An Idea Whose Time Has Come

By Noah Rothman

Monday, August 04, 2025

 

New York Times reporter Dana Goldstein’s dispatch chronicling the declining resistance among establishmentarian Democratic influencers toward school vouchers reads like a shot across liberal reformers’ bows. That conservative policy preference was once anathema to members of a party that was and, in many ways, is beholden to the teachers’ unions and their lobbies. Among the Democratic activist class, vouchers are still regarded as a violation of the social contract. But the cracks in that coalition are starting to show.

 

Now that the One Big Beautiful Bill Act has established “the first national private-school choice program,” Goldstein reported, Democratic governors are faced with the “difficult decision” of whether to opt their states out of the program to satisfy “advocacy groups” at their constituents’ expense. One organization urging Democratic governors to buck the activists is “closely affiliated with veterans of the Obama administration” and includes figures such as Arne Duncan, Barack Obama’s former education secretary, among its allies. “But its new stance in favor of vouchers is provocative within the party,” the Times report continued, “so much so that two former leaders of the organization have quit and are creating a rival group that will oppose vouchers, while supporting other forms of school choice.”

 

Those on the left who have warmed to school choice have done so for perfectly understandable reasons — at least, from the Democratic perspective. “This is literally free money,” said the onetime mayor of Providence, R.I., Jorge Elorza. His reaction doesn’t bust up any long-standing Democratic stereotypes, but it is comprehensible logic. Beyond the pile of taxpayer cash that is just waiting to be seized, Elorza observed, voucherization “is broadly supported by the majority of voters who have steadily drifted away from the party.”

 

To judge from Goldstein’s survey of the liberal landscape, those who oppose this measure have struggled to articulate a coherent response to this emerging groundswell. All that American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten could muster was the accusation that these traitorous Democrats want “to abandon public education,” but that is unconvincing. Increasingly, the argument that public education has abandoned the American people, not the other way around, is coming from Democratic mouths.

 

The disaster that befell public education during the pandemic explains why voters are sour on public education, even if they haven’t yet fully embraced vouchers as a remedy for what ails the American education system. But the fallout from 2020 is still settling, and its effects will have a long tail. One of those effects was adjudicated by the Supreme Court this term, and it provided a platform from which the logic for vouchers was articulated not by the conservative justices but by their liberal colleagues.

 

This year, the Court heard arguments in the case of Mahmoud v. Taylor, in which parents were denied the opportunity to opt their children out of a Montgomery County, Md., initiative forcing students to read “LGBTQ+-inclusive” books — some of which contained sexually suggestive language and advocated the adoption of certain lifestyles to which parents with religious affinities objected.

 

During oral arguments, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson made the case for vouchers as well as any conservative activist could have. “The parent can choose to put their kid elsewhere,” she said. “I’m struggling to see how it burdens a parent’s religious exercise if the school teaches something that the parent disagrees with,” she continued. “You have a choice.”

 

Of course, conservative reformers have long argued that, pace Justice Jackson, not everyone “can homeschool” their kids. “You don’t have to send your kid to public school,” she insisted. That’s simply not true for parents without means who hope to evade the scrutiny of truancy officers.

 

Brown’s liberal colleagues with slightly more respect for the intelligence of their audience made a more nuanced argument against the Court’s majority decision in Mahmoud. “Lastly, the majority is, of course, right to observe that not all parents can afford to send their children to private religious schools or to provide for homeschooling,” read a subtle admonition from her liberal colleague, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in her dissent. “Yet for public schools to function, it is inescapable that some students will be exposed to ideas and concepts that their parents may find objectionable on religious grounds.”

 

She argued that it would place a severe financial burden on schools that seek to accommodate every student’s religious objection. To attempt to comply, teachers will either “become experts in a wide range of religious doctrines” or, more likely, abandon controversial texts that offend even the most esoteric religious interpretation.

 

Sotomayor’s dissent may be a little overwrought, but her warnings should not be dismissed offhand. Still, all things considered, it seems more likely that teachers and administrators would find it less taxing to avoid scandalizing their communities by throwing Laura Ingalls Wilder out with ’Twas the Night Before Pride. It would be easier to simply inform parents of the curriculum and allow for opt-outs — and if there is a critical mass of opt-outs, perhaps that literature doesn’t belong on the curriculum. And if that arrangement doesn’t suit parents, they should have the option to take their tax dollars elsewhere.

 

This is all well-trodden ground. What’s unique about this moment is that Democrats are joining the GOP in treading on it, and those Democrats enjoy the cover of Supreme Court dissents that appear to ratify the logic behind school vouchers. It may not be a sea change, exactly, but it would be hard to miss the tide receding with an alacrity that should terrify teachers’ unions and their allies.