America's Voucher Politics
How Elites Learned to Hide the State

Explores how amid America's racial, religious, and civic struggles, voucher-supporting policymakers strategically attenuate policy design and communications to circumvent legal challenge.

Ursula Hackett (Author)

9781108812054, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 6 January 2022

290 pages, 30 b/w illus. 17 tables
22.9 x 15.1 x 1.6 cm, 0.45 kg

'America's Voucher Politics: How Elites Learned to Hide the State is an extraordinary study offering research based and insightful analysis of the history and contemporary employment of school vouchers and their selective education purposes, as well as their political implications … highly recommended as a unique and critically important contribution to our on-going national discussion of school vouchers.' The Midwest Book Review; Library Bookwatch

What explains the explosive growth of school vouchers in the last two decades? In America's Voucher Politics, Ursula Hackett shows that the voucher movement is rooted in America's foundational struggles over religion, race, and the role of government versus the private sector. Drawing upon original datasets, archival materials, and more than one hundred interviews, Hackett shows that policymakers and political advocates use strategic policy design and rhetoric to hide the role of the state when their policy goals become legally controversial. For over sixty years of voucher litigation, white supremacists, accommodationists, and individualists have deployed this strategy of attenuated governance in court. By learning from previous mistakes and anticipating downstream effects, policymakers can avoid painful defeats, gain a secure legal footing, and entrench their policy commitments despite the surging power of rivals. An ideal case study, education policy reflects multiple axes of conflict in American politics and demonstrates how policy learning unfolds over time.

Introduction. Subtle forms of circumvention
1. America's foundational identity struggles
2. Two dimensions of attenuated governance
3. The racial struggle: segregation grants in the Brown era
4. The religious struggle: vouchers and the church-state question
5. The public-private struggle: union opposition and the educational establishment
6. Tax credit scholarships in an era of Republican dominance
7. Education savings accounts and controversies beyond
Conclusion. Attenuated governance and the state.

Subject Areas: Constitutional & administrative law [LND], Politics & government [JP]