Unforgetting the history of school vouchers: A Disability Critical Race Theory analysis of what the market can do for education

• In Event: Students with Disabilities in School Voucher Programs

Abstract

Objectives and Purposes
On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina made landfall in Louisiana, producing a wall of water 29 feet high that burst the area’s levees and flooded over 80% of the city of New Orleans, claimed 1,836 lives, and wrought over $100 billion dollars in damage. Milton Friedman, architect of the school voucher movement, responded by publishing an Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal calling on Louisiana to seize this moment to enact a new system of school choice to “provid[e] a large-scale example of what the market can do for education” (Friedman, December 5, 2005). The change Friedman called for indeed came to pass, and New Orleans public schools were all but eliminated in favor of charter schools.

Twenty years after Hurricane Katrina, we draw on Disability Critical Race Theory (DisCrit) to “unforget history” and examine the historical roots of the school choice movement, their influences on school reform in New Orleans, and the impacts of the New Orleans educational experiment on students with disabilities and their families.

(1) What ideologies, assumptions and aims regarding disabled and minoritized students informed the initial school-choice vision as articulated by Milton Friedman?
(2) How did these ideologies, assumptions and aims shape post-Katrina school reform and impact disabled and racialized students in New Orleans?

Perspectives and Context
Our study is informed by disability studies and Disability Critical Race Theory (DisCrit) (Annamma et al 2013). DisCrit calls our attention to how whiteness and ability or “smartness” operate as white property (Annamma, et al 2013; Leonardo and Broderick, 2011). DisCrit illuminates the historical uses of disability identification to deny human rights and to justify slavery, eugenics, institutionalization, forced sterilization, and segregation and to deny access to citizenship rights, life-saving medical treatments, and equal educational opportunities (Baynton, 2001, 2005; Ferri & Connor, 2005, 2006; Schweik, 2009).

Data Sources and Methods of Analysis
Data include publicly available keystone texts i.e. Friedman’s 1955 seminal essay, legal filings and court documents related to P.B. et al v. Pastorek (2010), and a series of reports published in June 2025 by the Education Research Alliance for New Orleans. Across each of these texts we conducted both content analysis and critical narrative analysis (Souto-Manning, 2014; see also van Hulst, et al 2025).

Results
Our analysis demonstrates that access to schooling and denial of the opportunity to participate fully in educational contexts through the weaponization of dis/ability and racialized identities is both historically significant and ongoing in New Orleans. Unforgetting the history of school vouchers makes visible the links between resistance to school desegregation and the rise of “school choice.” Further, while Friedman places much emphasis on freedom, our analysis indicates that his narratives around freedom and responsibility exclude individuals with disabilities.

Scientific and Scholarly Significance of the Study
Our work provides urgent insights for interrogating current market-based reform efforts and for reimagining school reform that is inclusive, anti-ableist and anti-racist. This is critically important at a time when school vouchers are poised to reshape the public school system nationally. 

Authors

• Kathleen M. Collins, Pennsylvania State University

• James Collins, Pennsylvania State University