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AMERICA'S educational history is the story of a conflict between two strong traditions. On the one hand is academic freedom. Control once was decentralized, and educational institutions were voluntary, cooperative efforts between parents, teachers, students, and charitable organizations and local governments. Parents sought options for their children that harmonized with their religious and cultural traditions, and constitutional protections--including freedom of expression, religion, and association--helped to protect diverse institutions from state repression.

On the other hand, there is state-controlled schooling. The rise of the public school accompanied large waves of immigration in the 19th century. Government control was thought necessary in order to assimilate the children of immigrants, and to avoid conflicts over state subsidization of minority religious concerns. In one respect, this latter tradition largely has carried the day; well over 80% of kids now attend public schools.

Nonetheless, an ethos of educational freedom still exists. While most children attend public schools, the Constitution protects the right of alternative private ones to exist, and the right of parents to choose them. Many feel that mothers and fathers are better able to make childrearing decisions--including those relating to education--than the state.

In the wake of the Supreme Court's Zelman v. Simmons-Harris ruling upholding school choice programs, more and more families are questioning whether state control over education really is best. Decades of failure in the inner cities have contributed to the recent momentum against standard state solutions to social problems, and the success of choice programs in Milwaukee and elsewhere has challenged the conventional wisdom that families with low incomes cannot or will not make good decisions regarding their offspring's education.

Before the mid 19th century, schooling was a local undertaking, funded by tuition, charity, public monies, or some combination of the three. This range of schooling options met most citizens' needs. Tuition-charging venues in particular produced curricular and other innovations that spurred the young nation's economic growth. Residents of small towns and rural areas in the North attended semipublic district schools, which generally allowed poor students to attend for free while charging tuition to others. In the South, teachers selected temporary locations or were engaged by a group of parents to give instruction for a term. Most children in Northern rural areas and a substantial number of white Southern children attended class two or three months a year. Parents had considerable influence due to the custom of housing teachers in student homes. Parents also played a significant role in the selection of staff and textbooks.

This haphazard mix produced a surprisingly well-educated populace. By 1787, free male literacy was about 65%, and probably greater than 80% in New England. By 1850. only one in 10 people identified themselves as illiterate on the U.S. census. Enrollment rose steadily during these years, particularly among girls. Findings from an 1821 annual report of New York State superintendents indicate that schooling was almost universal there, without being compulsory or free (except to the very poor). Independent and, to a lesser extent, semipublic schools succeeded precisely because parents controlled instructor pay and made other important decisions.

Beginning in the 19th century, a system of "free" public schools began replacing the network of semipublic, independent, and charity facilities. They became institutions designed to achieve social goals. By the end of the 19th century, schools largely were state-run. The so-called "common school" movement accompanied an era of dramatic social change, particularly the influx of immigrants during the 1830s and 1840s. From the dominant (Anglo-Saxon and Protestant) viewpoint, that influx represented a threat. Protestantism, along with faith in capitalism and republicanism, justified reformers' wish to regulate morals and create a more homogenous population through public schooling.

These public schools generally enforced their Protestant bias. In 1854, for example, the Maine Supreme Court held that public schools could require reading from the King James Bible. In 1858 and 1859, New York City and Boston students were expelled from public school lot refusing to read from that Bible. By 1870, Protestant reformers, with little exception, had decided that public funds would not be allocated to sectarian schools.

Teachers and administrators vigorously supported this campaign. Their objective was to abolish rate bills (partial fees paid by parents) so district taxation would pay their salaries instead. Later, they lobbied for compulsory education. Thus, teachers eventually were able to earn higher salaries with less accountability to parents.

The lower classes and ethnic and religious minorities, however, lost out. As state funding increased, charity decreased. Immigrants found that public schools sought to Americanize their children at the expense of traditional customs and beliefs, while blacks were condemned to the segregated system of the post-Civil War. Whether they pressed for integration or tried to make the best of separate schools, their independent schools gradually were absorbed by public systems. In the end, state-sponsored education was detrimental to white Protestant children as well. By ceding control to the state, parents had reduced private options, ensuring declining quality. Public education increasingly satisfied the interests of the people the state had put in charge: teachers and administrators.

The dawn of the 20th century saw an escalation in the battle between proponents of educational freedom and activists bent on using the law to restrict flexibility. Efforts to restrict options sprang primarily from a continuing cultural backlash against the large waves of immigrants pouring in from southern Europe and Asia. Like those of the Reconstruction Era, but unlike earlier arrivals, these individuals often were not Protestant. Instead, Jews, Italians, Poles, and others were subject to widespread discrimination.

World War I significantly exacerbated this distrust. This backlash against immigrants--particularly those from Germany--was called nativism, or "100% Americanism." Immigrants were seen as ideologically suspect, thus unreliable supporters of the war effort. National and local organizations routinely investigated individuals and groups deemed hostile to the U.S. action in Europe.

The U.S. Supreme Court, however, effectively defended educational freedom from some of the era's worst assaults, striking down restrictions on teaching foreign languages as well as compelled full-time attendance at public schools.

The demise of these laws at the hands of the Supreme Court marked the beginning of an era in which a safe haven existed in American law for parenting and family life. Not just foreign languages, but any other areas of learning that parents and students wished to pursue now were protected from arbitrary state interference. This proved critically important in years to come, as the state schooling movement gained economic and political clout. The controversy also tied parents' liberty interest in raising children explicitly to freedom of intellectual inquiry and from official orthodoxy. Citizens reaffirmed their right to think differently, and recognized that educational freedom was critical to an intellectually diverse and tolerant society.

Parents fight back

While government control of schooling was ascendant for most of the 20th century, the pendulum recently has begun to swing the other way--back toward parental influence. Flexibility has become more popular with the courts and policymakers.

Opponents of school choice, including the National Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers, and Americans United for Separation of Church and State filed the Zelman v. Simmons-Harris case to challenge an Ohio law authorizing a choice program in Cleveland. They claimed, among other things, that it violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. However, the Supreme Court, in a five-to-four vote, explained that choice always is constitutional so long as it meets a few clear guidelines demonstrating that parents are offered a "true private choice."

Various states and cities have enacted either voucher or tax credit initiatives in recent years. Milwaukee's Parental Choice Program, established in 1990 and expanded in 1995, distributes vouchers to more than 10,000 students with family incomes at or below 175% of the poverty line. Similarly, the Cleveland Scholarship and Tutoring Program gave more than 4,500 low-income students vouchers of up to $2,250 for the 2002-03 academic year.