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The Private Eye: Josh Cowen’s Newsletter on School Vouchers and Right-Wing Politics
Federal Education Funding, More on the U.S. Department of Education—and a Couple of Court Wins
Hi Friends,I had a couple weeks back in Michigan after a month of travel in January, but now I’m back on the road starting in New Orleans with a speech to AASA, the School Superintendents Association (if you see me, say hello!) and then on to South Carolina and Ohio (twice). While I’m in Ohio, I’ll be opening the Network for Public Education conference in Columbus with a fireside chat Friday evening, April 4, with Diane Ravitch.Diane recently published an amazing essay in the prestigious New York Review of Books, reviewing my book The Privateers and framing that in the larger context of the history of school privatization dating back to the 1950s. It’s worth the read for her contribution alone, regardless of whether you care for my stuff or not. 😊I’m grateful there are lots of folks out there interested in what I have to say. But I also know that’s mostly because there’s so much going on right now around threats to public education—and to public services more generally—that we’re all hungry for information and a way forward. So, because it’s the season, bear with me as I dial in on a couple of items around the federal budget and federal funding for education in particular.Federal Funding 1: ELC in the News and in the Arena First, shout out to ELC’s Executive Director Bob Kim, who appeared last week at a House Appropriations Subcommittee hearing on federal investments in education. And then, Bob appeared again two days later at the Brookings Institution’s panel on the U.S. Department of Education’s new guidance on civil rights. At the congressional hearing, Bob had to square off with representatives from the Heritage Foundation and something called the “Defense of Freedom Institute,” 🙄 one of the many dark money groups trying to privatize education. The Heritage panelist was the author of Project 2025’s education chapter. So, you can imagine what Bob had to deal with (bless him).The one thing I want to flag about this is it was a hearing about education spending. And since the subcommittee is being run by the GOP, it meant ample chance for the two right-wing panelists and the committee members to repeat the myth that “money doesn’t matter” when it comes to education outcomes. The Heritage panelist even cited old research by Eric Hanushek, godfather of that myth, even though he has all but recanted that position. Let’s just repeat for the 1000th time, with a go-to reference if you need it: research is “essentially settled” on this question: more money improves both short-run and long-run student and community outcomes. By the way—and as Bob pointed out—that’s even true for COVID recovery (ESSER) funding: the money did help students recover, but not enough to bring students back academically from a once-in-a-century pandemic. One way to think of this is that public school spending is absolutely necessary for educational improvement. It’s just not always sufficient to overcome poverty, pandemics, or historical economic neglect. And adequate funding is always better than not enough. I also want to give a shout out to Rep. Mark Pocan, who, during the subcommittee hearing, correctly noted research of mine and others showing that 75% of voucher users were already in private school and that it’s the wealthiest families using most of the vouchers today. He also mentioned an older paper from my team showing that it’s the most at-risk kids who are often forced to leave voucher schools, though they do better when they land back at their local public school.(This illustrates one of the major reasons why the Right is trying to defund education research and evidence-based education policy.) Federal Funding 2: A Bit More on the U.S. Department of EducationIn my last newsletter, I made some notes about the U.S. Department of Education and Linda McMahon’s confirmation hearing, and I don’t want to repeat myself. Except now we have news that President Trump is issuing an executive order directing McMahon to dismantle what she can in the Department, subject to what Trump seems to suggest are the limits of federal law. To me, that makes the new order just a press release with Trump’s signature on it. But we’ll have to see how far they take it.In the meantime, I do want to underscore the issues with moving pieces of that department into other agencies, whether it’s Title I and IDEA into Robert F. Kennedy’s Health and Human Services, the Office of Civil Rights into the Department of Justice, or other plans raised in last week’s hearing. Don’t believe claims that those programs could “just” be moved without funding cuts. When the subcommittee asked panelists how much federal funding could and should be cut, the Heritage Foundation panelist said, “90 percent.” Meanwhile, ELC’s Bob Kim said zero, and a raise would be better. Good stuff – both the “quiet part out loud” bit from Heritage and Bob’s response.The point is that these folks do want to cut federal education spending, and the honest among them will just say so. Here I want to stress that we ought not to get caught up only in conversations about “agencies” and “departments” and organization charts. Those are important. But we also need to talk about real human impacts. One way to do that is with an important new resource from the University of Michigan’s Ford School of Public Policy, which allows you to calculate federal education spending by congressional district. And as I mentioned previously, check out Education Law Center’s new advocacy tool, Trump 2.0: How Much Federal Education Aid Could Your State Lose?A Few Court Wins Now, let’s close on a good note. Federal courts are beginning to kick in and stop a variety of Trump/Musk efforts to access our private data, in some cases stopping efforts to cut federal jobs as well. In education: last week, judges stopped Musk from accessing private student loan data, as well as certain U.S. Treasury data. These are important wins in terms of holding the line against what amounts to an unelected billionaire running wild through the federal government. Public Funds Public Schools and many of our allies will continue using all available avenues to challenge moves to enact federal vouchers, so stay tuned for more information about that.Hang in there everyone. This moment too shall pass. Josh P.S. 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On Linda McMahon, DOGE, and Attacks on Education Research
Hi friends. I don’t have to tell anyone that there’s been a non-stop barrage of news coming out of Washington, D.C. over the past couple weeks. And for someone who literally wrote a book about billionaire influence on public policy—in this case, education—it all feels like we’ve collectively raced past any warning signs and straight into crisis. But let’s try to make sense of a few ongoing developments moving so fast that they may well be further along by the time you read this. The McMahon Hearing First, let’s start with some comments on Linda McMahon’s confirmation hearing to lead the U.S. Department of Education. McMahon appeared at kind of an awkward moment, which more than one Democratic senator acknowledged, in that she was there to testify for leadership of a department that Trump had less than 24 hours earlier said should be disbanded “immediately.” (Trump also called the Education Department a “con job,” which may be why he appointed someone who made her billions hocking fake wrestling matches on national television.) It was a long hearing, but there were a few moments that stood out to me: First, note that McMahon was flanked by top staff from Betsy DeVos’s voucher lobby group, the American Federation for Children, one of whom sat directly behind her for the hearing itself. Second, McMahon said “I don’t know” and “we’ll have to see” when Senator Tim Kaine asked whether IDEA would actually be enforced if it left the U.S. Department of Education and was placed, for example, in Health and Human Services. This is a Project 2025 idea, and it would result in Robert F. Kennedy Jr. overseeing special education funding and programming. Third, McMahon noted (correctly) that the U.S. Department of Education doesn’t set curriculum policy. Which puts her at odds with other Trump Administration and right-wing influencers who claim the federal government has been indoctrinating children. It’s also at odds with McMahon’s answers to questioning during the hearing about whether Trump’s executive order on education content could restrict what local public schools teach. She appeared to suggest it could, but hedged a bit on a final answer. Fourth, I think it’s important that Senator Murkowski—a Republican—pointed out that many education reform strategies were built for urban and suburban markets, while doing nothing for rural communities. This is true, not just for school choice policies, but also “reforms” like firing teachers and assuming a better pool of educators is just waiting around town to be hired. Speaking of failed education market strategies, for me a key positive moment came when Wisconsin Senator Tammy Baldwin entered four research studies into the Senate record. Those four studies detail the devastating academic impacts for children who used school vouchers to transfer to private school over the past decade. I write about these studies in my book, The Privateers, and in the book I explain how those devastating impacts forced the voucher lobby to pivot back to culture war strategies to sell the voucher story. Finally, Linda McMahon went on record that private schools funded by taxpayer vouchers—including through a federal voucher scheme—should and do have the right to turn away any child who doesn’t fit those private schools’ needs or values. Always remember, when it comes to voucher schemes, it’s not about parent choice at all; it’s the school’s choice. Now’s a great time, by the way, to shout out to the great Jessica Levin, ELC’s Litigation Director, who’s quoted in this must-read new New Yorker piece on what Trump’s education agenda might mean for students with disabilities. To quote Jessica directly: “The vast majority of IDEA rights only apply to public school students. These rights are all lost when a student goes to a private school.” To summarize the Linda McMahon hearing, the best I can say for her is that she was an able spokesperson for the nonsense, the contradictions, and, in some cases, the outright scheming behind the Musk-Trump education agenda. Musk, IES, and More The other item to flag here is that Elon Musk—who is functionally all but in control of federal governmental operations—has his team inside the Education Department already. So much of the debate about how far Trump and McMahon could push a plan to dismantle the Department is sort of behind, in real time, some of the facts on the ground. We know that the administration is laying off key staff members inside the department, and that Musk’s young army of programmers appears to have access to key data systems. We also know that under the auspices of his “Department of Government Efficiency,” or DOGE, Musk has cancelled nearly $1 billion in contracts run out of the Institute for Education Sciences (IES), the key research and data arm of the federal education agency. The hypocrisy there is that many of these contracts and grants were directly supporting studies of what works best for children in public schools, something the administration claims it wants to know. Those studies include research on math and literacy supports, mental health, college access, educating students with disabilities, and—get this!—whether or not the Washington, D.C. voucher scheme (the only voucher system funded by the federal government in place to date) is actually working. All of this is basically in line with the administration’s efforts to cut billions of dollars from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, cuts that federal courts are taking a close look over at this very moment. My own research was a beneficiary of IES funding for years. I was in the inaugural cohort of doctoral students funded by IES during the first term of George W. Bush’s administration, back when Republicans at least claimed to believe in knowing what works for schools. I was part of teams that won major grants to study literacy reforms in Michigan, and led the $2 million, Michigan-specific site for the Education Department’s R&D center on school choice research. All of which is to stay, in addition to knowing just how important the U.S. Department of Education is to kids and families across the country, I also deeply believe in its support for learning more about how to make education work for all kids in this country. And have given my career to that work thus far. What it comes down to, though, is that we’re in a period of American politics and policy where facts really don’t matter to many of the folks in charge. Even when—especially when—those facts run counter to rightwing ideological priorities. Just take the school voucher case. As I say in my book, “if evidence meant anything, vouchers would have ended years ago,” such has been the devastating toll of these programs for so many children. None of this is an excuse to sit back and watch all this destruction unfold. But it’s worth taking a moment to just name, again, what’s at stake. It’s not only public schools. It’s more and more a question of democracy and of the truth itself. 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.
Notes from the Road, NAEP, Trump’s Forced Voucher Orders, and…What’s at Stake?
Just back from the road (again!) I just returned from a multi-state trip where I met with lawmakers, parents, and community leaders in Tennessee, Wisconsin, and New Hampshire. I’ve appreciated the chance to speak with folks of all political stripes—conservatives, progressives, and a lot of people in between. You can read some of the coverage of my visits here and here. News Dump: NAEP and Forced Vouchers Meanwhile, if you believe that education policy in this country has to be built on a fundamental commitment to public schools, and that public education is perhaps the most important of our public goods, the first days of the second Trump Administration have been chaotic and disheartening. Trump has issued sweeping executive orders (EO) pausing all manner of federal public services. And then there’s a specific EO trying to carve out pieces of federal agency budgets to fund school voucher schemes. Administration threats to gut and maybe eliminate the U.S. Department of Education abound, too. Then there’s the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the so-called nation’s report card which came out on January 29, right alongside Trump’s voucher EO. NAEP says, as usual, that math and reading learning rates for American 4th and 8th graders continue to stagnate. And the scores of many at-risk kids are even declining relative to their more advantaged peers—reflecting decades of financial and policy neglect dating well before the pandemic. (Just a reminder: vouchers do far more damage to vulnerable kids on similar academic measures). It's a lot. With the voucher EO, Trump is intending to create federally funded vouchers by diktat: directing the Departments of Education, Defense, and Health and Human Services (among others) to find ways to spend chunks of their budgets on voucher schemes. How that EO holds up in court, and what its relationship will be to the Educational Choice for Children Act (ECCA) tax shelter/voucher scheme sitting in Congress, are still open questions. But for the moment, what’s clear is that all of this is about amplifying voucher spending in states that are already diverting their own taxpayer funds to private education as well as forcing vouchers into states that have already (and often repeatedly) rejected them. So, while we wait, I want to take up a question I get everywhere when I travel. I think it comes from a genuine exhaustion that folks have fighting against things, and some genuine desire for inspiration to take up fights for something too. Sometimes this comes as a good faith question, sometimes as a challenge. But basically, it’s: “Okay Cowen, what are you for” What Works, and What’s the Right Thing to Do? These are important questions because although we know parents and voters strongly support public education and their own local public schools, they also want improvements. And isn’t learning and working together to improve investment in our future the point of public policy? What are some of the real opportunities for supporting and improving public education? Any answer ought to be guided by two basic principles: what actually works, and what’s the right thing to do? And those answers have to begin with deep, sustained investments in public schools. We know money matters, and we’ve known that for years. What else? Here are the kinds of things I talk about: investments in early education like pre-K and child care for all kids; Grow-Your-Own teacher pipeline initiatives that draw on local talent; policy strategies for diverse learners like English Learners and students with dyslexia; universal school meals and new investments in high-quality HVAC systems. And that’s just the start. We know those investments not only work, but parents like them, too. That’s why the voucher lobby has tried to buy votes and divide progressives by throwing versions of some of these ideas into spending schemes for so-called “education savings accounts (ESAs),” whose real policy goal is private K-12 tuition on the taxpayer dime. The common denominator for all of this is making sure these resources are available to every school in the nation, but especially those educating the most vulnerable students. And threats to those resources are clear and present every day—whether it’s in chronic underfunding in many states or in the Trump Administration’s effort to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education. Wrapping Up: What’s at Stake? Maybe your own list of policy priorities is different than mine. Maybe you’d add or take something away. But one thing is certain: when states commit more and more resources to voucher schemes—mostly for kids already in private school, by the way—they close the door on other solutions and opportunities. So, whatever our answer, “what are we for?” also becomes a question of “what do we lose?” when taxpayer dollars are sent to private schools. And with all the news and all the chaos out there, it’s more important than ever to remember what’s at stake. 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
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.