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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 So, I always worry that some new development will make whatever I put down here a bit out of date.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 And then I want to make a couple comments about something that’s never going to get old or out of date, and that’s connecting the fight for public education to the fight for democracy.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. 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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. 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