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The Private Eye: Josh Cowen’s Newsletter on School Vouchers and Right-Wing Politics
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.
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.