The secret history of the school choice left
Because teachers’ unions play such an important role in today’s Democratic Party, it is widely assumed that school choice — the policy of letting families use taxpayer dollars to educate their children as they wish — is a Republican or conservative program. And while it's true that teachers’ unions will instantly turn on any Democrat who favors public funding of non-public schools, there is in fact a long history of prominent left-wing thinkers and activists supporting school choice. As far back as 1956, British Labour Party leader Anthony Crosland wrote a controversial book called The Future of Socialism, in which he observed that the bureaucratic management of England’s newly expanded welfare programs was turning out to be almost as bad as having no programs at all.