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The Private Eye: Josh Cowen’s Newsletter on School Vouchers and Right-Wing Politics
More on the Election: State Results and the Emerging Trump 2.0 Education Agenda (a.k.a.: What Do Billionaires Want?)
Hi everyone,Well, we’re into the holiday season, and in the post-election period that means cabinet and other appointments (I know, nothing says holiday spirit quite like it, right?). Over the last few weeks, it’s become clear that Donald Trump’s appointments mainly come from a roster of his personal loyalists.Linda McMahon and the Billionaire Education AgendaTrump has followed exactly that pattern by naming Linda McMahon his nominee to head the U.S. Department of Education. McMahon ran the Small Business Administration during the first Trump term, and media reports have already made much of her thin education record. To me those resume items are far less important than her most recent role as chair of the America First Policy Institute (AFPI)—a dark money, vaguely focused outfit founded in the months following January 6.What this pick means is that, perhaps even more than the right-wing obsession with dismantling the very department McMahon is slated to lead, school vouchers will be item number one for Trump’s education agenda. McMahon founded AFPI with at least $20 million of her own money, partnering with Texas billionaire Tim Dunn in the effort. Dunn is the Texas-specific force working, as the New York Times put it: “to send public funding to private schools and to increase Christianity’s role in civic life.”My take on all of this is that the McMahon pick is about creating space to push these kinds of policy priorities while making sure the nominee doesn’t embarrass Trump. Expect to see a host of right-wing idea people and political hatchet-men coming in and out of the Department of Education. They’ll be looking to carve up, reorganize, and shut down programming they don’t like. They’ll reduce the Department’s budget ask to Congress and try to push the limits of any and all discretionary authority they have on, say, Title IX protections on gender-related discrimination. But the point of McMahon is to reward a long-time Trump loyalist who will let all of those things happen while the big, chief policy goal of a federal, tax credit voucher scheme gets priority. That scheme, currently called the Educational Choice for Children Act, which would establish a broad federal voucher program, is currently in play in Congress.It’s important to remember that Congress doesn’t belong to Donald Trump. So federal vouchers are hardly a foregone conclusion—especially if members of both parties stand up for their districts, like they did at times during the first Trump administration by rejecting cuts to public education.More on Election Results and Next StepsAnd on that note, I wanted to use the rest of this newsletter to make a point about the politics of the billionaire-backed school voucher push. Basically, that vast amounts of billionaire spending are necessary to ram voucher bills through state legislatures precisely because voters hate these schemes.That argument also includes the idea that voters in places like Texas selected pro-voucher legislators. But it’s important to remember how long and how much money from right-wing billionaires even that result has taken—among otherwise friendly Republicans. Texas Governor Greg Abbott has tried for nearly two years to ram vouchers through. And just as it did in other states, the Texas voucher push has cost millions in both in-state and out-of-state billionaire funding to come even as close as they have. What do those millions buy? Mostly favorable results in Republican primaries to try to weaken conservative opponents to vouchers. But as we know, actual voters tend to reject vouchers when given a direct say on them as opposed to a choice between legislators hand-picked by billionaires. Vouchers went 0-3 on Election Day on three statewide ballots: Colorado, Kentucky, and Nebraska. In Colorado, the result was a bit closer, in part because the ballot language was vague and contained a statement about parents’ right to direct their child’s education (who’s against that?!). In Nebraska and Kentucky, clear majorities of voters rejected vouchers while—and this is key—backing Donald Trump for the presidency. In Nebraska, 57% of voters actually pulled an existing voucher law off the books. In Kentucky, 65% of voters rejected a constitutional amendment that would have expressly authorized the state to spend public dollars on private school tuition. All 120 Kentucky counties voted against that plan, 119 of them by double digits.With those results, the streak continues: vouchers have never survived a statewide ballot where voters get to weigh in directly on these schemes. Public Schools are EverywhereIt’s really pretty simple. There are so many communities across the country where public schools hold a special place in folks’ hearts. And in their economies. Voters may not say so directly, but they’re perceiving what researchers find: that public school investments not only raise academic achievement, they also reduce crime rates, for example, and even may lead to greater health and life expectancy. And on the flip side, as voters may remember all too well from tough times like the Great Recession, cutting public school funding hurts kids and families.Look, there’s a reason real voters keep defeating vouchers even when they support Trump or other right-wing politicians on other issues. Public schools are everywhere—in red communities and blue communities. Just before the election, the New York Times published a massive new data tool showing where voters live with respect to key services, industries, and professions. So, for example: lots of public relations professionals in blue areas, lots of taxidermists in red spots, lots of Lululemons in blue areas, lots of Hardee’s and Sonic Drive-Ins in red. But you know what’s everywhere? Public schools. Check it out yourself. Alongside McDonalds (really, is that a surprise?), public schools are the one spot in the Times data tool you can’t really find a political pattern for based on left/right voting. (And on the flip-side, check out the new Public Funds Public Schools data tool to explore where private schools are, and aren’t, to see where parents would actually be able to use a voucher if those schemes came to town).Look, there’s work to be done. The extent to which public schools are able to fulfill their mission to serve everyone—every child—is going to be determined to a large degree by whether they’re given the support and the investment needed to do so. The data and the evidence are clear on that. It’s also the right thing to do. Voters spoke on Election Day. They didn’t choose everything I had hoped they would, but by and large they chose to keep and improve and ultimately fight for their public schools.Have a wonderful start to the holidays, I’ll get back to you again soon! Josh P.S. If this newsletter was forwarded to you, please consider joining the PFPS distribution list so you can receive future editions directly in your inbox.
Thoughts on the Election, Answering Questions from My Recent PFPS Webinar, and a Renewed Opposition
Dear Friends, Quick Election Reactions There is a lot to be said and done about public education in the weeks, months, and years ahead. For now, I want to just call your attention to the fact that school vouchers went down in defeat in all three states where they were put to voters on Election Day: Colorado, Nebraska, and Kentucky. Voter opposition to vouchers remains broad and bipartisan. In fact, it’s precisely because voters reject voucher schemes that the right-wing billionaires behind them keep turning to state legislators, who are easier (and frankly cheaper) to manipulate than hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens. Privateers Q&A from the PFPS Webinar There were so many great questions from the Public Funds Public Schools webinar that featured me and my book, The Privateers. A few of those were very specific, and I’ve tried to provide useful responses. Others were about the broader political landscape, and I wanted to use the opportunity to make a few bigger comments about public education and civic engagement in our new reality. First, the technical questions: How do you see the rightwing privateers shifting their messaging in order to pass vouchers/ESAs in purple states or states with slim red majorities? Not only did vouchers go 0-3 on Election Day, including with Trump supporters, these schemes have never survived any other statewide ballot measures—being put to real voters—even in red states. I think what’s going to happen in January is that Governors Abbott and Lee will try once more to ram vouchers through what they hope are now more pliant legislatures in Texas and Tennessee, respectively. And then I think the voucher lobby, the billionaires and the Trump administration together will continue the culture war. They don’t need to convince ordinary voters, and they haven’t been able to do so. But if they can keep influencing GOP primaries and the federal courts, that will be the strategy. Where can we receive information to communicate and inform our community members? Also, what approach would you recommend that you may have observed and how do you communicate this information in very conservative based areas without creating mass conflict within the community. Well, Public Funds Public Schools has a great set of resources! I’d start there. They even have interviews with advocates in conservative states who give tips on getting out the anti-voucher message effectively. And other groups like the Network for Public Education, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the Economic Policy Institute, the National Coalition for Public Education, and the National Education Policy Center all provide resources on a number of education questions. I hear from voucher supporters that they should be able to take the money for education for their child and use it however they want to educate their child. How would you reply to this parent? Public money already follows our children to school—as long as they’re enrolled in traditional public or charter schools. The only thing that doesn’t happen everywhere is tax dollars going to private, usually religious, education. But even in the states that do have such voucher schemes, remember this: it’s not really school choice. It’s the school’s choice. It’s a total myth that parents can customize their children’s education unfettered by rules and regulations. It’s that with vouchers, the private schools are doing the choosing. How do voucher recipient schools escape regulation? What is the special sauce of these programs that they escape oversight — that would be a step to prevent the failure you describe? In the old days when I first started studying this stuff as a young doctoral student (2005 or so), oversight of emerging voucher systems was still in place. The federal D.C. voucher scheme, which began enrolling kids in 2005, had real evaluation provisions. This was the era of No Child Left Behind, and lawmakers more or less extended those rules to voucher programs. Ditto with Louisiana and Indiana, for example, on the state level. In fact, that’s how we know how terrible voucher results have been over the last decade: even conservatives wanted to know whether parents were getting the results that private schools were promising them. But since the first Trump term, when we really started to see how badly vouchers were performing on academic outcomes, there’s been a real effort to avoid that oversight by omitting these requirements from many newer voucher laws. Voucher supporters are afraid of news headlines like these. When challenged about the lack of any real assessment as to how well students are learning under our voucher program in NH, a lawmaker said recently that it’s the parents whose children are in the voucher program who are the best judges for how the program is performing. What would you say to that? That’s more or less what Ken Starr said (remember him?) on the steps of the Supreme Court after leading the first voucher defense there back in 2002. That’s what voucher advocates have been saying for years. As a parent, I’d simply say: I’m very skeptical of any school that refuses to let me check their work. If that private school—or the lobby promoting voucher schemes—is so confident in what they’re selling, basic accountability shouldn’t be a problem. The fact that they’re so terrified that parents could compare results between their voucher school and a local public school should tell you a lot about what really happens when vouchers come to town. How do vouchers impact students with disabilities? With the expansion of vouchers, do we know what the impact is on students with specialized learning needs? In the past, states have carved out some voucher programs specifically for students with disabilities. Today, the emphasis is on vouchers for anyone, regardless of income or other characteristics. In almost all these programs, whether narrow or broad, students lose most of their rights under special education and disability laws. And in today’s world, there is no expectation that individual private schools will have to serve students with disabilities. The federal Government Accountability Office has previously warned about misinformation and false promises from voucher schools to parents with special needs students. And that’s something Arizona’s own Attorney General has warned about more recently. Now for two fundamental questions about education and democracy: What steps can we take to fight back? I just keep going back to the fact that voters don’t like these schemes—even conservative voters who backed Donald Trump. In The Privateers, I talk about the fact that school vouchers are one of the religious right’s very top policy priorities, alongside rolling back reproductive rights. The parallel is especially apt because voters hate rollbacks to their reproductive freedom, too. In this past election, not only did voters reject school vouchers in three states at the same time many backed Donald Trump, they also enshrined reproductive rights in seven more states. In four of those states—including Arizona, a key voucher state—Donald Trump won a majority of votes even while voters decided to protect reproductive rights. No matter what administration is in power, these fundamental questions about freedom will remain, and I think we need to remember that on those specific questions, more people agree with us than with the far-right. Join Education Law Center/Public Funds Public Schools next week for a webinar on concrete tools and steps to fight back against vouchers during Trump’s second term. Register here. How do you warn public school supporters about the extensive web of right-wing/privatization interests you've documented without sounding like a conspiracy theorist? Educator and author Jonathan Kozol said, “I used to think I could make a difference in education, but now I realize all I can do is stand back and watch.” Dr. Cowen, what can we do besides stand back and watch the dismantling of public schools by billionaires? For my part, I get called a conspiracy theorist all the time. It’s the Heritage Foundation’s favorite insult to use against me. And coming from the same people that wrote Project 2025, it’s an honor. I also get called a union activist, because I’ve appeared on stage with Randi Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teachers. And people call me woke because I spoke at a summit with Nikole Hannah-Jones. But in both cases, I am proud to have done so. Name-calling is to be expected when you’re doing the hard work. The reality is, many of these name-callers are just power-worshippers who have no problem being servient to far-right billionaires who will never know their names or care about them as people. Here’s what I’m trying to say: I’d rather be called an ally to unions that fight for working folks, journalists who ask questions about power and injustice, or educators on the front lines for our kids every day, than surrender my dignity to some of the wealthiest people on the planet. Know truth, and let it keep you free. We know that the evidence is on the side of new investments in public schools. We know that many state courts have said: “so is the law.” And we know voters are too—we just got another reminder. Standing up for democracy, and for education as a fundamental human right, is going to be an effort. And we do need to think hard about new strategies to take that stand in a way that speaks to people where they live, not just where or how we’d like them to be. So let those of us who can, get back to work. Josh P.S. If this newsletter was forwarded to you, please consider joining the PFPS distribution list so you can receive future editions directly in your inbox.
And Now for Some Good News!
Hey friends, I’m writing this edition on the way back from a swing through Florida, Iowa, Ohio, and Kentucky. Officially this is a book tour, but the first three of those states are dealing with the fallout of devastating universal voucher schemes, and the fourth – Kentucky – has a constitutional amendment on the ballot on November 5 that could open the door to voucher schemes. I’ve been talking about my book, The Privateers. But underlying that conversation is always the basic facts about vouchers: they defund public schools, devastate student learning, and fund discrimination against vulnerable kids and families. I’ve talked to so many folks on the road since August. Teachers who’ve given their careers to public schools, only to see themselves attacked and demoralized for their service. Parents who were lured in by the false promise of school choice for all, only to hear a school they chose for their child was not going to choose to accept them. Local activists and organizers who just want to know: “What can I do to stop these voucher schemes from growing in my state?” I don’t have all the answers. But I tried to end The Privateers with some uplifting words about the rock-solid evidence behind investing anew in public schools and communities and the moral value of whole-child commitments to kids everywhere. But if I were writing that conclusion today, I’d also add this: the fight against school privatization isn’t over. Not even close. And that’s not just a statement of will but a statement of fact. Although a handful of right-wing billionaires have succeeded in ramming voucher laws through a number of state legislatures over the last few years, they’ve also had some big setbacks. So, let’s talk about that good news. First, I mentioned Kentucky. There’s a scheme on the ballot trying to pry open the door to vouchers, disguised as a constitutional amendment that would merely, innocently, provide more parental choice. Something similar is on the ballot in Colorado, and in Nebraska, the state supreme court has allowed a vote on whether to roll back the state’s newly enacted voucher scheme. I don’t know what’s going to happen in those three states, but I know this: Vouchers have never survived a statewide vote by real, actual parents and other voters. It’s why so much dark money has to get spent to ply legislators into backroom deals to ram these things through. Second, there are the courts. Kentucky’s voucher amendment is up for a vote in 2024 because back in 2022 the commonwealth’s supreme court saw through the voucher scheme passed as a tax credit by a supermajority, right-wing legislature. The court noted, correctly, that the tax credit version of vouchers has the same revenue impact as a direct appropriation, and that using public dollars collected for education to fund anything other than the public schools (without voter approval) was a constitutional no-no for the Bluegrass State. Well, guess what? Just a few weeks ago, the South Carolina Supreme Court also rejected that state’s voucher scheme. Never mind the marketing around giving voucher cash to parents, the court said, all of that is just “window dressing" for sending public dollars to private schools. Again, another state constitutional no-no. Shoutout, by the way, to my amazing colleagues this year at Education Law Center and in the ELC-led Public Funds Public Schools campaign, who were co-counsel in the South Carolina case. There’s also Tennessee – another place ELC is co-counseling a voucher challenge – where the courts held vouchers at bay for several years. Though a geographically- and income-limited scheme exists now, the program has yet to find legislative votes to expand statewide. And look, we know the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative members keep blessing the diversion of public funds to private and religious schools. We know the end goal for Betsy DeVos and the Koch network is a SCOTUS ruling making private education vouchers mandatory in every state. But we also know they’ve got a ways to go. The SCOTUS term just started. And already the Court declined to take up a case from the right-wing Mackinac Center in Michigan that sought to crack open my state’s 529 savings plan for use on private K-12 tuition. And while voucher allies have just asked the Court to hear Oklahoma’s Catholic charter school case – basically, they want SCOTUS to say religious public schools are A-okay – let’s be clear about why they’ve had to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court in the first place. That’s because earlier this summer, Oklahoma’s Supreme Court threw that religious public school out the legal window. Watch’s ELC’s webinar on the decision for more details. (ELC is also co-counseling a separate case challenging the religious charter school, by the way.) What do you notice? Kentucky, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee. A case still pending in Ohio. When you ask state courts to decide for themselves on the constitutions they know best – and when you ask state voters – turns out these voucher schemes just don’t pass muster much of the time. And that’s important to remember because we know the other side claims the moral high ground, that they’re speaking for parents. And more often than not, they try to claim the legal high ground, too. Except it’s not at all true. Real voters have yet to pass a voucher scheme, and the courts have often rejected voucher laws. Vouchers are batting pretty well with judges like Samuel Alito and John Roberts. But so did ending reproductive rights and granting broad presidential immunity. I have said for more than two years now that the school voucher issue specifically, and the Christian Right’s privatization plans for education more generally, have passed the point of being credibly called effective public policy or a reflection of the “will of the people.” The evidence is just too dreadful for us to really have that debate any longer. And what we actually learn about vouchers comes as much from journalists and real parents shortchanged by the reality of failed voucher promises, as well as their legal advocates, as from researchers like me: outside of a few special interest groups fueled by right-wing billionaires, real parents and voters reject these schemes. Vouchers don’t have to be a foregone conclusion. Thanks again for reading and take good care. Josh P.S. If this newsletter was forwarded to you, please consider joining the PFPS distribution list so you can receive future editions directly in your inbox.
Additional Newsletters
My Address to the Center for Journalism and Democracy at Howard University
Hi again from the road! On October 8, I had the honor of addressing a gathering of journalists at the third annual Democracy Summit at Howard University’s Center for Journalism and Democracy. The Center was founded by Nikole Hannah-Jones, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of the 1619 Project.This year’s summit theme was understanding oligarchy. And my subject, not surprisingly, was private school vouchers. In her opening remarks, Ms. Hannah-Jones commended the audience to “call the thing the thing” in their reporting and writing. In my book, The Privateers, the thing I call vouchers is a billionaire-backed right-wing culture war on vulnerable children.I want to share my remarks to the Summit with all of you:******Thank you for the kind introduction, and thanks to Nikole and the Center for Journalism and Democracy for having me here today. I’ve been traveling around the country talking about the issue of school vouchers, and one of the things I say is that it’s going to be up to journalists—especially those with an investigative focus—to illuminate what these schemes are doing and where they come from, moving forward. So, I’m honored to be here. If you’ll indulge me, I want to take a minute to add a small piece to my biography, because it highlights the door I used to enter this kind of work, it’s an important part of the book I wrote, and it’s part of the message I try to get across today. I won’t go line by line, but the take home point here is that I started my professional life as a policy analyst, first as a young researcher across town at Georgetown, and eventually through making my way up in the field with bigger and bigger projects. I worked with state agencies, school districts and other partners to help learn what policies and programs work for kids and families, which don’t, for whom, and why. And I started that work studying school choice—programs that fund children who go to school outside their residential area—and especially school vouchers. There are a lot of different ways to deliver “school vouchers” and we can talk about those in the Q&A if you’d like but for the purposes of today’s talk a voucher is a.) public funding for private school tuition, and b.) an exit from traditional public schools. First just a status check. Now, this chart from researchers at Georgetown is a few months old now, and it’s broken down by type of voucher scheme. But you can get the idea even from the basic shape. And this is the 2024 status alone. What does this all tell you? Vouchers are on the march. So, with that basic introduction, I want to tell you a story. It’s 1955. Just a few months after the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that segregation in public spaces is unconstitutional. A 43-year-old conservative economist named Milton Friedman—who’d later go on to win a Nobel Prize and advise such leaders as Ronald Reagan and the Chilean strongman Augusto Pinochet—is crafting an essay. In this essay, Friedman is proposing what became the school voucher idea: payments to parents to shop for an educational environment as they wished. Now it seems likely that Friedman was working on this idea before the Brown decision but he certainly knew of its potential, and we know from historical work by Dr. Nancy MacLean and others that Friedman’s editor pressed him to address it. So how does Friedman choose to do that? By suggesting that vouchers can alleviate the inevitable conflict caused by “forced integration.” He says, “Under such a system, there can develop exclusively white schools, exclusively colored schools, and mixed schools. Parents can choose which to send their children to.” Now it’s a matter of some debate whether Friedman himself was a segregationist but what’s inarguable is that segregationists sure liked his idea. States across the South saw this voucher scheme as a way to avoid Brown. And predecessors to today’s voucher legislation popped up everywhere. In Texas, for example, voucher legislation called for parents to sign an affidavit affirming they were requesting the voucher cash specifically to avoid racial integration. It’s in documents like these that the “parents’ rights” slogans you hear today have their origins. The Texas bill didn’t pass, but the state’s about to consider a new voucher scheme this upcoming January. Because, although vouchers have gone down to defeat in multiple specially called legislative sessions over the last year, the right-wing billionaires pressing them today have not given up. So that’s where our story fast forwards to the present. Today, if we’re talking about vouchers, we have to talk about Betsy DeVos. Betsy DeVos has lamented the role of public schools in American life. She thinks public schools have replaced churches as centers of community. And she wants to use “school choice” (vouchers) to “advance God’s kingdom” on earth. She has the money to do it. This spring, CNN got ahold of an internal slide deck showing DeVos and her allies have spent more than $250 million over the last decade, to pry out $25 billion in voucher funding across the states. That’s $100 back for private school vouchers for every $1 they put in. There are other billionaires to talk about. Charles Koch. Jeff Yass. A right-wing organization called the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, based in Milwaukee, where the first modern voucher system began. DeVos gets more attention, but the role the Koch-backed groups have played in pressing for these schemes is almost incalculable. Journalists like Jane Mayer and scholars like Harvard’s Theda Skocpol have written widely on Koch groups, and I draw on their work for my own. In the voucher case what’s important to know is the Koch Network stands up everything from think tanks to campaign style field operations for door-to-door and direct mail efforts to get vouchers through. Milton Friedman gave all that an intellectual cover story. The Cato Institute, started with Koch funding, has a Friedman award to what they call the greatest champion for liberty in the 20th century. Quite the statement about someone who was a contemporary of Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, and other members of the civil rights community. But Milton was a social scientist (technically). So let’s talk about social science for a second. I’m a social scientist too. And I think it’s important to disenthrall ourselves from dusty old theory. I think it’s important to ask who—if anyone—these voucher schemes are helping now. What if vouchers really are an “opportunity” for kids who’ve been ill-served for whatever reason by their public schools? Except. That’s not what vouchers do. For one thing, most voucher users, around 70%, were already in private school to begin with. So, a lot of this needs to be thought of as just a typical interest group subsidy. That’s why some of the most accurate coverage I see of voucher schemes comes from state budget and political reporters. And the subsidies don’t stop at parents. It’s why you see in Ohio, the state is actually funding new private school construction—90% of private schools are religious by the way—to take new seats. But let’s talk about what happens to the kids who do transfer from public to private school? That would be, historically, about 30% of voucher users. And historically, those are disproportionately students of color, and kids from low-income families. The answer is, they suffer horrific academic consequences, especially in math and science. Over the last decade vouchers have caused some of the worst academic declines on record. You have to go to something like what Hurricane Katrina did to kids’ education in Louisiana, or to pandemic-sized learning loss, to get at the magnitude of what we’re talking about here. There’s a basic reason why. The private schools taking voucher bailouts aren’t the elite academies you may have heard of or that some of you may even have attended. They’re what I call sub-prime providers. Financially distressed. Mostly attached to churches, which siphon off much of the revenue. Some teaching things like creationism instead of the academic basics. So, what’s really going on? I call vouchers a new religious separatism in American education. Funding discrimination—in the name of a private school’s “creed” or “values”—against the most vulnerable kids out there. It's no accident that we’re talking about vouchers in the same moment as book bans, the teaching of accurate histories about race in schools, and new attacks on LGBTQ+ rights. I mentioned the right-wing Bradley Foundation. Bradley has funded most of the favorable voucher “studies” since 1990, millions in voucher advocacy, and all of the litigation pushing vouchers forward in the states and in the federal courts. Bradley has also backed indirect efforts to weaken trust in public schools—like the pandemic-era fights over in-person school learning. And they’re right in the middle of election denial schemes from the past, and voter suppression efforts today. They’re funding a new legal PAC by Trump’s anti-immigration crony Stephen Miller, and some of the groups aligned with Turning Point USA—the network for young, far-right operatives. This is a long-game effort, and vouchers are a key part of the story. Because what’s education really about? Is it just about academics? No, it’s quite literally about the future. If you grew up in a faith tradition as I did, and still practice as I do, you know how much emphasis is placed on child development. Vouchers, book bans, fights about school bathrooms and locker rooms—it’s all about trying to mold not just our children but everyone’s child into what Christian Nationalists think they ought to be. And doing so by separating out, isolating, and excluding those kids from what these folks consider sinful and unclean. So, let’s summarize what I’ve had to say today. Today’s vouchers mostly go to existing private school families. And they cause unprecedented academic hardship for kids who do transfer, many of whom lured away from under-resourced public schools. The voucher lobby folks like Betsy DeVos know this. It’s why they’ve turned increasingly to culture wars and especially to Christian Nationalism to make their case. In doing so they’re calling us back to voucher origin stories. Those based on separation. Isolation. Exclusion. Instead of community. Commonality. And shared dreams and goals. Vouchers have to be understood as part of this larger political moment we’re in. They headline Project 2025 and the Trump 47 education agenda. And they go alongside everything from book bans to election denial—quite fittingly. And quite deliberately. Thank you for giving me the time to tell you part of that story today. ****** Thanks again for reading and take good care. Josh P.S. If this newsletter was forwarded to you, please consider joining the PFPS distribution list so you can receive future editions directly in your inbox.
Beware State Education Departments Pushing School Voucher Schemes
Hello from the road! I’m writing this edition of The Private Eye while traveling between bookstore visits at Politics and Prose in Washington, D.C., Changing Hands near Phoenix, and Princeton University. I appreciate all the well-wishes and enthusiasm for my book, The Privateers, so far! For this edition, I want to draw special attention to the ways the private school voucher lobby makes its case and, especially, goes on the offensive against voucher critics. And I want to highlight the relatively recent role that the apparatus of state government plays in that activity—particularly, and perhaps surprisingly, the state departments of education charged with overseeing public schools. Now, just before I hit “send” on this newsletter, the Center for Media and Democracy published a big expose on how the Heritage Foundation, authors of Project 2025, are “weaponize[ing] state superintendents in culture war.” It’s a must-read on this issue too, because they explain how this all gets done. But keep reading here for the why: Why do these state education agencies matter to right-wing education policy schemes and especially the voucher fight? Although states vary in the process by which their superintendents of public instruction enter office —some are elected officials, some are appointed by governors, others are selected by statewide boards—all have one important job in common: they all oversee a civil service department that the federal government recognizes as a state education agency (SEA). The SEAs have a variety of functions, but most involve distributing taxpayer dollars earmarked for both general and specific school needs, and overseeing their use. These dollars include federal contributions, and with those federal dollars come a number of different requirements. For the purposes of today’s newsletter the most relevant of those rules are around data use and student privacy. The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) lays out many different restrictions on the use of student-level data. It’s what keeps schools from giving your kid’s information out to vendors, journalists, or researchers just because the district might want to do so. But there are important FERPA exceptions, and one of those is that SEAs and local school districts both have some latitude to use confidential (usually deidentified) student records toward the goal of improving educational outcomes. This includes partnering with outside researchers on studies that might illuminate what’s working and what’s not when it comes to educational programs. I’ve worked in such partnerships throughout my career, as have many of my colleagues and counterparts across the country. What does this all have to do with school vouchers? Well, in the early days of voucher evaluation—events I discuss in The Privateers—some of those research partnerships included efforts to study school voucher outcomes. We know about the dreadful academic results for voucher users in Louisiana, Indiana, Ohio, and Washington, D.C. precisely because of such partnerships, usually included in the original state (or in D.C.’s case, federal) legislation authorizing vouchers in the first place. But here’s the thing. SEAs can and do limit what data researchers have access to—and even which researchers get that access to begin with. I was involved in setting up a general-use partnership based at the University of Michigan that (within reason) provides redacted student records to researchers under FERPA’s research exemption. Similar programs exist in North Carolina, Texas, and Tennessee, to name a few. The point is that none of us can just simply decide to study school voucher impacts with even the redacted student-level records needed for most rigorous methodologies. The SEA gets to approve who uses those data and what they study, and usually even gets a chance to review results well ahead of public release. You can see where I’m going. Each state’s superintendent is more or less the final decision point for student record use, and for the distribution of results using their state’s student records. This means that in states like Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, or Iowa, a voucher study that might use student records is going to have to go through the state superintendent’s office before its authors are approved to use those data, and before the public sees what results are found. I name those states because all four have zealous, extremely pro-voucher state superintendents—an irony given that their daily charge is working on behalf of students in public schools. As one indicator, consider that the Arkansas and Florida superintendents spoke on behalf of vouchers at the 2023 Moms for Liberty general convention. Iowa’s state education director was previously Betsy DeVos’s policy director at the federal education department during the Trump years. The superintendent and communications office at the Arizona Department of Education have been especially aggressive in leading a quasi-official state war room against voucher opponents. The state’s education agency routinely releases reports on users of the state voucher system, which voucher lobby groups like the Heritage Foundation and Betsy DeVos’s American Federation for Children then cite in a cyclical fashion as evidence that vouchers work. In the most recent case, ADE communications staff sent out press releases “demolishing,” as they put it, highly regarded work from the Brookings Institution on wealthy voucher users, and investigative reporting from ProPublica describing voucher pressure on the state’s budget. Arizona also illustrates the dynamic in which even an anti-voucher governor could be hamstrung by a pro-voucher superintendent. The reverse is certainly possible as well: if the superintendents are not pro-voucher partisans, their governors might be, so even responsible superintendents might be compelled to use their authority over student data to either push or quash reports that align with the pro-voucher objective. The point here is that because of good, important legal safeguards on the use of student data, researchers, journalists, parents and the general public are all but at the mercy of their state education agency to provide indicators of progress or decline when it comes to vouchers. That’s information the public deserves to have, but nowadays it very well might be denied them. I should say, I’ve never had a study of mine quashed by the Michigan Department of Education or any other partner agency. But I have gone through intense and sometimes extended back and forth on text, language, and timing of report release. Most researchers in such situations have. You do your best to work with a partner while not compromising your independence or your principles. In The Privateers, I recount how such situations allowed both the Louisiana and Indiana Departments of Education to restrict and delay their partner researchers’ release of studies showing negative voucher impacts. Those eventually did see the light of day, but it was a different time back then. Now it’s not even clear whether, or which, evaluators may be able to assess voucher outcomes today. Among recent legislative expansions, only Arkansas and Iowa affirmatively (though nominally) provide for outside inquiry. Unfortunately, I don’t think any of this is changing any time soon. My goal here today with this newsletter is simply to lay down a marker: Be very, very skeptical of any voucher results you see coming out of states where pro-voucher superintendents control state records used to obtain such results. State education agencies employ so many well-meaning and dedicated civil servants. But they all have a boss, and today the use of proprietary education data is one more example of a dangerous scenario in which the mechanisms of ordinary mid-level bureaucracy may be used to further ideological and political objectives. Thanks again for reading and take good care. Josh P.S. If this newsletter was forwarded to you, please consider joining the PFPS distribution list here so you can receive future editions directly in your inbox.
Welcome to The Private Eye!
Hello and welcome to The Private Eye! This is the first of many more newsletters I’ll be writing into the future. You can read these on Education Law Center’s Public Funds Public Schools website, or you can subscribe to the PFPS email list to get a copy right to your inbox! I’m a professor at Michigan State University, but I’m on leave for the next few months because I’ve been honored to receive a fellowship from Education Law Center to write and work on private education voucher issues full-time until May 2025. ELC is the premier legal and policy group working on behalf of kids and families in public schools, especially on issues related to equitable school finance. I’m publishing this newsletter through PFPS, which is a campaign directed by ELC. This newsletter’s focus will be school voucher policies and politics as those schemes continue to roll out across the states. But because the underlying theme in all of my writing is that vouchers are just one part—though a very important part!—of an increasingly extreme but powerful right-wing agenda, there’s going to be a lot here about other pieces of that agenda, too. So, we’ll be talking about Project 2025. We’ll be talking about right-wing billionaires. And we’ll be talking about how vouchers fit into a broader effort to make America a Christian Nationalist state. If you’ve followed me on social media or in newspaper columns and coverage, you probably already know I have a book on this stuff that’s just been released. It’s called The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers, published by Harvard Education Press. If I had to summarize the message and the story in that book in one sentence, it’s this: over the past decade as school vouchers caused some of the worst academic declines in the history of education research—on par with what COVID-19 or Hurricane Katrina did to student outcomes—the right-wing voucher lobby turned increasingly to culture wars and especially Christian Nationalism to sell the story. Book bans. New attacks on LGBTQ+ Americans, including students. Restrictions on what teachers can do and say on issues surrounding race in this country. Erosion of child labor protections. And rollbacks to reproductive freedom. It’s no accident we’re talking about each of those things in the same moment as school vouchers are spreading across states. It’s mostly red states so far, but that could change in an instant. I see this newsletter not so much as a companion to The Privateers but a kind of real-time extension. Once an author hits “send” on any final manuscript, it’s done. But in the case of school vouchers and so much of the related right-wing politics I write about in the book, we are smack in the middle of a long struggle: one that predates many of us—certainly me—but that many of us plan to finish. So, I wanted a place to park some follow up notes and thoughts on all of this truly awful stuff, and that’s what The Private Eye newsletter is going to be about. I hope you’ll look forward to future newsletters and also check out some of the information ELC and PFPS share about the voucher push both nationally and in the states, including many useful resources for fighting back. And I hope you’ll consider joining up with that effort down the line as well. That’s all I have for now. Stay tuned in the coming days and weeks for more. Thanks for reading and take good care! Josh P.S. If this newsletter was forwarded to you, please consider joining the PFPS distribution list so you can receive future editions directly in your inbox.