School choice has exploded in recent years. Is this development as novel as our heated debates suggest? Neal McCluskey, the former director of the Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom, is out with a new edited volume that seeks to bring some historical perspective to our current clashes over tax-credit scholarships, education savings accounts, vouchers, and charter schools. In Fighting for the Freedom to Learn: Examining America’s Centuries-Old School Choice Movement, he and James Shuls of the Institute for Governance and Civics at Florida State, have assembled a collection of essays that trace the history of school choice back to the colonial era. I recently had the chance to chat with Neal about the book and what it means for today’s debates. Here’s what he had to say.
—Rick
Rick: You’ve got a new book out on school choice, Fighting for the Freedom to Learn. What’s it about?
Neal: The book traces the treatment of pluralism in American education—what we often call “school choice”—from the country’s colonial period to the “universal” programs of the last few years. Our most immediate goal was to get beyond the myopic focus on the 1950s. School choice opponents often claim the movement began as an effort to evade school desegregation following Brown v. Board of Education, while advocates suggest it started with Milton Friedman’s 1955 essay, “The Role of Government in