Here's some history of the movement.
washingtonpost.com
School Vouchers - Where Is the Constituency?
Politics Has Changed the Demographics of Supporters
By Terry M. Neal
washingtonpost.com Staff Writer
Wednesday, July 3, 2002; 12:53 PM
Within days of the Supreme Court's obliteration of the constitutional challenges to school vouchers, the president — until now reluctant to even utter the V word — was on the stump in Cleveland and Milwaukee, proclaiming the dawn of the new civil rights movement. All parents, he said, regardless of income level should be able to send their children to the school of their choice.
So you're thinking, with the legality established and the leader of the free world now solidly behind it, it's only a matter of time before the GOP launches a major effort to make vouchers a universal reality.
It's not going to happen. Not anytime soon anyway — and not for the reasons you may think.
While opposition to school vouchers remains intractable with teacher's unions and other strongholds, the most potent obstacles now lie somewhere else: changing demographics and the simmering ideological dissonance within the school choice movement.
Yesterday, a senior administration official, speaking on the Supreme Court's ruling, was blunt about the political prospects for major voucher legislation from Capitol Hill any time soon.
"On the local level, you'll get a boost, but you're probably not going to see a lot on the federal level," this official said. But why? "There are a lot of suburban white Republican voters who don't want to change their schools because their schools work just fine. And until you get the suburbs supporting choice, you don't have the voting bloc to get it done."
Translation: The vast, affluent white suburbia, the people once most associated with the voucher movement, the demographic group whose ideological soul is being desperately tugged by both parties, is simply not clamoring for school vouchers. And there's no hope that vouchers, as a single issue, will ever break the Democrats' lock on the black and Hispanic vote.
This White House, which chooses its words so carefully (even when the president himself mangles them), telegraphed itself in Milwaukee and Cleveland this week. And it may not please the conservatives who saw Bush not following on his campaign promises when last year's education bill made no mention of school choice initiatives.
"One of my jobs is to make sure that we continue to insist upon reform, to take this court decision and encourage others to make the same decision at the local level," Bush told a crowd in Cleveland, whose voucher system was upheld by the Supreme Court last week. If the president were being blunt, he would have said: "I completely agree with the court's decision, and I believe vouchers are right for America. I'll take to the bully pulpit to encourage other cities to do what Cleveland and Milwaukee have done, but don't expect the full-court press directed from Washington."
Paradigm Changed Over Time
A compressed, and admittedly simplified (but nonetheless accurate) history of the movement is in order: Two decades ago, when Ronald Reagan energized conservatives by endorsing the concept, vouchers were portrayed by the left as little more than a tax cut for the rich, a reward for enrolling their children in elite private and parochial schools. In a political environment still raw from the busing wars and urban white flight, the left won the argument.
The right set out to change the paradigm — and to some extent was too successful. The idea was to portray vouchers as a device that would primarily help the parents of low-income, minority parents with children stuck in poor performing schools by offering them public dollars to send their kids to the school of their choice. White conservatives worked with black parents and educators in Cleveland and Milwaukee to create voucher models in those broken, predominately black school districts.
Meanwhile, a handful of black leaders such as former Queens Congressman Floyd Flake (D) and Newark City Councilman Cory Booker, got involved in the movement as the numbers began to change among those most desperate for educational options. But as support from the Democratic party's most loyal constituency--blacks and Hispanic--went up, white support went down. Now, depending on which poll you look at, white support is below 50 percent, while black and Hispanic support is up or around 65 percent.
California is one of a few states to offer statewide referendums on vouchers, yet the general public has rejected them.
"Look at this thing in term of demographics," said David Bositis of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, the black think tank based in Washington. "White suburbanites are cool to school vouchers. And young blacks and Hispanics under 35 are very hot on vouchers…. Since when in American politics have the things that young African Americans wanted ever been something that is likely to be achieved?"
Look further at the numbers: The people most likely to vote, white suburbanites and older people (both black and white) strongly oppose vouchers, Bositis says. Those least likely to vote, young black and Hispanic men, are now among the most ardent supporters.
Bositis's argument aside, support for vouchers remains strong for a segment of white suburbia-the reliably conservative segment-and the religious right of all economic classes. But even many of them recognize the landmines on the political landscape.
Grover Norquist, a conservative activist who is close to the White House, and an ardent supporter of vouchers, acknowledges the momentum gained by the Supreme Court decision is only sustainable for now on the micro level, meaning it will serve as a catalyst to voucher movements in select localities. Perhaps it could ignite interest in Rep. Dick Armey's (R-Texas) long-floundering D.C. vouchers bill. As with welfare reform, the party needs only a few successful local or state voucher models to prove they were right all along.
"The Republicans will not win a single vote for doing the right thing on this," Norquist said. "But over time, it's so obviously the right thing to do, it'll benefit us in the end."
Changing Demographics Creates Rifts
The changing demographics of the issue will complicate the issue in another way. As the perception of who benefits most from vouchers has changed over the years, a rift has developed in the movement about what kinds of voucher programs should be advocated. The debate is over "means testing," a term that sounds more forbidding than it should. Essentially, it's this: Should only poor kids be eligible for vouchers? And if so, doesn't that rule out many of the affluent white conservatives who have pushed this issue for decades? And if you rule them out, where's the incentive for Republican leaders looking to galvanize support in their communities?
These are not arcane points, for it becomes self-defeating for a movement that is already struggling to build a majority to become split and splintered.
"We support vouchers for low-income parents, not universal vouchers," said Lawrence Patrick III, president and CEO of Black Alliance for Educational Options, the organization responsible for those television and radio ads featuring black families supporting vouchers that you've probably seen. "The reason we're not for [universal vouchers] is because the effect [means testing] would have is leveling the playing field. You don't give Pell Grants to rich people in higher education, we don't give everyone a voucher."
Asked how long it will take the political movement to make vouchers an institutional reality in America.
"Twenty years minimum," he said. "This is still a very long-term struggle."
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