- Home
- Josh Cowen's Newsletter
The Private Eye: Josh Cowen’s Newsletter on School Vouchers and Right-Wing Politics
News Stories to Follow—and a Note on Democracy and “the Price of Eggs”
Hi Friends, It’s always hard to sit down and try to write a few thoughts about the news. This fight against billionaires trying to privatize schools—and other longstanding public investments—seems to take a new turn by the day. So, I always worry that some new development will make whatever I put down here a bit out of date. But with that caveat, I still want to run through a few events and news items just to flag what I’ve been following and chewing on. And then I want to make a couple comments about something that’s never going to get old or out of date, and that’s connecting the fight for public education to the fight for democracy. Keep Your Eye on These Stories First, any minute now, the U.S. Supreme Court will be hearing the Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board v. Drummond case about the proposed St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, which will determine whether charter schools—independent but public schools—can be run by a religious entity. This has monumental implications for both public schools specifically and for the separation of church and state more generally. Education Law Center is co-counsel in the companion case, and the plaintiffs in that case filed an amicus brief in Drummond earlier this month. Next, make sure you’re following the pushback by state departments of education against the Trump regime’s threat to rescind federal funding over DEI initiatives. As of this writing, California, Minnesota, New York, and Vermont, as well as Colorado, Pennsylvania, Washington, my own state of Michigan, and ELC’s home state of New Jersey have responded to the federal threat by saying, essentially, “we already follow the law.” I also want to make sure we’re all monitoring the shutdown of regional offices serving Head Start families. It’s affecting providers across the country—there’s little or even no staff now to serve those providers. Here’s sample coverage from Michigan, but you can find similar stories in many states. Bottom line: this is a slow-moving disaster for so many families, and with everything else going on right now I’m worried it will get lost in the mix. Let’s not let that happen, okay? Finally, we’re all still waiting to see what happens with the so-called Educational Choice for Children Act (ECCA)—aka the tax shelter for the wealthy that’s also a federal voucher scheme intended to ram vouchers into every state—even those that don’t want it. Those of us with our ear to the ground have heard conflicting things: maybe it will make it into the federal reconciliation process (where it would need only a simple GOP majority to pass) or maybe it’ll come up for a vote later in the year. One thing we know is that Betsy DeVos’s group is continuing to make this a top priority, so it’s something to keep monitoring closely. A Note on Democracy—Recapping the Network for Public Education Conference Now I want to give a shout out to Diane Ravitch, Carol Burris, and the entire team at the Network for Public Education for putting together an outstanding conference in Columbus, Ohio, on April 4-6. I had the honor of opening the conference with a Friday night fireside chat-type session with Diane. And then none other than Governor Tim Walz closed us out. In between, several of us working with or as part of Education Law Center contributed to and presided over panel sessions. These included ELC Executive Director Bob Kim, ELC Litigation Director Jessica Levin, and Sharon Krengel, who is ELC Director of Policy, Strategic Partnerships, and Communications. These panels ranged from a discussion of voucher impacts on neighborhood school closures, a recap of victories against the voucher push in both red and blue states, and a session I joined with the Economic Policy Institute’s Hilary Wething to walk through EPI’s fantastic tool that lets you calculate how much vouchers will cost any school district in the country. (Ongoing shout-out here as well to ELC’s own cost-calculator that lets you estimate the hit to your state education budget from a universal voucher program.)Bob, Sharon, and I also joined NEA’s Kyle Serrette for a standing-room-only discussion of the link between public education and democracy. One of the things that I struggle with in conversations like that is trying to connect some of the big, underlying philosophical goals—standing up for democracy, defending the principle of equal citizenship, and so on—with the everyday events in people’s lives. This is the education version of a debate that progressives are having right now in the aftermath of the 2024 election: do we talk about democracy, or do we talk about the price of eggs? The answer is both. The NPE conference took place on the same weekend that hundreds of thousands of people turned out in states across the country for a day of protests, demanding Hands-Off public schools, Social Security, Medicaid, and so much more. It was a highly specific, and unusually policy-focused type of organizing. But it was also democracy. I think the lesson there is that as much as we need to defend democracy as a core and motivating principle itself, we also need to remember that people experience democracy in many different ways. For a single mom trying to get extra support for her child learning with dyslexia, democracy might mean a public school that responds to that advocacy on behalf of her kid. For a guy with a longstanding, chronic health condition, maybe democracy means a law that prevents him from getting kicked off an insurance plan. For a senior living check-to-check on Social Security, maybe democracy means having a regional staffer return her call if the check goes missing or delayed. For someone who’s just lost their job, maybe democracy means a few extra dollars of support until they get back on their feet. Or, for thousands and thousands of folks with jobs, maybe democracy means the chance not just to survive by putting food on the table, but to thrive and invest some of their paycheck in their children’s futures. All of that is at stake right now. But the flipside is also true: all of that is still possible. And it’s with that possibility, that potential, and another call to defend that future that I’ll leave you this week. 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.
Testimony, Texas, and Trump’s Department of Education Order
Hi folks, I’m taking a minute here after stops in Texas, South Carolina, and D.C. to regroup before a busy April of more public speaking. For those of you attending the Network for Public Education conference later this week, Diane Ravitch and I will be opening the event together with a special fireside chat on Friday evening. After that, I along with several members of the ELC team will be in a variety of panels throughout the weekend. Stop by and say hello! What I want to do with this newsletter is make a quick comment on Trump’s Department of Education executive order, flag Jessica Levin’s testimony to a House subcommittee and a new resource on the federal voucher tax credit scheme, and wrap up with a comment on my testimony to the Texas Legislature on March 11. Quick Word on Trump’s Department of Education Order The big education news in the last couple weeks has been Trump’s signing of his executive order to gut the U.S. Department of Education. I’ve said a lot about this in other spaces, including: My appearance on Fox News Live Now; My appearance on my local news station, WILX; And my column in The Conversation, syndicated elsewhere, too, explaining what Trump’s order does and doesn’t do. You can even check out my Instagram feed, where I’m posting a lot of quick commentary on news events like this. What you’ll find in any or all of those is this: to me, it’s important not to get too lost in the language of departments, agencies, EOs, Titles, and the like. These are all really important, but that’s what we have lawyers like the good people at ELC to do. For the rest of us, I strongly believe we need to be talking about how these activities harm local communities in terms of funding. Services. People. Already the layoffs, the rhetoric, and the confusion are creating real threats and harms to supports and services that families depend on—and I think we need to talk about that all of the time moving forward. Jessica Levin’s Testimony and New ECCA Resources Next up, I want to give a shout out to ELC’s Jessica Levin, who did her own testimony before the House Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Elementary, and Secondary Education in Washington. I didn’t get a chance to watch that live because I was in the committee hearing down in Texas, but I know that Jessica did a great job standing up for the facts on school voucher schemes and for the need for more public school funding. You can watch the entire hearing here. Speaking of Congress, I also want to take a second to remind folks that the latest effort to pass a federal school voucher scheme—the so-called “Educational Choice for Children Act” (ECCA)—is still a threat. There’s a great new report from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy that walks through the details of this bill, which doubles as a tax shelter for some of the wealthiest Americans. What’s great about this report is it lays out how the tax credit version of vouchers works—basically, wealthy donors divert what they owe in federal (or state) taxes into a middleman organization that then distributes vouchers. But it also lets you see how much some of the billionaires behind the voucher political push—Betsy DeVos, Charles Koch, and even Elon Musk—could personally benefit from the latest scheme. Worth a look. I’ll also flag a recent piece of my own in Michigan’s biggest paper, the Detroit Free Press. In that piece, I walk through how the ECCA bill would force vouchers into states that don’t want them—like my home state of Michigan. And I also explain how that scheme would do almost nothing for families in the Michigan 5th and 7th Congressional Districts—the two regions closest to my town. I hope you can use a piece like this to make your own case against these schemes in your communities. Texas, Texas, Texas Forgive the cliché metaphor, but Texas really is the Alamo when it comes to efforts to fight vouchers in the states. With vouchers spreading through red states over the past three years, the big holdouts have been Tennessee and Texas, mainly because the DeVos/Koch/Yass strategy of primarying out rural Republican school voucher opponents has taken longer and been more expensive there than in states like Iowa and Arkansas. But with Tennessee falling earlier this winter—I was there in late January trying to fight back—the voucher lobby really is running out of real estate on their strategy. There just aren’t that many states left with supermajorities of GOP legislators vulnerable to reshaping by right-wing billionaires. That’s actually a big reason why ECCA, the federal voucher scheme, is getting so much effort in D.C. It would give Betsy DeVos and team a wholesale way of avoiding tough legislative fights in blue states. Which, again, leaves Texas. The March 11 hearing on HB3—the voucher bill introduced in the state’s House of Representatives—was a marathon session that lasted more than 22 hours. I was one of five witnesses invited and scheduled by House Democrats in the minority. The hearing began at 8 a.m. It took almost five hours for the bill sponsor and committee chair, Rep. Brad Buckley, to lay out his bill. He took questions from Republicans and Democrats alike, and despite a few grandstanding comments from GOP members about failing public schools (under the jurisdiction of their committee, I might add), this was a pretty informative and detailed discussion. I sat in the front row for all of it. Late in the afternoon, after the first round of three majority witnesses (in favor of the bill) and two invited witnesses in opposition, I gave my testimony alongside Paige Duggins-Clay, the chief legal analyst from the Intercultural Development Research Association, who’s also been a great ally to ELC on these issues and others. Our opening testimony lasted five minutes each, but then we took questions for another hour. I took a lot of questions from hostile GOP committee members about my background, what the research on vouchers really says, and specific issues I raised in the bill. But I don’t mind tough questions. And we’re not going to win or win back any of the things we value—whether that’s new investments in public education or across the policy space on issues like health care, jobs, or retirement security—without talking to the other side. I didn’t get a single question I couldn’t handle. If you’re reading this you probably already know my message on these billionaire-backed voucher schemes: vouchers threaten public school funding by subsidizing a new sector of kids who were already in private school; vouchers devastate student learning for the few kids who transfer from public school; and vouchers give private schools—not parents—the true choice of which kids to admit and which to leave out. What all that has in common with the U.S. Department of Education news—and with the larger political moment we’re in—is the dangerous ideology that crucial public investments in kids, families, and communities should be not just deprioritized but considered wasteful, and that those investments should be replaced with a go-it-alone approach that simply won’t work for millions of Americans. That’s an idea I reject, I think most folks do too, and when you have your principles and you have your facts, tough questions are just one more opportunity to make your case. Be well. 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.
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. 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
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.
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.