Charters became the privately regulated route to the same privatization vouchers promised

Evidence

In public confusion about the nature of charters, the DeVos family and their allies saw opportunity. A lightly regulated charter school industry, they realized, could achieve many of the same goals as voucher programs. They could drain funding from traditional public schools, deregulate the education sector, and promote ideological or even religious curricula—all without provoking the kind of resistance that vouchers received. Democrats, centrists, and secular education reformers who opposed voucher schemes were often favorably disposed to charters, which they saw as one of many tools available to public school systems. — Katherine Stewart, The Power Worshippers, 768

Categorization

• XREF: A clean example of tactical frame-switching between two technically distinct vehicles — parallel to how religious-liberty rhetoric gets swapped for privilege claims in ch9; resembles Gentzkow’s language-shifting strategies. — connects to: School vouchers originated as subsidies for segregated white religious academies — Katherine Stewart, The Power Worshippers: Inside the…, 752; Voucher advocate Diane Ravitch reversed to oppose vouchers — Katherine Stewart, The Power Worshippers: Inside the…, 765
• DEEPTHINKING: Illustrates how exploiting a semantic distinction (charter vs voucher) lets an actor achieve a politically unpalatable end by relabeling — a dense mechanism for how labels channel legislative politics.