“The Voice of Choice”: Transpacific Educational Exchanges in the Neoliberal Era

Abstract This essay queries how ideas about school choice traversed the Pacific in the late twentieth century. Specifically, it reconstructs and deconstructs the visits of two African American proponents of parental school choice, Annette “Polly” Williams and Howard Fuller, from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to Aotearoa New Zealand in the 1990s. Drawing from oral histories, newspapers, and archives in the United States and Aotearoa New Zealand, this essay explores Fuller’s and Williams’s travels and the responses they generated to better understand how and why choice-based educational policies, including school vouchers, gained traction, or failed to do so, at the close of the twentieth century. A close-up analysis of one small strand of the transnational voucher movement reveals that educational ideas and policies did not drift naturally from one place to another. To the contrary, they were cultivated; and that cultivation, particularly when done across vastly different contexts, represented both a political act and an expression of power. This essay also prompts historians to understand the global ascendancy of school choice at the end of the twentieth century by looking to other transnational frameworks and ideologies in addition to neoliberalism: decolonization, Indigenous activism, Pan-Africanism, and the “Black Pacific,” among others. Finally, this essay hopes to encourage more historians of education, including Americanists, to peer beyond national boundaries when investigating the cultivation, development, and dissemination of educational ideas and practices. A close analysis of the transpacific travels of Fuller and Williams can serve as a tangible model for how historians might utilize microhistory to reap the benefits of transnational inquiry while avoiding its analytical hazards: broad generalizations, oversimplifications, and cultural misinterpretations.