Heather Cox Richardson’s Bowdlerized History of School Choice

A Response to Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American Substack

Like most Americans, I am fascinated with history but have not had a chance to follow the work of Heather Cox Richardson with any frequency. Because I work in education policy, a friend sent me her August 21 Substack which aims to be a racial takedown of the school choice movement. If it is any indication as to how she approaches history, I feel for Boston College students and those who read her regularly.

In her piece, Richardson draws a line from Southern efforts to deny Black Americans an education, through segregation academies and religious schools, to Ronald Reagan’s support for vouchers and today’s school choice movement. She concludes with an extraordinary and malevolent claim: In 2026, as in 1831, “the intent to exclude certain Americans” from full participation in American society “remains the same.”

To get there, she employs a trick favored by ideological historians: omission of a bevy of obvious facts and inconvenient history. In this case, she skips more than three decades of school choice history and ignores the evidence from the nation’s largest and most mature school choice system.

Ignoring the largest and longest-standing school choice market in the U.S.: Florida

Richardson devotes considerable attention to Texas, where universal school choice is new. She never mentions Florida, where well over a million students attend schools or participate in educational programs outside traditional district schools and the state has more than two decades of experience with choice at scale.

In 2025–26, Florida has 3.5 million K–12 students across traditional public schools, charter schools, private schools, home education, and other educational options. More than 560,000 students receive state-supported scholarships. As of November 2025, 316,000 students participated in the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship (FTC) or Family Empowerment Scholarship for Educational Options (FES-EO), another 84,000 participated in the Personalized Education Program (PEP), and more than 163,000 received Family Empowerment Scholarships for Students with Unique Abilities (FES-SUA).

Florida’s private schools enroll nearly 500,000 students (this figure does include pre-K), while more than 150,000 students participate in home education. The state also has more than 408,000 students enrolled in 739 public charter schools.

Who are these students? Step Up reports that 54 percent of FTC/FES-EO scholarship students are Black or Hispanic, more than 100,000 qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, a standard proxy for lower income, and 36 percent live in single-parent households.

The history is even more telling. Florida’s choice system was not built for wealthy families. For most of its history, the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship was means-tested and targeted to lower-income students. An Urban Institute analysis of Florida scholarship students found that 65 percent received free lunch and another 11 percent reduced-price lunch.

Universalization changed the mix. Florida opened eligibility to all families in 2023, and 69 percent of new scholarship students that year had previously attended private schools. That is worth acknowledging. But it tells us who enters first when eligibility changes, not whom a mature choice system ultimately serves.

Higher-income families entered a massive, two-decade-old system whose foundation was lower-income students. Today more than 100,000 FTC/FES-EO students still qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. That is the difference between taking a snapshot of the first year of universalization and looking at the development of a school choice market over 25 years.

The racial data tell much the same story. Among FTC/FES-EO scholarship participants, 42 percent are white, 36 percent Hispanic and 19 percent Black, compared with 50 percent non-Hispanic white, 29 percent Hispanic and 16 percent Black in Florida’s overall population. The mature Florida program is more racially diverse than the state it serves.

These are awkward facts for Richardson, who is claiming that today’s school choice is a modern form of racial and economic exclusion.

Richardson is hostile to programs disproportionately chosen by black and brown families

Richardson’s hostility to school choice extends to charter schools. In 2020, she railed against Betsy DeVos for “privatizing the public school system,” which she equated with “replacing our public schools with charter schools.” She said Michigan had been “flooded with low-performing charter schools.” Michigan’s charter authorization system needs some improvement, but Stanford’s CREDO research finds that Michigan charter students significantly outperform peer traditional public school students. Detroit charters always rank at the top of the public school system there. Curiously, Richardson reserves her outrage for the “privatizers,” not the traditional public schools they outperform.

As noted above, more than 400,000 students attend Florida public charter schools. The students choosing charters make Richardson’s racial argument even more clueless. Florida Department of Education data show charter enrollment at 29 percent white, 46 percent Hispanic, 18.4 percent Black and 6.6 percent other—meaning 71 percent of charter students are racial or ethnic minorities. More recent data show 63 percent are Black or Hispanic alone.

As for the income of the families choosing charters, Florida DOE data show that around 50 percent of charter students qualified for free or reduced-price lunch.

Put the pieces together and the scale is striking: More than 560,000 Florida students receive state-supported scholarships, including more than 163,000 students with unique abilities; more than 150,000 students in home education; and 400,000 students are enrolled in public charter schools..

Equally striking is how wild and irresponsible Richardson’s claims of racial and economic exclusion are given the disproportionate number of minority and lower-income families choosing these options.

The historian who avoids history: The missing 30 years

On history itself, Richardson plays the same trick of omission, telescoping from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump, while whistling past more than three decades during which the modern school choice movement was built. Richardson does this because she wants to federalize the issue, but make no mistake about it: The modern school choice movement has very little to do with Washington and the federal government.

The modern school choice movement was built from the ground up, starting with metropolitan areas and then state by state. Milwaukee launched the nation’s first modern private-school choice program in 1990, targeted to low-income children. Cleveland’s program was created in 1995 and launched the following school year. Congress created the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program in 2004 for low-income children in Washington, with priority for students attending schools identified as needing improvement.

Florida built tax-credit scholarships and programs for students with disabilities. Other states developed still different approaches. The school choice movement was built on multiple chassis—vouchers, tax-credit scholarships, charter schools, special-needs programs, education savings accounts and other models.

That history matters. States experimented, learned and changed eligibility, funding, accountability and program design. Today’s universal programs are the next iteration, not Reagan-era vouchers suddenly resurrected by Donald Trump.

Richardson’s own Texas example illustrates the problem with drawing sweeping conclusions from a new program. She emphasizes that 70 percent of first-year participants previously attended private schools or were homeschooled. But in the same paragraph, she reports that most participating families earn less than twice the federal poverty level.

What matters is what happens over time: whether new schools open, good schools expand, supply responds to demand and participation broadens. States also learn from early problems and adjust quality controls, accountability and safeguards. Florida gives us more than two decades of evidence on those questions; Texas gives us one year.

The discrimination Richardson leaves out

If Richardson’s history and grasp of the facts around school choice are weak and willfully misleading, her history omits any concern about religious discrimination.

For much of American history, state constitutions barred public education funds from reaching religious schools. Many of those provisions grew out of the 19th-century Blaine Amendment movement and its anti-Catholic politics. At the same time, supposedly nonsectarian public schools commonly used Protestant prayers and Protestant Bibles.

This isn’t revisionist history. The Supreme Court has addressed it explicitly. In Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue in 2020, the Court considered a Montana program that provided tax credits for donations funding private-school scholarships but barred families from using those scholarships at religious schools. The Court struck the restriction down.

The history was ugly, and the Court said so plainly. The federal Blaine Amendment was “born of bigotry” during a period of “pervasive hostility to the Catholic Church and to Catholics in general.” Justice Samuel Alito’s concurrence described “virulent prejudice against immigrants, particularly Catholic immigrants.” The constitutional principle was straightforward. A state does not have to subsidize private education. Once it chooses to do so, it cannot exclude schools simply because they are religious.

Two years later, Carson v. Makin pushed the principle further. Maine has rural communities without public secondary schools, so the state pays tuition for students to attend another public or approved private school. But Maine refused to pay if the private school provided religious instruction. The Court rejected that distinction. Maine could not create a private-school tuition program and then disqualify otherwise eligible schools because they were religious. Nor could it evade Espinoza by distinguishing religious “status” from religious “use.”

In Espinoza and Carson, the Court struck down major constitutional barriers states had used to exclude religious schools from choice programs. That helped clear the way for dozens of states to establish new or expand existing school choice programs, to the point where today almost one in two American students has access to a state-sponsored school choice program. And today programs that began largely for low-income children, students with disabilities and children in failing schools are now being expanded and, increasingly, universalized. We are at the beginning of a revolution in American education.

Blinded by Ideology, Richardson Can’t See Her Detroit—and Boston—Public School Problem

Richardson is remarkably incurious about the performance of the traditional public schools families are leaving. Why are Detroit families choosing charters there? What about NAEP scores that have been falling for well over a decade? And what about the public schools in her—and my—hometown of Boston? It is one final omission that reflects the ideological blinders she brings to the school choice debate.

I am the first to say that the school choice movement has major challenges ahead—particularly when it comes to leveling up academic performance consistently and transparently. The quality of instruction, instructional materials and practices must be at the center of all educational options. We must also ensure that public money—in Florida frequently $8,000-$9,500 per student—is spent in a way that the public knows is without fraud. If Richardson wants to challenge school choice on those grounds, she would be on stronger ground and hers would be a productive voice. These questions are worthy of debate and continued work.

But she is willfully oblivious to the grim fact that so many families face today: Traditional public-school performance is in free fall.

The 2024 NAEP results were grim. National fourth-grade reading fell another two points from 2022 and five points from 2019. Eighth-grade reading also fell two points from 2022. Fourth-grade math recovered somewhat from the pandemic collapse but remained below 2019, while eighth-grade math remained well below its pre-pandemic level.

And this isn’t simply a COVID story. NAEP data make very clear that the free fall began prior to COVID—the pandemic simply accelerated an already existing downward trend.

Massachusetts is a particularly striking example. Following the 1993 Massachusetts Education Reform Act, the Commonwealth rose from second-tier national performance to the top of the country on NAEP and became internationally competitive. The gains stopped around 2013 and began to reverse.

In the six years prior to the pandemic, fourth- and eighth-grade math scores each fell six points (253 to 247 and 301 to 295, respectively), and reading declined as well. The declines accelerated through 2022, with fourth-grade math falling another five points (247 to 242) and eighth-grade math another 11 points (295 to 284). Overall, between 2013 and 2022, fourth- and eighth-grade math fell back to or below their 2003 levels, respectively 242 and 284. Reading fell in fourth grade from 232 to 227, and in eighth-grade from 277 to 269.

According to the 2024 NAEP results, the middle-school decline has not reversed. Eighth-grade math fell an additional point (to 283), as did eighth-grade reading (to 268).

So, by all means, let’s ask the quality question—of all schools. Let’s ask the public trust question around how funds are spent in school choice programs. Let’s take on those challenges, but the denial of the quality problem in the traditional public schools is irresponsible—especially to the families Richardson purports to care about. The professor teaches at Boston College, and she should know that the Boston Public Schools (BPS) are spending $38,000 per student, while yielding dreadful results in at least a third of the schools.

She might want to ask Boston families, white and of color, why they left the city schools or why they are choosing Private, charter and historic desegregation programs over the mighty BPS, the first public school system in America. Just 50 years ago its enrollment stood at 92,000. This year, BPS serves 44,000 students.

The Reality of School Choice is Federalism at Work

Richardson has bowdlerized the history of school choice, lopping off decades of state experimentation, the racial and economic makeup of the families who actually choose alternatives, the religious discrimination confronted in Espinoza and Carson, and the long decline in traditional public-school performance that so disproportionately affects lower-income students.

Put those facts back in and a very different picture emerges. School choice has evolved over decades, with states testing and improving on previous models. It is federalism at work: states not waiting for Washington to tell them what “innovation” is. Today school choice serves disproportionately minority and lower-income families in its most mature markets, and is expanding at a time when families have good reason to demand alternatives.

A caricature works by exaggerating and bending real features, while erasing others. Richardson’s history works the same way. The result is political advocacy, not history.