This month, former Senator George McGovern frames his beau ideal of the crusading and committed progressive in his new book, What It Means to Be a Democrat. Addressing issues as varied as education, defense spending and universal healthcare, McGovern reminds the reader that “if there ever was a moment to define ourselves boldly, to stick to our ideals, it is now.” But now, McGovern’s ideal Democratic defense of public education is much narrower than it was when he ran for president 40 years ago.

“Yes, I’m sure that some private academies offer students more one-on-one attention and perhaps more intellectual stimulation than the neighborhood public school,” he writes. “But that doesn’t change my strongly held view that public funds should be invested in public education … Voucher programs that use public money to send kids to private school only divert money away from the overall goal of making U.S. public schools as robust as possible.”

When he ran for president in 1972, however, McGovern’s support for education was drawn more broadly. As Election Day neared, McGovern proposed his own tuition tax credit plan to help the parents of elementary and secondary schoolchildren offset the costs of a private or parochial education, just as advisers to Richard Nixon had done. Politically, McGovern wanted the Catholic vote, but this pretends that he was a maverick among liberal Democrats in wanting to aid families choosing a private, even faith-based, education. He was not.

Hubert Humphrey proposed his own tuition tax credit plan when he ran against Nixon in 1968. And McGovern joined 23 Democratic senators in 1978 to co-sponsor a plan championed by one of the nation’s most prominent Democrats, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, offering $500 in tax credits to families paying private school tuition.

“We cannot abandon these schools and we will not,” McGovern announced to a throng of Catholic high school students in Chicago in the fall of 1972, according to the Washington Post. Catholic schools, McGovern added, are a “keystone of American education," and without government help, families would lose the right to give their children an education in which spiritual and moral values play an important role.

Presidential candidates were born to flip-flop, but McGovern’s newest manifesto reminds us how far Democrats have strayed from a movement they once breathed life into. Moynihan was prophetic in 1981 when he wrote that as vouchers become more and more a conservative cause, “it will, I suppose, become less and less a liberal one.”

If that happens, he added, “it will present immense problems for a person such as myself who was deeply involved in this issue long before it was either conservative or liberal. And if it prevails only as a conservative cause, it will have been a great failure of American liberalism not to have seen the essentially liberal nature of this pluralist proposition.”

When an Indiana judge refused to halt the nation's most sweeping state voucher law this week, he partly relied on precedent that refuses to accept that only "public" schools make up the education system in the Hoosier State. As Judge Michael Keele's ruling states: 

A review of the historical record is instructive. When the State constitution was revised in 1851, the delegates considered an amendment to prohibit the establishment 'at the public charge, [of] any schools or institutions of learning other than district or township schools,' but did not adopt it ... Then, shortly after the adoption of the 1851 Indiana Constitution, the General Assembly created the Indiana public school system, but did not reverse the longstanding policy of financing private schools ... In fact, the School Law of 1855 permitted cities and town to 'recognize any school, seminary, or other institution of learning, which has been or may be erected by private enterprise, as a part of their system' ... Yet, such action would not 'supersede the common schools established under the authority of this State and supported by the public funds.'

That kind of argument reached across party lines not long ago. In 1977, Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Republican Bob Packwood jointly addressed The New York Times after the paper editorially opposed the tuition tax credit measure the pair had proposed and for which they had gained bipartisan support. In their letter to the Times, Moynihan and Packwood wrote:

We seek to reduce the artificial distinction between 'public' and 'private' schools and colleges, if not in governance then at least in the minds of prospective students and their families. Not until the mid-19th century did that distinction even come into existence. For many years, funds raised through public means were channeled directly into schools and colleges administered under private auspices ... We believe that the tuition tax credit approach as represented by our bill provides simple, direct and effective financial aid to students of all levels of education without the further expansion of an already massive bureaucracy.

Moynihan's tone grew more aggressive the following year when the New York Democrat wrote in Phi Delta Kappan:

The issue is not the future of the public schools. They now enroll more than 90% of all primary and secondary students and more than 75% of all postsecondary students. Although they do not lack for problems, their future is secure and is not the least threatened by our proposal ...

... Far the more important policy question before the Senate is whether nonpublic schools are to have a future or whether the national government is to aid and abet those who would not mind in the least if they were to shut down entirely ... Let there be no mistake about this either: In the field of education, the public sector is slowly but steadily vanquishing the private.

Thirty-three years separate Keele's ruling and Moynihan's argument, and there are too few Democratic leaders today who would take up the senator's old cause of "Diversity. Pluralism. Variety" in public education.  Whatever the outcome in Indiana, here's hoping this look in history can help to change that political dynamic.

Columbia University education professor Amy Stuart Wells is troubled by the spread of bipartisanship in education reform. "President Obama’s signature Race to the Top program, which promotes charter schools, state tests, and tough-love accountability for educators, might just as well have been proposed by a Republican president," she writes in Education Week.

True. But professor Wells has a short memory of what she considers the "traditional goals" of the Democratic Party. Far from subverting the party’s ideals, as she claims, today’s proposals for education reform echo the proposals for school choice and equal opportunity that Democrats advanced more than 40 years ago.

Both Hubert Humphrey in 1968 and George McGovern in 1972 proposed tuition tax credits for elementary and secondary school students in their respective Democratic presidential platforms. Also, in 1978, McGovern joined 23 other Democratic senators in co-sponsoring legislation introduced by Democratic Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan that would have awarded up to $500 in tax credits to families paying private or parochial school tuition. (more…)

A story today on Stateline.org shortchanges much of the Democratic support that has rallied behind proposals for school vouchers and tax credit scholarships in several states. But a greater lapse may be the characterization of who has historically supported private-learning options.

Much of that is understandable, given that Republicans have been the most vocal in advocating for greater choice and marketplace competition in public education, particularly in the decade-long timeframe relevant to Stateline’s analysis. But the increasing Democratic support particularly for tax credit scholarships more closely reflects the reality of the voucher movement in the 1960s and 70s.

While it was economist Milton Friedman who introduced the idea for school vouchers in his 1955 essay, “The Role of Government in Education,” the voucher movement got a jumpstart soon afterward from liberal intellectuals and activists and Democratic lawmakers, particularly from Harvard social scientist Christopher Jencks, Berkeley law professor John Coons and Democratic Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan. (more…)