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.