Dear Friends,

Quick Election Reactions

There is a lot to be said and done about public education in the weeks, months, and years ahead. For now, I want to just call your attention to the fact that school vouchers went down in defeat in all three states where they were put to voters on Election Day: Colorado, Nebraska, and Kentucky. Voter opposition to vouchers remains broad and bipartisan.

In fact, it’s precisely because voters reject voucher schemes that the right-wing billionaires behind them keep turning to state legislators, who are easier (and frankly cheaper) to manipulate than hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens.

Privateers Q&A from the PFPS Webinar

There were so many great questions from the Public Funds Public Schools webinar that featured me and my book, The Privateers. A few of those were very specific, and I’ve tried to provide useful responses. Others were about the broader political landscape, and I wanted to use the opportunity to make a few bigger comments about public education and civic engagement in our new reality.

First, the technical questions:

How do you see the rightwing privateers shifting their messaging in order to pass vouchers/ESAs in purple states or states with slim red majorities?

Not only did vouchers go 0-3 on Election Day, including with Trump supporters, these schemes have never survived any other statewide ballot measures—being put to real voters—even in red states. I think what’s going to happen in January is that Governors Abbott and Lee will try once more to ram vouchers through what they hope are now more pliant legislatures in Texas and Tennessee, respectively. And then I think the voucher lobby, the billionaires and the Trump administration together will continue the culture war. They don’t need to convince ordinary voters, and they haven’t been able to do so. But if they can keep influencing GOP primaries and the federal courts, that will be the strategy.

Where can we receive information to communicate and inform our community members? Also, what approach would you recommend that you may have observed and how do you communicate this information in very conservative based areas without creating mass conflict within the community.

Well, Public Funds Public Schools has a great set of resources! I’d start there. They even have interviews with advocates in conservative states who give tips on getting out the anti-voucher message effectively. And other groups like the Network for Public Education, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the Economic Policy Institute, the National Coalition for Public Education, and the National Education Policy Center all provide resources on a number of education questions.

I hear from voucher supporters that they should be able to take the money for education for their child and use it however they want to educate their child. How would you reply to this parent?

Public money already follows our children to school—as long as they’re enrolled in traditional public or charter schools. The only thing that doesn’t happen everywhere is tax dollars going to private, usually religious, education. But even in the states that do have such voucher schemes, remember this: it’s not really school choice. It’s the school’s choice. It’s a total myth that parents can customize their children’s education unfettered by rules and regulations. It’s that with vouchers, the private schools are doing the choosing.

How do voucher recipient schools escape regulation? What is the special sauce of these programs that they escape oversight — that would be a step to prevent the failure you describe?

In the old days when I first started studying this stuff as a young doctoral student (2005 or so), oversight of emerging voucher systems was still in place. The federal D.C. voucher scheme, which began enrolling kids in 2005, had real evaluation provisions. This was the era of No Child Left Behind, and lawmakers more or less extended those rules to voucher programs. Ditto with Louisiana and Indiana, for example, on the state level. In fact, that’s how we know how terrible voucher results have been over the last decade: even conservatives wanted to know whether parents were getting the results that private schools were promising them. But since the first Trump term, when we really started to see how badly vouchers were performing on academic outcomes, there’s been a real effort to avoid that oversight by omitting these requirements from many newer voucher laws. Voucher supporters are afraid of news headlines like these.

When challenged about the lack of any real assessment as to how well students are learning under our voucher program in NH, a lawmaker said recently that it’s the parents whose children are in the voucher program who are the best judges for how the program is performing. What would you say to that?

That’s more or less what Ken Starr said (remember him?) on the steps of the Supreme Court after leading the first voucher defense there back in 2002. That’s what voucher advocates have been saying for years. As a parent, I’d simply say: I’m very skeptical of any school that refuses to let me check their work. If that private school—or the lobby promoting voucher schemes—is so confident in what they’re selling, basic accountability shouldn’t be a problem. The fact that they’re so terrified that parents could compare results between their voucher school and a local public school should tell you a lot about what really happens when vouchers come to town.

How do vouchers impact students with disabilities? With the expansion of vouchers, do we know what the impact is on students with specialized learning needs?

In the past, states have carved out some voucher programs specifically for students with disabilities. Today, the emphasis is on vouchers for anyone, regardless of income or other characteristics. In almost all these programs, whether narrow or broad, students lose most of their rights under special education and disability laws. And in today’s world, there is no expectation that individual private schools will have to serve students with disabilities. The federal Government Accountability Office has previously warned about misinformation and false promises from voucher schools to parents with special needs students. And that’s something Arizona’s own Attorney General has warned about more recently.

Now for two fundamental questions about education and democracy:

What steps can we take to fight back?

I just keep going back to the fact that voters don’t like these schemes—even conservative voters who backed Donald Trump. In The Privateers, I talk about the fact that school vouchers are one of the religious right’s very top policy priorities, alongside rolling back reproductive rights. The parallel is especially apt because voters hate rollbacks to their reproductive freedom, too. In this past election, not only did voters reject school vouchers in three states at the same time many backed Donald Trump, they also enshrined reproductive rights in seven more states. In four of those states—including Arizona, a key voucher state—Donald Trump won a majority of votes even while voters decided to protect reproductive rights. No matter what administration is in power, these fundamental questions about freedom will remain, and I think we need to remember that on those specific questions, more people agree with us than with the far-right.

Join Education Law Center/Public Funds Public Schools next week for a webinar on concrete tools and steps to fight back against vouchers during Trump’s second term. Register here.

How do you warn public school supporters about the extensive web of right-wing/privatization interests you've documented without sounding like a conspiracy theorist? Educator and author Jonathan Kozol said, “I used to think I could make a difference in education, but now I realize all I can do is stand back and watch.” Dr. Cowen, what can we do besides stand back and watch the dismantling of public schools by billionaires?

For my part, I get called a conspiracy theorist all the time. It’s the Heritage Foundation’s favorite insult to use against me. And coming from the same people that wrote Project 2025, it’s an honor. I also get called a union activist, because I’ve appeared on stage with Randi Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teachers. And people call me woke because I spoke at a summit with Nikole Hannah-Jones. But in both cases, I am proud to have done so.

Name-calling is to be expected when you’re doing the hard work. The reality is, many of these name-callers are just power-worshippers who have no problem being servient to far-right billionaires who will never know their names or care about them as people.

Here’s what I’m trying to say: I’d rather be called an ally to unions that fight for working folks, journalists who ask questions about power and injustice, or educators on the front lines for our kids every day, than surrender my dignity to some of the wealthiest people on the planet.

Know truth, and let it keep you free.

We know that the evidence is on the side of new investments in public schools. We know that many state courts have said: “so is the law.” And we know voters are too—we just got another reminder.

Standing up for democracy, and for education as a fundamental human right, is going to be an effort. And we do need to think hard about new strategies to take that stand in a way that speaks to people where they live, not just where or how we’d like them to be.

So let those of us who can, get back to work.

Josh

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