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:

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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 20^th 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.

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Thanks again for reading and take good care.

Josh

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