Radical Dreamers: Race, Choice, and the Failure of American Education

An immersive and authoritative history of the school choice movement—from its idealistic roots among Black activists to the costly unaccountable programs of today.

Seventy years after Brown v. Board of Education and demands to desegregate public schools, race and class remain the most reliable predictors of educational achievement in America. In attempting to address this divide, many school reformers have championed school choice: solutions like charter schools, vouchers, and other innovations designed to build more options into the system. Today, at least thirty-five states have laws that enable parents to send their children to private and religious schools at public expense while forty-six states have legalized charter schools.

In Radical Dreamers, Joseph P. Viteritti tells the definitive history of the school choice movement. In the 1990s, school choice emerged as an effort by a coalition of Black activists and conservative lawmakers seeking to offer economically disadvantaged students of color a way out of failing schools. As Viteritti shows, however, today's movement—championed by Republicans, conservatives, and faith-based organizations—has become less about placing disadvantaged children in better schools and more about providing public funding to students, irrespective of income, attending private—and frequently religious—schools.

Viteritti, an education insider and supporter of school choice for underserved students, profiles six influential figures, the "radical dreamers," who were integral to understanding the movement for greater education equality and the role that choice can play in fully realizing the movement's potential. Radical Dreamers urges us to have an honest conversation about education in America and where we have gone wrong. Viteritti's compelling narrative of how some of the most passionate educators conceived of school choice provides a valuable context to our nation's long struggle to offer every child in America a good education, and how that goal was undermined by advocates on both the left and right.