Coons and Sugarman's Proposal for Income-Adjusted Vouchers Revived

In the 1970s, the legal scholars John Coons and Stephen Sugarman developed an income-adjusted voucher plan for California, entitled the California Initiative for Family Choice in Education, and attempted in 1979 to get it on the state ballot for a referendum vote. Yet despite much publicity, their petition drive fell far short of harvesting the number of signatures necessary to place the initiative on the ballot.

In an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal today, Mark Brilliant and Steven Davidoff Solomon  nevertheless contended it is time to revive Coons and Sugarman's proposal. According to Brilliant and Solomon, professors of history and law, respectively, at the University of California, Berkeley, the pandemic should make Coons and Sugarman's proposal all the more compelling.

"It’s time to revisit their liberal version of vouchers," Brilliant and Solomon wrote. "During the pandemic the achievement gap expanded as the rich created pods, hired tutors, and moved to private schools or districts with open schools. Poor children suffered in ways that will last a lifetime. Vouchers are a liberal idea that should be adopted to give all parents equal opportunities to educate their children at the school of their choice. Surely, correcting the fundamental unfairness of a system that allows choice only for those with means is something conservatives and liberals can agree on."

While the pandemic does indeed appear to have broadened the achievement gap, there is little if any evidence of greater support today than in 1979 for the income-adjusted voucher proposal advanced by Coons and Sugarman. Brilliant and Solomon certainly do not provide any such evidence in their op-ed.

- S.E. Abrams