Segregation Academies Show Us the Ugly Side of Vouchers

As communities across the nation are experiencing heightened tension and acrimony, including fights over “parents’ rights” concerning public school classroom curricula and library books, a wave of states are implementing “universal vouchers.” These allow public dollars to follow any student—not just children with disabilities or those in poor-performing schools—to private schools, among other uses. As of July 2023, seven states had initiated a universal voucher program. Nine more had expanded existing programs. According to Education Week, “Private school choice is not a new thing, but what we’re seeing now is very new.”

One prominent example from this past February is the Arkansas Learns Act, introduced by Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, which includes vouchers to provide up to $6,600 per student attending a private school. It is no accident that Deep South states are represented in this movement en force, as this is the very region where efforts to divert public dollars to private schools first began. Uncovering the racist legacy of the nation’s first major expansion of private schools—in the post-Brown V. Board of Education South—offers important context for parents as they weigh whether they should trade public for private schools and support the use of vouchers to do so.

Many Americans are familiar with images from Central High School in 1957, when President Dwight Eisenhower sent in the National Guard to escort the “Little Rock Nine” to class, integrating the school. What is less known is that the following year, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus retaliated, closing all Little Rock public high schools. The school board tried to lease the high school buildings to a newly formed group that intended to operate an all-white high school using public funds, a move successfully blocked by the NAACP. Undaunted, Faubus purchased buildings on the public dime to house the hastily formed Raney High School. The school enrolled 800 white students that year. Before the public schools reopened in 1959, state funding for displaced white students spurred the opening of two more all-white private schools, the first of what came to be known as “segregation academies”— private schools established with the express purpose of excluding Black students.

Read more at The Daily Beast.