Far from radical

School choice continues a 250-year tradition of American education

This article originally appeared in the Spring 2026 issue of Thinking Minnesota magazine.

From the Declaration of Independence to nearly 250 years since the country’s founding, our nation has been defined less by static answers than by a willingness to test ideas — often imperfectly — in pursuit of liberty and self-government.

Few institutions reveal this ongoing experiment more clearly than American education, and few debates capture its tension more sharply than the question of school choice.

At its core lies a radical premise: that ordinary people, when given real freedom and responsibility, can shape their own futures. The Founders did not believe that liberty could be preserved by distant authorities alone. It required a self-governing people — informed, virtuous, and capable of judgment.

That conviction shaped early American education. Schooling was not conceived as a single, centralized system, but as a pluralistic effort rooted in families, churches, and local communities. Authority rested close to home. Parents were not bystanders. They were primary actors.

This tradition reflects a conviction that those closest to children are best positioned to guide their learning, and that a free society depends not on top-down control but on the informed choices of engaged families.

A history of choice

From the beginning, educational choice was part of the American experiment. In “Fighting for the Freedom to Learn: Examining America’s Centuries-Old School Choice Movement,” 12 scholars argue that empowering families through school choice is not a recent or radical idea. It is woven into the country’s history.

Early policies illustrate this clearly. Pennsylvania’s 1802 policy provided public funds so poor families could choose among neighborhood schools, including religious institutions. Catholic schools in Connecticut received public funds in the 1860s. Vermont and Maine launched town-tuitioning programs in 1869 and 1873, letting towns pay tuition at approved private schools. These policies recognized education as a public concern while respecting family choice.

With the rise of the common school movement in the 1830s, the character of American schooling began to change in fundamental ways. Common schools, primarily intended for white children, were designed to be locally controlled, publicly funded, and open to families regardless of income. They were “common” in the sense that children from different economic backgrounds would share classrooms and absorb a shared civic culture. Reformers such as Horace Mann, drawing inspiration from Prussia’s system of state-organized schooling, promoted this more standardized schooling to shape Americans “on the basis of a model that left no room for significant differences over values and loyalties, or for the structural pluralism in society’s institutions that permits genuine freedom and responsibility,” as Charles Glenn writes in “Fighting for the Freedom to Learn.”

From the beginning, critics questioned whether schools organized and funded by the state could truly remain neutral. They warned that centralizing authority over education risked weakening the mediating role of families, churches, and local communities. Although the movement did not initially aim to create a large federal education system (authority remained primarily at the state and local levels), it introduced uniform standardization that expanded over time. What began as an effort to secure republican self-government through civic formation helped lay the groundwork for the administrative growth that would characterize public education in the decades to follow.

European countries such as Austria, France, and the Netherlands initially emulated the Prussian model, yet many later shifted course, allowing and funding non-public schools alongside government-run ones. Even after Europe became more flexible, the U.S. education establishment largely pressed on with uniformity “as the only guarantor of social unity and citizenship,” Glenn continues.

From roughly 1880 to 1955, school choice was largely dormant. Yet its philosophical foundation never disappeared. As Neal McCluskey argues in “Fighting for the Freedom to Learn,” the movement did not enter “hibernation” because families lost interest in guiding their children’s schooling. Rather, reformers of the era sought to minimize differences among Americans and consolidate education under a more centralized, standardized system. Widespread choice complicated that vision. As a result, policies favoring parental discretion were overshadowed, but school choice in principle was preserved.

Choice, civil rights, and renewal

The civil rights era reshaped the debate. Brown v. Board of Education (1954) exposed deep injustices in American schooling. Some Southern segregationists misused the language of “choice” to preserve racial separation through private school tuition grants in defiance of federally mandated desegregation orders. Courts struck these programs down, recognizing that genuine school choice cannot serve discrimination.

Far from defining the origin of the school choice movement, these segregationist initiatives represented a distortion of its principles and “were a last-ditch effort when all efforts to maintain segregated public schools had failed,” writes James Shuls in “Fighting for the Freedom to Learn.” “Of course if segregation is a stain on vouchers, it must also be a stain on public education. Public schools were segregated from the first, and a segregated public system was the goal of massive resistance.” So, while the Brown v. Board of Education ruling triggered the South’s massive resistance efforts, it also reignited a movement advocating for educational freedom as a fundamental civil right.

Advocates came from many quarters — from civil rights leaders seeking alternatives for children trapped in failing schools to progressive reformers viewing vouchers as a tool to fight poverty. The pivotal role conservative advocates have played in the choice movement is not denied, writes Ron Matus in “Fighting for the Freedom to Learn,” but “the epic story of education freedom in America spans centuries … [and] many of the key actors have entered from stage left.”

They are found in the centuries-old struggle for educational opportunity in the black experience, in the liberal academics who saw vouchers as a tool in the War on Poverty, in the counterculture dissidents who sparked the “free schools” and homeschooling movements, and even, for 20 years, in the Democratic Party’s national platform.

The tension between pluralism and uniformity evident from America’s founding continued. The 1970s and 1980s saw practical innovations in school choice. Minnesota’s 1988 open enrollment law let students attend public schools outside their assigned zones. Charter schools (with Minnesota again leading the way) and voucher programs emerged in the 1990s. Tax-credit scholarships and Education Savings Accounts (ESAs) followed, offering families additional tools to reclaim control over their children’s learning.

Education Savings Accounts: A modern expression of a 250-year principle

Today, roughly half of U.S. students are eligible for some form of school choice. “Those who have it will fight to keep it,” writes Jason Bedrick in “Fighting for the Freedom to Learn,” “and parents in states that lack school choice will increasingly demand it.”

That demand is unfolding in states like Minnesota through American Experiment’s $7k for Kids initiative to establish an ESA program. ESAs represent the most direct modern expression of an old American principle: public support without centralized control.

Consider a hypothetical scenario: A single mother in Minneapolis whose son struggles with reading in the large Minneapolis school district. She cannot afford private tuition, and moving to another neighborhood is out of reach. An ESA would not guarantee success — no policy can — but it would give her the ability to seek specialized tutoring for her son or a smaller school. Instead of waiting for reform to reach her son someday (if ever), she could act now.

ESAs allow a portion of state education funding to follow the student rather than the ZIP code. Families may use those funds for tuition, tutoring, therapies, online courses, or other approved educational services. Authority — and accountability — moves closer to the household.

Critics warn that such policies could weaken public schools or fragment communities. Those concerns deserve consideration. But a system that traps families in failing schools ultimately betrays the very promise public education was meant to uphold.

There are also legitimate worries that accepting public funds could invite new regulations that erode the independence of nonpublic schools. But well-designed choice programs can address these concerns while preserving autonomy under existing law. And participation in ESA programs is always voluntary.

These assurances are not just practical but reflect principles that guided the Founders themselves. Early American education thrived through a mix of private initiative, local authority, religious instruction, and voluntary association. Modern choice programs do not invent something new; they restore something old — think 18th-century idea with a 21st-century mechanism.

And accountability is to families. Here is an uncomfortable truth that is often forgotten: Government can attempt to regulate nonpublic education whether choice policies exist or not. The real question is where authority should begin.

By giving families the power to choose where and how their children are educated, ESAs respect the principle that parents — not distant bureaucrats — know their children best. Families limited to subpar school options due to financial or geographic barriers find that choice programs such as ESAs improve their access to quality learning environments and educational service providers, promoting equality of opportunity rather than uniformity of provision at the expense of liberty. As families vote with their feet, public schools face incentives to improve. That dynamic is important.

Most students will continue to attend public schools for the foreseeable future. Choice policies are not an attempt to abolish public education. They are an attempt to make it better and to ensure that when schools fall short, a student’s education is not on the hook.

Research suggests that choice programs are associated not only with academic gains but also with higher levels of civic participation and political tolerance. Choice programs are also associated with higher educational attainment and pro-social outcomes, including lower rates of criminal convictions in early adulthood.

No system is perfect. Results depend on teaching quality, curriculum, culture, and family involvement. That is precisely why a marketplace of learning options is needed. Student needs are varied, and families should be given the opportunity to select the environment that best aligns with those needs and what they value most for their children’s education.

A 250-year perspective

From the beginning, the United States has wrestled with how education sustains liberty. That promise has never been automatic or universal.

At 250 years, the American experiment remains unfinished. The nation has repeatedly expanded its understanding of “the people” and the opportunities they deserve — from the abolition of slavery to women’s suffrage to civil rights legislation. Progress has rarely meant preserving institutions unchanged but asking whether they fulfill their founding purpose and reforming them when they cease to serve that purpose.

School choice should be viewed through this lens — as one reform among many aimed at restoring authority to families in a diverse society.

Public and private schools will coexist, as they long have. The measure of success is not which type of school prevails, but whether every child is equipped to participate fully and responsibly in American life.

If the American experiment is to endure into its next century, it will do so not by concentrating power further from families, but by trusting them once again.