How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers

Josh Cowen is a nationally recognized expert and writer on topics related to school choice, teachers and teaching, policy analysis, and education politics. He has studied school vouchers, school accountability, charter schools, and parental decision-making as part of major research teams in Louisiana, Michigan, and Wisconsin. He is a Professor of Education Policy at Michigan State University, but is currently a Visiting Senior Fellow at the Education Law Center. You can subscribe to his newsletter on School Vouchers and Right-Wing Politics here.

In his book, he sumarizes what is behind today’s Education Freedom agenda:

“This then, is the education freedom agenda in its entirety: increasingly overt conflict on issues of race, gender and sexuality with the express intent of devaluing public schools as a civic institution amd reorienting the notion of education from a public good to a private enterprise.” (p131)

That’s it in a nutshell.

Cowen demonstrates it is no coincidence that the recent explosion of school voucher programs has coincided with “an explosion of legislation and policy decision-making of overt hostility to LBGTQ+ families, to curricular focuses on the issue of race, and to transgender identity broadly.” The billionaire backers of school choice are also driving the culture war issues. By following the money, Cowen make the case that “The school voucher movement is the parents’ rights movement, and the parents’ right movement is religious nationalism.”

The fundamental message of his book is that, for the last thirty years, the advancement of right-wing education policymaking has entirely depended on what Cowen calls “a small, narrow band of soldier-scholars” forming the “counter-intelligentsia” who are funded by a network of billionaires. He describes advocacy organizations disguised as think tanks and lobbyists with words like “research” or “fellow” in their job title who parrot message-tested talking points (like “fund students not systems). And their goal is to privatize the responsibility for public education.

First, let’s make it clear. Private School Vouchers (or their newer, even less accountable variation, Education Savings Accounts or ESAs) don’t work. Or at least they don’t improve academic outcomes. They have been shown to promote discrimination and segregation, which may be the point for some of their backers.

Cowen reviews in detail the history of voucher research, some of which he participated in. While a few early studies showed small positive improvements in standardized test scores, between 2005 and 2010, major studies in Washington D.C. and Milwaukee found no impact on student outcomes. Since 2013, as programs expanded across the country, multiple studies from multiple research teams found that “vouchers cause some of the largest academic declines on record in education research,” (p6) demonstrating academic declines similar, or greater, than those measured following the COVID pandemic or Hurricane Katrina.

By 2018-2019, the evidence was clear, vouchers had failed from an empirical standpoint. But, despite the documentation of such devastating impacts, of real harm being done to children, the voucher advocates soldiered on…

Cowen’s book documents the lengths voucher supporters were willing to go to advance their efforts despite the overwhelming evidence against vouchers, and the web of billionaire donors who were behind those efforts. Many people associate Betsy DeVos and Milton Friedman with school vouchers, but Cowen demonstrates the involvement of the Koch Brothers, the Bradleys, the Waltons, the Council for National Policy, the Heritage Foundation and numerous billionaire funded astro-turf organizations, like Moms for Liberty and Parents Defending Education, and many others.

Cowen hopes his book will “make it impossible to encounter claims about school choice, school vouchers, parent’s rights, or any other tenet of that conservative “freedom” agenda with anything but the strongest doubt and deepest hesitation. Who has funded the work? Who has distributed the contents? Which organizations and which public figures are associating themselves with those claims?… and… do the people lining up to march for education freedom line up on other questions like environmental protections, health care access, immigration, elections and voting, marriage equality and reproductive rights?”

I think he has succeeded.`

In his Epilogue, Cowen offers what he sees as “an evidence-based but also equity-based and ethical representation of an alternative to the deceptive simplicity of parents’ rights and private school choice as a cure-all”: Fund Public Schools. (or, I would offer: Fund Public Schools Not Scams.)

“Fund public schools. It really is that simple. Voucher advocates know that – it’s why from Christopher Rufo on down, there requires a deeply rooted skepticism of public education to pass universal school choice. There are only so many dollars to pay for it all. And in as much as the last decade of rigorous evidence on school vouchers had identified some of the largest academic losses in the research record, the last decade has also solidified a growing consensus among experts that the more money we spend on schools the better off children are, no simply academically, but in later-life outcomes like higher wages and fewer encounters with the criminal justice system.” (p145)

Cowen documents the current evidence that school spending matters: academic outcomes improve dramatically, educational attainment rises, later-in-life incomes improve, poverty levels fall and incarceration rates decline. It is, also, clear that cuts to public school funding stalls academic progress. (p146)

Given the proponderance of the evidence, any policy recommendation, he says, must begin with embracing a “vigourous commitment to make direct and sustained investments in public education – every other initiative depends on that.”

So what works? (Each of these have a stronger base of evidence to support them than school vouchers, p147)

• Universal school meals that provide adequate nutrition and eliminate the stigma of poverty
• School-based health clinics for students and staff
• Weighted funding formulas that reflect the true cost of educating diverse learners
• Grow-your-own teacher training programs drawing on local talent
• Early childhood investments
• Investments in after-school and summer school programs.

These are all policies that, if adequately funded, could positively impact our children. As Cowen touches on, there is also the moral aspect of funding public schools for all children, of considering education a public responsibility rather than a private one. For generations, public schools have been the centers of their communities, a place where all children, regardless of circumstance, can have access to life changing education.

The goal of these billionaire “privateers,” as I have said many times before, is to privatize not just our public schools but the RESPONSIBILITY for education itself. They have created a vast network which fabricates research which is then used to influence policy makers and further their agenda. Cowen describes it as a “direct and deliberate creation of a base of dubious facts to support a predetermined ideological outcome.” It is a direct attack on our public schools, our communities and our democracy.

Let’s support what is proven to work: Fund Public Schools Not Scams.

Read the book. Support Public Schools.