one: a program to give money directly to the poor children (through their parents ) to assist in paying for their education. By doing so, we might create both significant competition among schools serving the poor (and thus improve the schools) and meet in an equitable way the extra costs of teaching the children of the poor.^{Footnote 4}

Sizer and Whitten proposed a voucher system that would “give money in the form of a coupon to a poor child who would carry the coupon to the school of his choice,” whereupon “the school could use the sum as it saw fit.”^{Footnote 5} While they were aware that a similar voucher system had been proposed “recently from Milton Friedman, the conservative University of Chicago economist,” they point out that other such voucher systems had been proposed by liberals like John Stuart Mill and Thomas Paine, and that the “appeal” of such programs “bridges ideological differences.”^{Footnote 6}

Their proposal, while broad in detail, differed in several ways from most market libertarian proposals. First, because redress of economic inequity was the goal of this Poor Children’s Bill of Rights, Sizer and Whitten unabashedly offered a plan that will “frankly discriminate in favor of poor children.”^{Footnote 7} Speaking in broad terms, their “research suggests several alternative patterns which provide sliding scales—allowing for the allocation of different amounts of money proportional to family income and number of school-aged children.”^{Footnote 8} Children whose families made less money, and particularly those who lived under the poverty line, would receive more tuition money.

Another crucial area where they disagreed with Friedman was on his “emphasis on private enterprise.” Sizer and Whitten envisioned a system that would allow private schools to compete for voucher money but also allowed “competition between public school systems or even between public schools within a system.”^{Footnote 9} Additionally, while Sizer and Whitten wanted children to have access to a plurality of educational models, they shared none of Friedman’s reluctance in granting the state a significant role in accrediting schools, as long as governments accredited on a plurality of metrics that were not too standardized.

Lastly, Sizer and Whitten envisioned this voucher system as “part of a package” governments make available to the poor as part of the Poor Children’s Bill of Rights, a package that would include such things as “some form of guaranteed annual income and the provision of health and welfare services at a level of accommodation much higher than at present.”^{Footnote 10}

Sizer was not a politician or economist, but an educator and educational reformer. By the time he and Whitten penned the “Proposal for a Poor Children’s Bill of Rights,” Sizer had been a high school history teacher in private schools, and had worked for several years as a professor in Harvard’s Graduate School of Education (where he was colleagues with Jams Coleman and Christopher Jencks, who also wrote influential papers supporting school choice).

While Sizer doesn’t appear to have written anything specifically on school choice prior to his article with Whitten, he showed a very consistent concern for the related issue of school autonomy. In an introductory essay he wrote for a collection of writings about the role of academies in early American education, Sizer suggested that one advantage academies had was in their “relatively private form of control.” Sizer argued that academies offered a curriculum that generally “was broader and more ‘practical’ than that of their predecessor, the Latin grammar school,”^{Footnote 11} arguing that this was likely because their private structure allowed them more flexibility to build curricula that served the needs of its customers. “The founders were ambitious in their plans, organizing the academies as relatively independent institutions, usually tied closely to the local community.”^{Footnote 12}

This concern for school autonomy followed Sizer throughout his career. In 1981, Sizer, then a Headmaster at Philips Academy, would lead a study of American high schools (cosponsored by the National Association of Independent Schools) that would lead both to his influential book Horace’s Compromise, and to start the Coalition of Essential Schools, a consortium of public and private high schools based on Sizer’s educational philosophy. At the heart of this philosophy was the idea that schools should be both small enough to allow a unique culture to form among those who inhabit it, and autonomous, so that the choices governing the school are made by those within and close to the school. When, in later years, Sizer was asked why he objected to plans for national curricular standards (and conversely, supported school choice), he suggested that:

One … has to do with the importance of making sure that the politics of the community are brought to bear [on the school]. Say I’m a parent. If I really don’t like what’s being taught, I want to be able to look in the eye of the administrator who has the ability to change the curriculum. That’s not going to happen if decisions are made by a committee of people far away from the community.^{Footnote 13}

The Coalition of Essential Schools, then, was just that: a coalition of autonomous schools that agreed on the same core principles (such as valuing curricular depth over breadth, and student exhibition of work in lieu of traditional tests) but beyond that, made their own decisions based on their own unique cultures. Sizer and the Coalition’s founders “started from the assumption that schools are unique. In order to be good, a school has to reflect its own community. And therefore, we offer no model.”^{Footnote 14}

For that and other reasons, the Coalition of Essential Schools “have disproportionately been schools of choice. Because no one has to go there. Choice encourages people to experiment.”^{Footnote 15} Alluding to his time at Philips Academy, Sizer was also affected by his time as “a principal at a school of choice. And it changed my whole relationship with parents . I had to be much more attentive to the parents, because my budget depended on their support.”^{Footnote 16} Choice is valuable in large part because it meant that everyone involved in a school—parents, students, teachers, staff—were there because they chose to be and could choose differently if another school fit their needs better.

Like Frank Chodorov, Sizer was a pluralist who opposed all attempts to standardize education for all students. Students, families, and cultures (even within the very plural United States) differ. Not only do schools need the ability to differ in reflection of the communities they serve, but individuals need the ability to choose from a plurality of educational institutions. In a 1976 article pleading for an “educational smorgasbord,” Sizer takes aim at the very idea of “the common school,” that in such a diverse nation in fact “never was and clearly will never be.”^{Footnote 17} Like Chodorov, Sizer recognizes that education is irreducibly value-laden and “there will inevitably be a powerful, if small, group of political ‘ins’ who will persistently argue for the existence of a school system to hammer kids into their molds.”^{Footnote 18} Sizer does not argue against assimilation to a broad American culture, but he recognizes two things that make it possible or desirable to put the educational focus more on diversity. First, Sizer recognizes that at the time he wrote, the news and entertainment media and other outlets had taken over some of the assimilation role. Second, putting the primary educational emphasis on assimilation means that swaths of people will be forced to attend public schools where they do not see the values of their culture(s) reflected.

Sizer’s pluralism ran so deep that he suggested that a program of educational choice might extend beyond the idea of one child attending one school at a time. It may be that some families choose for their child to attend one school that meets all that child’s educational needs, but others might choose different schools throughout the child’s educational career or even complementary educational institutions at the same time.

What we need instead is a smorgasbord of schools, all of high quality (that is, accredited and all open and accessible to those who would choose among them). … Diversity in schooling need not be divisive; schools can collaborate, not only compete; schools can be complimentary, not only alternatives to one another.^{Footnote 19}

Throughout his career as an educational reformer, Sizer remained committed to the values of school autonomy, the value of small schools that reflect the culture of their stakeholders, and school choice. While Sizer’s body of work reflects increasing disenchantment with growing calls for centralization, bureaucratization, and standardization within public education, he remained optimistic that school choice was gaining champions of diverse political stripes. In 1997, perhaps thinking about President Bill Clinton’s stated support for school choice,^{Footnote 20} Sizer was able to write:

This fascinating and politically diverse cacophony reflects the growing—and sensible—acceptance of the notion that schools should not necessarily be alike and that families should have far greater control over the particular schools that their children attend than they have had. Choice is on the banners of many influential groups. It is now a deeply entrenched idea.^{Footnote 21}

While Sizer never doubted that school choice was desirable as public policy, it was perhaps the gradual rightward tilt of this “politically diverse cacophony” that soured one of Sizer’s closest colleagues away from school choice after Sizer’s death of colon cancer in 2009. Deborah Meier, once an advocate of school choice alongside Sizer, would come to it as an idea used increasingly by the conservative right wing to serve ends at odds with those she and Sizer supported.

Meier met Sizer in the 1983, as he was getting ready to publish Horace’s Compromise and was a central player in the founding of the Coalition for Essential Schools. Before that, she had founded the Central Park East elementary school, a small public school of choice in New York that became a school within the Coalition. Like Sizer, Meier advocated that to best fulfill their educational missions, schools should be small and autonomously run within a system of school choice. Like Sizer, though, she was quite ambivalent about whether schools of choice should be public or private. In a 1991 article, she warns that education reformers do not cede the idea of school choice to those on the political right. Central Park East and the district of “small, largely self-governing and pedagogically innovative” schools it existed in would not have been possible had District 4 not allowed school choice in the form of open public school enrollment. “It would have been impossible to carry out this ambitious agenda without choice. Choice was the prerequisite.”^{Footnote 22} Like Sizer, Meier argues that “There’s something galling about the idea that you’re stuck in a particular school that’s not working for you unless you are rich enough to buy yourself out of it.”^{Footnote 23} Yet, Meier argues that choice supporters need not buy into the libertarian “rhetoric that too often surrounds choice: about the rigors of the marketplace, the virtues of private schooling and the Inherent mediocrity of public places and public spaces.”^{Footnote 24}

To Meier and Sizer, choice was a vehicle for improving education that serves the public (whether or not the schools that did so were public or private). In addition to its ability to empower families by allowing them to choose the schools that fit them, Meier, believed , as Sizer had, that school choice would allow the flourishing of small, innovative, and autonomously controlled schools that a bureaucratic public school system would not allow. As time went on, however, Meier believed that the increasingly conservative visions of school choice did not share the same vision, and often favored privatization regardless of whether the schools were small and autonomous. By 2017, Meier had largely abandoned the idea of school choice, which “has taken a divisive and often destructive direction” in the hands of conservatives who were, she argued, using it as a rallying cry for corporate privatization; she now only “recommends its use with some significant caveats.”^{Footnote 25}

“For better or worse,” Meier wrote, “my message [of school choice] resonated with educators and reformers from across the political spectrum.” But unlike Sizer, who saw the ideological diversity of school choice supporters as a sign of the idea’s strength, Meier came to believe that the core vision of small, autonomous, schools of choice that she and Theodore Sizer had long championed had become hopelessly co-opted by folks whose primary goal was privatization and the withering away of the public sphere.

Their aim: to demonstrate that education would work better, as would other public and private institutions, if the followed a free-market business model, with financial incentives in place, while starving out democratic voices and purposes. Schools that serve to educate a democracy increasingly seem like a luxury we can’t afford.^{Footnote 26}

John Coons met Steve Sugarman when Coons was a law professor at Northwestern and Stephen was a student trying to decide where to go to law school. The two began an intellectual relationship that led to the 1970 publication, with colleague William Klune III, of the book Private Wealth, Public Education. The book reflected a shared concern with addressing the inequities of education funding that was tied primarily to the school district. Such funding schemes meant that districts would vary wildly in what they could spend on public education, leaving the educational quality children receive largely up to what district they lived in.

Rather than argue for a “true egalitarian” position held by some of their colleagues, where the state would take over school funding and districts would receive a certain dollar amount per child,^{Footnote 27} Coons, Sugarman, and Klune argued a more moderate position that they called “district power equalizing.” As they wrote, “Power equalizing is a commitment by the state to the principle that the relationship between effort and offering of every district will be the same irrespective of wealth and that the district is to determine the effort (within appropriate limits if the state so desires).”^{Footnote 28}

This was a middle position between leaving districts to fund their own education and the state financing education by apportioning money to districts per child. It may be, the authors argue, that districts might want to spend different percentages of their budget on education. The problem is less that districts spend different amounts, but that poorer districts have to tax themselves at high rates to keep up with what more affluent districts can easily afford.

To preserve a balance between district autonomy over school spending and equity between districts, the authors suggested an intricate formula (replete with pages of diagrams). Their formula allows each district to determine what percentage of their tax revenue will go toward operating the district’s public schools. The state will determine some amount of money that each percentage of districts’ tax spending toward public schools will be “worth,” and then pay the difference to each district between what their tax revenue raises and what the formula determines that level of tax should yield in spending. One reviewer of the book used the following example to illustrate:

The state will contribute to each local district funds sufficient to provide $100 per pupil for each mill of education tax imposed on itself by the local district. Thus a 10 mill tax will produce $1,000 per pupil; a 15 mill tax will produce $1,500 per pupil—regardless of the wealth of the district or the amount per pupil actually produced at these rates. The poorer the district, the more the state will contribute at any given tax rate in order to reach the state-determined amount for the given tax rate; the wealthier the district, the less the state will need to contribute.^{Footnote 29}

In this way, Coons, Sugarman, and Klune sought to provide a balance between equality and what the authors called subsidiarity, “the power of localities to decide (a) how much education they desire (perhaps within minimums and maximums set by the state ) and (b) how much they are willing to spend to reach their goals.”^{Footnote 30} District power equalizing was, they argued, a way to ensure a level of equity while preserving district autonomy to make choices about education spending.

This model of district power equalizing, in fact, became a key part of a case that was headed to the California Supreme Court. Coons and Sugarman were asked to write briefs in support of the plaintiffs in, who (successfully) challenged the state’s existing structure for school funding. It’s “substantial dependence on local property taxes and resultant wide disparities in school revenue,” they successfully argued, violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.^{Footnote 31} (The state adopted a more equitable funding system, but not the district equalizing power model.)

Toward the end of their book, the authors also argued that if subsidiarity was the goal, it might be that district equalizing power was a step in the right direction but didn’t get to the destination. Perhaps subsidiarity could be extended down to the family level. Fiscal control can be placed directly in the hands of the family, in the manner in which we have previously conceived it in the district.

In other words, subsidiarity can be maximized insofar as it remains consistent with the elimination of wealth determinants of equality. In order to prevent wealth discrimination, ultimate state financial responsibility, of course, would be maintained; the shift from district to family decision-making regarding effort, therefore, would mean that each family now would have the same financial backing as any other for purposes of public education. We call this notion family power equalizing.^{Footnote 32}

Coons and Sugarman were intrigued by the idea of achieving subsidiarity through family choice, and explored the issue in subsequent essays culminating in the 1978 book Education by Choice. What they had previously called a family power equalizing model was now labeled the quality choice model of school funding, though the plan was largely the same as what they’d proposed in Private Wealth and Public Education. The state would set a range of acceptable tuition rates, largely to ensure that school tuition could not gradually creep up to put some choices out of reach of the poorest families. From there, “each family would select from the various priced schools the one it thought best for its child and pay a portion of its income towards tuition; the state would subsidize the rest.”^{Footnote 33}

Of the choice advocates in this chapter, Coons and Sugarman did the most sparring with their libertarian counterpart, Milton Friedman. Prior to Coons’s scholarship on school choice, Friedman had been an occasional guest on his Chicago radio show Problems of the City and had occasionally discussed school choice, agreeing on its desirability but not on specifics, such things as who the customer (or primary beneficiary) of education was (child? parents? the government?).^{Footnote 34} Those disagreements only intensified once Coons and Sugarman articulated a school choice plan that differed from Friedman’s.

In Education by Choice, Coons and Sugarman not only outline a school choice plan much different from Friedman’s, but differentiate their plan, and those of other non-market libertarian choice advocates like Theodore Sizer, as being designed to “compensate for the discrimination inherent in the unregulated Friedman model.”^{Footnote 35} They criticize Friedman for viewing “education through the lens of laissez-faire economics,” not because there isn’t merit to the pro-market argument, but because, in the authors’ view, Friedman misses some key complexities, such as how “standard theories of consumer sovereignty” “merely raise, and do … nothing to answer, the crucial question of the child’s own welfare under a family regime.”^{Footnote 36} For these and other reasons—such as the potential inequities of giving all families regardless of financial ability the same sized voucher—Coons and Sugarman write that “if the Friedman scheme were the only politically viable experiment with choice, we would not be enthusiastic.”^{Footnote 37}

We can already get an idea of some of the differences between the plans of Friedman and Sugarman and Coons . As we’ve seen, Coons and Sugarman’s plan allows families to spend different amounts on their children’s education (and schools to compete with different price points) in the way Friedman’s plan does. But Coons and Sugarman’s plan differs from Friedman’s by establishing not only a range of price points above and below which schools cannot charge, but significant subsidies that essentially vary with income bracket.

Beyond this, like Sizer, Coons and Sugarman were not as eager as Friedman to get rid of or minimize the presence of public schools. “Under Milton Friedman’s plan,” the authors warn, “the public sector would begin to withdraw from the business of providing education,” a goal Coons and Sugarman believe does not logically follow from support for school choice and could produce ill effects. While Coons and Sugarman are noncommittal regarding what public school options would look like in a choice system, they suggest such possibilities as putting a cap on the “market share” private schools can have among educational choices in an area and “establish[ing] each public school as an individual nonprofit corporation” that, while having “independent power and duties” might still be subject to certain regulations that public, but not private, entities must comply with.

Coons and Sugarman’s plan also differs from Friedman’s in several other areas involving the role of the government. The authors of Education by Choice, for instance, advocate a quota system for admissions similar to that advocated by Christopher Jencks and the Office of Equal Opportunity (OEO), where schools might be allowed a certain portion of their seats to be filled by whatever selection criteria the school wants to use, where other seats have to be filled by lottery or some other random method. Where Friedman probably assumes that, as with other markets, companies will work hard to advertise and consumers, to inform themselves before making choices, Coons and Sugarman also suggest that government has a role to play to “ensure effective dissemination to all classes of families,” a proposal also similar to that of the OEO.^{Footnote 38} Unlike the OEO’s proposal, Coons and Sugarman recognize the potential danger of government demanding that schools report only particular metrics. Accordingly, they suggest that beyond data like average class sizes, dropout rates, and similar data, “schools would also be invited to set their own criteria of success” and report on factors they believe encapsulate their school.^{Footnote 39}

As with their work with William Klune on school finance Coons and Sugarman’s voucher proposal made an appearance in the public sector when it attracted the attention of Democratic Senator Leo Ryan who, in 1978, met Coons and Sugarman and was intrigued by the possibility of putting the authors’ recent voucher plan onto the California ballot in 1980. In 1976, the California Supreme Court heard a continuation of the aforementioned Serrano v. Priest , finding that while the state had taken some steps to reduce inequity in school funding (via “Proposition 13”), the persisting inequities were sufficient to remain unconstitutional.^{Footnote 40} Coons, Sugarman, and Ryan all thought that a plan for school choice might stand the best chance of leading to constitutionally equitable outcomes.

The law professors and Senator were aiming to get their school voucher proposal (now called the Initiative for Family Choice) on the 1980 California state ballot. Even with the political capital of Senator Ryan behind them, however, there was considerable pushback against the proposal. The executive secretary of the California state teacher’s union called the Coons–Sugarman plan “social dynamite,” and the teacher’s union president in San Diego predicted that the proposal would invite “all the racist scumbags” to create and attend schools to indoctrinate youth “and the public will [financially have to] support them.”^{Footnote 41}

While those on the political left were reluctant to support any proposal that could introduce private competition to the public schools, several libertarians introduced their own competing ballot proposals that went in a more libertarian direction, introducing many fewer government regulations into their plan. One proposal was drawn up by Jack Hickey, an electrical engineer and many time Libertarian candidate for governor and Congress.

Both Coons and Sugarman, and Hickey, sought to get Milton Friedman’s public endorsement of their favored proposals, and in the end, Friedman chose to endorse Hickey’s plan. Jack Coons later told an interviewer that he suspects the ultimate failure of his and Sugarman’s plan also had to do with Friedman talked several donors out of backing the Family Choice in Education proposal. “Well, they all sort of drifted away and we wondered what was wrong. Milton had, in fact, dissuaded them. He thought this [our plan] was not a good idea.”^{Footnote 42}

On top of those obstacles, Coons and Ryan lost their key ally in the Democratic party, Leo Ryan, when Ryan was shot and killed in November 1978 by members of the People’s Temple of the Disciples of Christ in Guyana. As Coons later recalled, Ryan’s tragic death was not only tragic but spelled “the end of our democratic supporter with political power.”^{Footnote 43} Coons went on to recall that by that time.

We had already, I think, gotten the initiative into official status, where we had so many days to get the signatures. And we tried. It cost me a lot of money. In the end, we made every possible mistake, I think, imaginable.^{Footnote 44}

In the end, Coons and Sugarman were not able to muster the financial, political, or popular support to get their Family Choice in Education proposal on the ballot. They created other voucher proposals in subsequent years, ones they believed might be more streamlined so that they were easier to explain to politicians and the public. But an environment that was becoming increasingly polarized on the issue of school choice, and a cause most often championed by the political right, none of these proposals met with political success.

In John Holt’s ideal world, schools would not exist. At least that is what he wrote in his 1972 book Freedom and Beyond. In a chapter called “Beyond Schooling,” Holt offers an imagined dialogue, where he travels five hundred years into the future to a civilization that is more advanced than ours. He asks someone from that culture a question:

‘But where are your schools?’

‘Schools? What are schools?’ he replies.

‘Schools are places where people go to learn things.’

‘I do not understand,’ he says. ‘People learn things everywhere, in all places.’

‘I know that,’ I say. ‘But a school is a special place where there are special people who teach you things, help you learn things.’

‘I am sorry, but I still do not understand. Everyone helps other people learn things. Anyone who knows something or can do something can help someone else who wants to learn more about it. Why should there be special people to do this?’

And try as I will, I cannot make clear to him why we think that education should be, must be, separate from the rest of life.^{Footnote 45}

Strictly speaking, Holt was not primarily concerned with school choice. He did not, as other figures in this chapter, develop anything like a formal proposal of what school choice should look like. His primary concern was to lessen the legal and cultural grip formal schooling had in the United States . Since his days as a private school teacher, he’d gradually become disenchanted with the idea that formal schooling—with its curriculum, grading, and other structures that systematically inhibited students’ freedom and curiosity—was conducive to good learning.

Holt, however, was an advocate of school choice, and even, as we shall see, hinted at some different proposals he thought might bring it about. For Holt, though, school choice was something he entertained largely as a means to reduce the compulsory nature of conventional schooling (both legal compulsion by way of compulsory education laws , and cultural compulsion via that assumption that school is the only way kids can learn). While Holt’s ideal was that schools would not exist at all, the more achievable goal was to lessen schools’ legal and cultural monopoly on learning and to ensure that, to exist, schools had to persuade rather than force. That would require some sort of school choice.

Holt started teaching in the early 1950s, first at a “progressive” private school in Colorado, and then at several private schools in Boston, Massachusetts. Hold was previously in the military, and teaching had never been his intended career. He took up teaching at the behest of his sister, who recognized his talent for interacting with children. During his teaching career, Holt became gradually disenchanted with what he saw as a mismatch between how he believed children naturally learned and the regimented way schools expected them to learn. As his concerns grew, Holt “was fired from several schools for his refusal to accommodate administrative needs” like accommodating to what Holt believed to be rigid pedagogical methods or administering required tests to students.^{Footnote 46}

During his teaching career, Holt kept journals about what he saw, and this felt contrast between how children seem to learn naturally and how schools expect children to learn. In 1964, these journals would be published as How Children Fail, a book which became wildly successful and gained Holt a reputation as an important education critic. Holt’s second book, How Children Learn, consisted of a similar set of journals, this time recounting various children he had known learning things outside of the confines of school.

As Holt increasingly thought, wrote, and gave invited lectures, he became less convinced that schools could simply be reformed to be better places of learning. He came gradually to believe that, for various reasons, reforming schools was less likely to produce good results than finding ways to bypass schools and lessen their legal and cultural grip. In an essay called “Not So Golden Rule Days,” Holt flatly suggests, in what he says is a change of mind, that “compulsory education laws of good education,” that “they should be relaxed, repealed, or overturned in the courts.”^{Footnote 47} His reasoning was both that having to learn under the threat of compulsion violated children’s liberty, and also that it created a prison-like atmosphere bad for both teacher and student. Schools were forced to teach students whether or not they wanted to be there, and schools and the authorities in them would feel no necessary pressure to earn—because they could force—student attention.

While Holt increasingly became pessimistic that reform of conventional schooling was possible, generally owing to their political and cultural inertia, his first mention of school choice as an idea was in 1970’s What Do I Do Monday? There, he expressed hope that more parents sending their children to “free schools” (schools that afforded children more freedom than conventional schools) might “rouse public support for the voucher plan, in which parents are given money directly for their children’s education, to spend as they wish,” or “bring closer a time when independent schools with no tuition and non-selective policies, no weeding out of children … will be considered ‘public’ and supported by tax funds on the basis of the number of students attending.”^{Footnote 48} All of these would serve to loosen the legal and cultural grip schools have on students and families, and hopefully, introduce more pressure on conventional schools to serve rather than compel.

Only when all parents, not just rich ones, have a truly free choice in education, when they can take their children out of a school they don’t like and have a choice of many others to send them to, or the possibility of starting their own, or of educating their children outside of school altogether—only then will we teachers begin to stop being what most of us still are, and if we are honest know we are, which is jailers, baby-sitters, cops without uniforms, and begin to be professionals, freely exercising an important, valued, and honored skill and art.^{Footnote 49}

Several years later, in his 1976 book Instead of Education, Holt proposed more several more ways to expand learner choice and, in so doing, weaken the monopoly of formal education on learning. The book itself is devoted to articulating a vision of what educational institutions might look like if not schools in the conventional sense, the difference between what Holt called “S-chools” (conventional Institutions of Learning that we now call “school”) and “s-chools,” places where anyone of any age could go to learn things on their own or with asked-for help.

Holt, of course, was pessimistic—even fatalistic—that such s-chools could replace S-chools without both a shift in cultural attitudes about education and a reduction in the ways government vests schools with power. (Holt believed very much that the latter perpetrated the former.) As he had in earlier works, Holt argued against compulsory education, that any education should be voluntary, on the part of the learner, not just the parent. He also argued that one reason for S-schools’ ascendance was that they, by state mandate, were both educative institutions and issuers of credentials like diplomas, and insofar as certain professions require these credentials, S-chools retain their cultural dominance. Holt suggested that we could “do away with the near monopoly of S-chools over credentials,” by governments “pass[ing] laws saying that whenever a credential was needed to do a given kind of work, there would have to be ways to get this credential without going to or through a S-chool.”^{Footnote 50}

Holt also continued the defense of some type of voucher-like system of school choice, reiterating that “It seems only fair that if the state can force young people to go to school it should at least allow them to pick the school.”^{Footnote 51} Holt’s idea of school choice, however, was more granular than most proposals, less school choice and more educational choice. Holt, for instance, argued that we might allow a learner to “get some of his schooling in one school, some in another” and issue “school credit for a much wider variety of activities, including work.”^{Footnote 52} Holt envisioned a world where learners (of all ages) would have a bevy of options to choose from far beyond S-chools: “Thus we might have small neighborhood tutoring centers, or the kind of storefront mini-schools … that were often so successful in New York, or neighborhood versions of the Beacon Hill Free School or the Learning Exchange, or something like the Storefront Learning Center we had in Boston for some time, or other inventions.”

Beyond sketches like these, Holt was quite noncommittal on details. As suggested in a previous quote, Holt believed that to accept state voucher money, a school must have “non-selective policies”; though what he meant by that was not clear, it is reasonable to suppose he meant that schools not be allowed to introduce selection criteria for admittance.^{Footnote 53} If students “need transportation to do this [attend the institution of their choice], the state and/or their home district should pay for it,” though, again, Holt did not offer specifics of how transportation funding might be determined.

This lack of committal to any specific school choice plan may be because for Holt, school choice was a tertiary issue, important, but as a means toward weakening the cultural and legal monopoly of S-chools. It could also be because, as historian Milton Gaither notes, “One of Holt’s most appealing qualities was his willingness to listen to and make common cause with people from a wide range of ideological perspectives.”^{Footnote 54} Holt’s mission was to open people’s eyes to the idea that S-chools were not the only ways to educate people (largely turning his attention toward homeschooling and what he later called “unschooling” as a result of suggestions in Instead of Education). It could be that Holt was more concerned with building support for this broader mission and feared that advocating for one specific school choice vision would alienate potential allies.

Whatever the reason for his lack of specificity when sketching a vision for school choice, Holt’s ability to make common cause with diverse groups may have been what led to some contact with the market libertarian movement. Certainly, Holt had some things in common with market libertarians: they both wanted to repeal compulsory education laws , give people more choice about how they receive education, and both had a philosophy that put freedom at its center. There were, of course, differences: Holt never explicitly embraced markets the way market libertarians did. Nor was he as reluctant as they to suggest government involvement in the form of some type of welfare state. (Holt’s 1974 book on children’s rights , Escape from Childhood, advocated that children and potentially adults be able to receive a guaranteed minimum income from the state.)^{Footnote 55}

Nonetheless, in 1978, Holt found himself a “surprise guest” on a panel at that year’s libertarian convention after walking over to the convention from his Boston office to see “his old friend” Karl Hess, a libertarian activist and author. The panel consisted of conservative author Samuel Blumenfeld, and a staff member and student from the private Sudbury Valley School. Jeff Riggenbach, a reporter for Libertarian Review magazine, reported Holt as saying that he thought of himself as “a small ‘l’ libertarian.” “The opposite of liberty is coercion. I’m interested in minimizing the amount of coercion in human affairs.” (Holt did issue the caveat that from the child’s perspective, a private school is just as compulsory as a public one.)^{Footnote 56} Later, the Libertarian Review ran the full transcript of the panel, where Holt reiterated his contempt for compulsory education laws (“It’s a terrible situation, and I think it’s only going to get worse”^{Footnote 57}), and got a chance to plug a project that would make up a large part of his work until his death in 1985: a magazine devoted to homeschooling called Growing Without Schooling.

Theodore Sizer, Deborah Meier, John Coons, Stephen Sugarman, and John Holt advocated for school choice on grounds that were not particularly grounded in pro-market libertarianism. None were particularly hostile toward government as a matter of principle, and each was willing to give the government some substantive role in education beyond funding tuition.

Each of these figures argued that market forces should be brought into education not because markets were inherently superior to government or out of any belief that individuals had rights against government coercion, but because markets might be an effective means toward educational goals existing governments seemed unable to reach. For Sizer and Meier, the goal was to achieve educational equity and the types of small, autonomous schools that would empower all stakeholders. For Coons and Sugarman, the issue was to redress persisting economic and racial inequality. For Holt, the goal was to lessen the cultural and legal monopoly of public education and formal schooling generally, to allow a variety of educational forms to emerge.

I offer these non-market libertarian visions of school choice to serve as points of comparison to the market libertarian plans advocated by the subjects of previous chapters. These figures were writing at a time when the idea of school choice could attract, as Sizer suggested, a “fascinating and politically diverse cacophony” of voices from across the political spectrum. In subsequent years, the landscape would become more polarized, school choice largely associated with the conservative right wing and resistance to it, the politically liberal position. This polarization, perhaps, is well-illustrated by the differing but equally firm positions on school choice taken in the concluding chapter, by former Republican Congressman Ron Paul and former Assistant Secretary of Education and one-time school choice supporter Diane Ravitch.