The Billionaire Culture War and School Vouchers
/The Privateers, by Josh Cowen, Professor of Education Policy, MI State U
I just finished reading Professor Cowen’s very serious, challenging book – and I’m utterly depressed. Yes, I knew I’d learn a lot, because I knew very little about school vouchers, and I was already pretty sure I opposed them. But I had no idea – absolutely no idea – how dark and insidious and LONG the school voucher battle has been! I want to share the history and insight and wisdom I found in this book, and I want others to know the story, but, oh! It’s not a happy one. My summary is long – I hope you’ll hang in there to the end. It’s important to truly understand this stuff.
A very different history
Let me start with a little personal background: I’m the last person on earth to be championing public schools. Yes, I serve as a trustee on my local board of education, and I care deeply about our Green Bay Area Public Schools – now, because the citizens elected me to care for our schools. But you should know the backstory.
I am a product of 12 years of Catholic education in Appleton, Wisconsin, an education I loved and for which I am deeply grateful. After graduating from a state university, I taught for two short years in Appleton Public Schools. Then I became an Army wife, and I never taught in a public school again (except four months as a substitute in Coffee County, Alabama, teaching whatever was needed, grades K-12 – all in one building!). I moved my family 18 times in 16 years, so I taught in five states, never able to stay at one school for more than three years. I taught in Catholic school, Christian school, non-religious private academies, and even in a family-owned day care. (I hung a little cross-stitch sampler on the wall in our army quarters that said, “Home is where the Army sends us,” and so it was.)
My children went to every kind of school imaginable. The younger one, my daughter, attended 7 schools by the time she graduated from high school. My son attended 12 schools in 13 years. They went to public schools, Catholic schools, Christian schools, Department of Defense schools (our family favorite), Montessori school, private academies... and each one attended a Green Bay Public School for one year. Both graduated from Notre Dame Academy in Green Bay. Full disclosure: I got a 50% discount on their tuition at NDA because I was on the faculty.
In fact, let’s address that “tuition” thing right up front: My parents paid for me and my three sibs to attend Catholic school. I remember Mom taking us to the parish hall one year in late summer to get us registered for Catholic elementary school. The price was $25 each for the year, and it was a huge burden, back in the late ‘50s, for my folks to come up with $75 for a year of school. But they did. Tuition for my first year at Xavier High School was $75; the next year it rose to $95. Of course we were expected to help pay our tuition, and we all happily found part time jobs as soon as we turned 16. My parents paid for my private school education, and I paid for my children’s private school education when our Army life landed them in private school.
I have owned 6 homes in 4 states, and I’ve always paid my property taxes cheerfully and on time. I understood a significant part of my tax money went to support the local public schools. Back when I went to school, we had studied “civics,” and we learned that an educated public was fundamental to a thriving democracy, and so our taxes paid for public schools for all, even though my parents chose to pay a second time – as did I in much of my adult life – to send a child to private school. Never once did my parents suggest anyone else should be funding our tuition, and never did I expect, when I chose non-public schools for my kids, that the obligation to pay was anyone else’s responsibility.
Separation of church and state, no?
When I heard of this thing called school vouchers, by which local tax dollars collected on behalf of the local public school system are siphoned off to pay private school tuition for some, I was in shock. It made no sense, especially when that money was going to religiously-affiliated schools, because my civics study had taught me about “separation of church and state.” For some years I listened to the chatter and tried to sort through this “voucher” stuff. When I was elected to the school board, it became a real “thing” for me – part of understanding our annual budget: We are forced to send a huge chunk of our state aid to local private schools via vouchers. After all, I have fiduciary responsibility: The voucher issue became real and urgent to me, but I still didn’t understand it.
When a smart friend recommendedThe Privateers, I dug in. Now, I feel pretty naive, but I’m going to be as transparent as possible, because I really believe every American should fully understand the whole story of school vouchers. Let’s get started. (My gratitude to Josh Cowen. Assume all quoted material is fromThe Privateersunless otherwise attributed.)
The original meaning of “school choice”
First of all, when do you suppose the concept of school vouchers started? I figured it was maybe in the 1980s. You too? Well, that was my first shock. I knew Milton Friedman was already writing about education back in the 1950s, but I had no idea he started the whole voucher movement! Sure. Think about it: What earth-shattering education decision was made by the US Supreme Court in 1954? Why, yes: Brown v the Board of Education. And stupid me learned that Milton Friedman launched the idea of “school choice” as soon as it was made clear that schools would no longer be segregated by race.
I had experienced firsthand the “white flight” phenomenon as a private school teacher in Georgia, finding its legacy still in force as recently as the late 1970s. Someone explained to me that all these private schools had been launched in response to the mandated desegregation of public schools, and, indeed, the large private academy in which I taught (with great joy) – and my son attended – was 100% white. For more than 20 years this community had fought desegregation by establishing private schools, paid for by tuition. But I still hadn’t realized that, back in 1955, Milton Friedman had proposed a path “toward a limited educational emancipation.” Let the market drive school success, he declared. Let parents choose.
In The Role of Government in Education, Friedman wrote that he “deplored segregation,” but it was not the role of the state to force integration. Parents, he explained, were being forced to choose between two evils: segregation or mandatory integration. “Privately operated schools can resolve the dilemma,” he wrote, and “under such a system there can develop exclusively white schools, exclusively colored schools, and mixed schools. Parents can choose.” He compared the evil of “forced desegregation” to Hitler’s Nazism, asserting that it was a greater evil than forced segregation. And he saw the tax code as an opportunity, Josh Cowen tells us, to subsidize private tuition. Friedman explained that it’s not “racism,” it’s “free market.”
Southern legislatures enacted “voucher-like programs” after Brown, The Privateers tells us (to my utter disbelief). Friedman handed out copies of the essay mentioned above, speaking “at southern conferences paid for by conservative donors.” He offered a solution to rising tensions over integration: “a privately operated school system with parent choice of schools.” It was supposedly about “individual liberty” and “freedom of the marketplace,” not about racism.
Six states bought in, Virginia first. Texas proposed “dual enrollment systems” with white and negro schools, with voluntary transfer. Someone patiently explained that, due to the forced nature of school attendance, if Black parents would choose integrated schools, then it would be “forced integration” for white kids. Therefore we need a sort of voucher system because, right now, it was asserted, we have only two choices: forced integration or no education. The proposal, then, was a “tuition grant plan” to avoid racial integration, but the bill never passed.
Still, the drumbeat continued with the proposal of a “libertarian, market-oriented ideology” imposed on state and local governments. Multi-millionaire Betsy DeVos herself conceded, way back then, that “we are buying influence,” and “we expect a return on our investment.” (This is the Betsy DeVos who eventually was put in charge of our federal Department of Education and is part of the Michigan DeVos family that funds the DeVos Center for Religious Life of the Heritage Foundation.)
And then the link to ideology
In St. Louis in 1959, a Catholic funded organization arose: Citizens for Educational Freedom. The group claimed “a God-given and inalienable right [for] parents to direct and control their children’s education.” They focused, therefore, on receiving their “fair share” of tax dollars for parochial school use. So, diversion of public dollars to private education was the crux of the problem, but the language in which it was couched proved to be seminal: “individual liberty.” And so, scholarly pedigree became linked to ideology, Cowen explains.
The efforts to fight school integration immediately attracted big, conservative money: Friedman attracted Charles Koch, who attracted the DeVos family – people Cowen calls “holders of extreme wealth.” But they realized that no amount of money can buy an outcome without a message, and their message about parents’ rights assumed that parents are white, Christian, married, and heterosexual. Schools would no longer be viewed as a core function of democracy, but rather a sectarian, theocratic version of publicly funded education. All three big donors founded think tanks on the subject which, the author says, were based on “a narrow and politically directed set of facts.”
Friedman’s privatization of education idea matured over the 1970s and ‘80s through the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation and others. The Christian right was mobilized, and Ronald Reagan became president. And so, the first actual voucher program was born in 1990, right here in Wisconsin: The Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, driven primarily by the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. (This foundation was founded in 1942 in Milwaukee and started to focus on public policy in 1962. Early investments were “tied to religious fundamentalism.” In 1985, when the family business, the Allen-Bradley Company, was acquired by Rockwell International, assets soared from $14 million to $290 million, making it one of the country’s largest philanthropies. The foundation claims to support “limited government” and is acclaimed as a leading funder of conservative efforts, including three anti-Muslim groups.)
A new leader of the Bradley Foundation established the Wisconsin Policy Foundation, now called the Badger Institute. That group aggressively funded books and papers, including the notorious book, The Bell Curve(1994), which asserted a relationship between low IQ and race. The Bradley Foundation helped fund the Hoover Institution, which became another strong source of support for vouchers. Then, Governor Tommy Thompson signed school vouchers into law in September 1990.
The Milwaukee voucher program began with 341 children identified as “low income” who had never been in public schools, now enrolled in seven private schools. Within four years it had grown to 830 children in 12 schools. In its first two years it was overseen by the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction. The State Superintendent of Instruction (known to be “a critic of the voucher program”), appointed John F. Witte, a University of Wisconsin professor, to analyze the data and create the report. Witte ultimately reported that the data was tainted by political misperception, that it showed parents were happier but offered little evidence that test scores or attendance had improved. His evaluation also noted that “students gave up the vouchers at high rates to return to Milwaukee Public Schools.”
The Kochs and the DeVos family and the Bradley Foundation, noting that the Superintendent who had appointed Witte was not a voucher program supporter, assumed that Witte, therefore, was predisposed to find fault with the program. Cowen tells us that Witte’s previous work “actually indicated he might have leaned the other way.” But the monied and powerful did not like that evaluation, so they funded their own research. According to Cowen, “the two reports clashed.” He says that, by 1995, results were inconclusive, showing a mixed bag of outcomes.
Even the man paid by the Bradley Foundation found “egregious errors” but also blamed the statute itself. The author of this new report, Paul Peterson (who has stayed with the voucher program through the years) says the Milwaukee program was set up for failure from the start due to income limits and prohibition against religious school participation. Cowen describes the reporting of that time as reaching a unique level of “vitriol” and “fury.” Witte, the original evaluator, was called a “hired gun.” Essentially the first evaluation of the first voucher program yielded only confusion and controversy.
When big money meets religion
At the same moment, those “holders of extreme wealth” mentioned above had renewed the effort to include religious schools in the voucher program and to increase the capacity limit tremendously, to 15,000 students. Former aide to Clarence Thomas, Clint Bolick, got involved, as did the well-known Kenneth Starr. The latter, we are told, charged the state $300,000 for a month’s work in 1998. (But no worries: Apparently the Bradley Foundation paid the bill.) And so the argument made it all the way to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, which voted 4-2 to expand the voucher program. (The state legislature, however, would allow no further state evaluations.)
The city of Cleveland, by then, had “picked up the mantle,” intending to create a voucher system that would be “a model for the country.” Its 1996 launch involved low-income children and 50 schools, nearly all Catholic! But it also included two brand new schools that hadn’t ever been heard of before. They were what some term “pop-up schools,” quickly put together in order to take advantage of those voucher dollars. (Their origin was seeded by the Walton Family Foundation.)
The first official evaluation in Cleveland was pretty much like Milwaukee’s: little difference attained. But, once again, the same team arrived to counter that conclusion: Paul Peterson and his deputy, J.P. Greene. Amazingly, they saw “large gains.” And then it was discovered they had collected data from only 2 of the 50 schools – the two new pop-ups funded by Walton! This “great news” about the Cleveland Scholarship Program was taken immediately to the press – no stops for peer review or publication in scholarly education journals. (Much later a textbook for program evaluation would be written. It would cite Peterson’s work in both Milwaukee and Cleveland “as a cautionary example of ideologically predisposed research and ‘a hidden agenda.’”)
In 1998 our same Paul Peterson released a report on the efficacy of voucher programs in New York City, Dayton, and Washington, D.C., one of them with private schools all funded by the Walton Family Foundation. The report itself was funded, in part, by the Friedman Foundation (remember Milton of 1955?). It cited improved parent satisfaction and “positive test score impacts” after only one year of voucher usage. The New York Times noted links to conservative funding sources and, importantly, high rates of student exit from the programs. Two weeks later, an organization called Mathematica admitted that it had been involved in Peterson’s study, and now claimed the results were “overstated.” In fact, Mathematica asserted they’d found no difference between results of the New York voucher program and local public schools. Peterson’s findings were labeled “premature.” Further investigation revealed that scores analyzed from one program had been taken only from African-American sixth-graders, because no other group had shown any impact.
“A tightly connected, insular network”
Cowen calls this “an isolated group of conservative scholars shouting their views from ivory towers.” And then he summarizes the progression of these efforts in the first 40+ years: Koch pushes conservative priorities and libertarian economic policy; the DeVos family and other major Republican donors join in; foundations hostile to government oversight, organized labor, and public education (e.g. Bradley) drive the school privatization agenda; two foundations fund Peterson’s “corrective” review of the poor results in Milwaukee (Bradley’s hometown), launching a multi-year effort to discredit the report; religious schools are finally added in 1995, their legality defended by Bradley and Koch.
Peterson’s reports on those three programs described above “persist more than 20 years later as the best available evidence,” Cowen says, “that school vouchers might improve student achievement.” Three wealthy foundations got what they paid for, he asserts: “a proof-of-concept stamp of pedigree for programs they funded, offered by scholars they funded.” It was the “template for beginning, controlling, and then distributing pro-voucher findings through a tightly connected and insular network of advocates that still exists.”
Regarding the Cleveland project, Peterson, who helped get the religious voucher program through the courts, claimed the “Cleveland public schools were failing the city’s children.” He wrote in an affidavit that Friedman’s idea in1955 had found that its time has come – we have a crisis in public education. (Cowen points out that the Friedman Foundation had funded Peterson’s three-city study.)
“They love choice dearly”
The real goal, though, was the highest court. Finally, in 2002, the US Supreme Court heard Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, related to the Cleveland program, and their decision granted approval for public funding to pay for religious school tuition. And so it was done. Ken Starr reminded people that it’s really less about student outcomes and more about parental satisfaction. And Starr and Peterson introduced “the equality principle,” the needed defense against discrimination aimed at religious institutions and parents. Peterson said at a conference funded by the usual suspects, “Once parents exercise [choice], they love choice dearly, all but ensuring its perpetuation.”
Now it was time for what Josh Cowen calls “the Republican trifecta.” Time to bring vouchers to Washington, D.C.! Its education system was, after all, under federal control. George W. Bush made D.C. Parents for School Choice sound like a grassroots neighborhood group founded by one desperate mother. In fact, the new voucher-promotion organization was funded by a local real estate mogul along with Dick and Betsy DeVos, John Walton, and Clint Bolick’s group.
The School Choice Incentive Act of 2003 became law in 2004, and a new voucher program, called D. C. Opportunity Scholarships, became a reality. It was open to families at or under 185% of the federal poverty limit. Each student could get up to $7500 as a voucher to be paid to a private school. The annual evaluation would be under the auspices of the Department of Education, proctored by yet another Paul Peterson protege.
Early results were not promising. The Government Accounting Office (GAO) found poor financial record keeping and insufficient mechanisms in place to govern use of funds that went quickly from $150K to $12 Million. Apparently private schools had to be recruited to participate in the program by the offer of tuition moneys, should they accept low-income students. And children from struggling public schools were especially unlikely to get into the private schools, which were mostly religious. Cowen says the poorest of the poor had the poorest luck at gaining entry. GAO concerns continued: “a lax verification process to confirm that voucher users’ income met eligibility criteria” and “little overall accountability for program funds.”
Another look at Milwaukee
2006 brought a new look at that original Milwaukee program. Act 125 had required a 5-year evaluation, including standardized testing of “a representative panel of voucher students” compared with Milwaukee Public Schools. DPI, however, was not allowed to choose its own evaluator; the legislators had stipulated it must be the School Choice Demonstration Project, founded by Paul Peterson’s student, Patrick Wolf. So, a rookie, trained by the ubiquitous Peterson, was now leading the inquiry into the nation’s most high-profile, controversial education issue of the day. Wolf was moving the Project to Arkansas, to the newly established Department of Educational Reform, chaired by another Peterson protégé, J.P. Greene, mentioned above. This new department had been funded with $10 million – from the Walton family.
Note that this comparative study was the method originally used by Witte for the first evaluation and then criticized by Peterson and Green. All three of them would now be involved in this new evaluation, along with Wolf! Cowen notes three important characteristics of this new evaluation:
It offered Peterson a chance to be seen “crossing the aisle” and “breaking bread” with the man he’d criticized (Witte), possibly adding credibility to the program.
Five years had allowed for program maturity.
By selecting the privately funded School Choice Demonstration Project as the evaluator, the legislature would save tax money – because that group was funded by the Bradley and Walton Foundations, among others.
Milwaukee’s voucher schools were not identical in their enthusiasm for or cooperation with the evaluation, but Cowen says it all worked out and continued to work each fall after that. After the report was complete, the state’s Legislative Audit Bureau was to replicate the analysis as a follow-up. When shared, data was notattributed to specific voucher schools. Over five years, 36 reports had been generated; only 10 of them made up the annual report mandated by Act 125. Mostly they measured parental satisfaction, school participation, or the impact of voucher competition on public schools. Much later three other reports were released, measuring voucher schools’ impact on character, effect on crime, and the impact of parent religiosity. (Seriously?)
Cowen says the results replicated “the pattern indicated by Witte’s original state evaluation” that had been roundly criticized. As a participant himself in these activities, he says, “I saw no proverbial ‘thumb on the scale.’” He says there was no manufacturing of data or falsification of results. It was simply a faulty process for generating data, for deciding which private schools would participate, and which questions would be asked by whom. He calls it a “cyclical form of research advocacy.” It is interesting to note, however, that, while the Bradley Foundation was funding this evaluation over the years, it was also funding one of the Catholic schools being evaluated (one that showed questionable results).
Some have pointed out that the voucher schools were not taking a lot of special needs students; the response was that they just don’t label kids. However, Cowen did find that “private schools admit students with special needs to avoid oversight on the admissions process, but then quietly counsel them out because retention data receives far less scrutiny.” One of the reports (#35) referred to this as “eschewing the formal special ed label...[to] focus... on interventions such as parental school choice.” (That’s an intervention?)
Wisconsin grows its voucher program
Within a few years Racine had a voucher program, and then the program went statewide in Wisconsin. It was determined that voucher schools would now be identified by name in evaluative reporting; their performance reports overwhelmingly improved once the state required the data to be reported by school name alongside the city’s public schools. But, the author notes, “Private schools with a particular evangelical bent – those teaching creationism [instead of science] for example – were particularly poor performers on the state exam.”
At the same time (2014), results of the Louisiana program, gathered by the same characters, were released, and they were, apparently, shocking. The author reports a “huge, nearly unprecedented loss for students who transferred to Louisiana schools using a voucher.”
As the voucher program grew around the country, Cowen says, the School Choice Demonstration Projectbecame the key vendor for legislatures to manage their initial trial process. “It was [my] first exposure... to working with data on research supported by large funders in the education reform network,” he explains. He says, as results are published, he notices that all of his conclusions supportive of school choice and vouchers are incorporated into studies and published, but “none of my more voluminous, skeptical scholarship... has ever made it into those compendia.” He says that unpublished material would have shown that “Milwaukee voucher users left the program at extraordinarily high rates and improved their academic outcomes once returning to public school.”
Same characters – new theme
The bulk of researchers now scrutinizing the broader “education freedom” movement, Cowen says, are being trained by the School Choice Demonstration Project and University of Arkansas Department of Educational Reform. “Alumni” of that first project in Milwaukee who got their start there and now influence the “evaluations” of these voucher projects include the Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute, the Friedman Foundation, which is now called EdChoice, and Betsy DeVos’s own American Federation for Children.
A beachhead for “a conservative presence in educational policymaking” had been established. As the empirical case based on metric standardized testing has been collapsing, this core group has retrenched around “parents’ rights.” Cowen calls it “a much larger and destructive culture war.”
In 2005, while Milton Friedman was still speaking of education in terms of “the market,” Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans and forever changed that city’s approach to education. Of the 126 public school buildings, 110 were ruined or severely damaged. Forty-three percent of the city’s population simply left. Those remaining pushed for “emergency vouchers for temporary private school attendance.” Friedman jumped at the chance to empower consumers (in the marketplace!) through substantial vouchers. He called it “a large-scale example of what the market can do for education.” The vast majority of New Orleans students are apparently now in charter schools; some call it “charter school city.”
By 2012 the New Orleans program had expanded to all of Louisiana. And that same evaluation team, the School Choice Demonstration Project at the University of Arkansas Department of Educational Reform, funded in large part by the Waltons, is shaping the story. “Results were and remain shocking,” Cowen reports. The move has “caused unprecedented large, negative impacts on student achievement.” Earlier research had found no positive effect from the move to voucher schools; these new data showed negative impact. What Peterson and Starr had called unchanging academic results but happier parents was now actual “damage,” as reported by two independent teams. (One of them was Wolf’s own team!)
The Louisiana Superintendent of Schools said vouchers just needed more time to succeed, but student losses continued into year two: There were no offsetting benefits, and the annual exits from the program were substantial. The voucher schools saw some recovery in years 3 and 4, but even Wolf had to acknowledge “the negative effects... after four years especially in math.” Once again, we heard the “overregulation” theme, and all negative results were carefully worded, excused, and edited by Paul Peterson – the clean-up work having been funded by Bradley and Koch.
If evidence meant anything...
And then in 2017 and 2018, Washington, D.C.’s Opportunity Scholarship Program “had large negative student achievement results in the first two of three years.” Assessments showed that children in religious voucher schools were receiving fewer hours per week in fundamental core subjects. In the same year (2017), Indiana was “beginning to show dismal results,” including lower achievement, especially in math. Cowen says these results were not made public, though; they were acquired through an open records request.
Voucher programs in Indiana, Louisiana, Florida and Milwaukee were all experiencing large student exit rates. The author notes, “Louisiana and Indiana shared little with respect to their economies, demographics, or political histories.” What these states had in common was voucher programs. And all had followed the Betsy DeVos design:
Moved funding away from the state’s public schools
Did not restrict eligibility to very low-income families or students from low-performing public schools
Enjoyed strong enrollment from the middle class
The Privateers tells us that Indiana’s program (the largest) also showed widespread discrimination. Its scope allowed vouchers to schools with “particularly extreme social or religious views.” In fact, $16 billion went to schools with overtly LGBTQ+ discriminatory policies. “Similar reports would surface later in Florida and Wisconsin,” recalling Friedman’s original mantra at the time of Brown v Board of Education: Vouchers let parents of all races avoid compulsory integration and choose whether to enroll in racially diverse environments. Now one might simply apply that reasoning to the issues of sex and gender, offering further motivation for school choice.
From 2016 to 2019, Cowen says, negative headlines about voucher programs appeared frequently across the country. At the same time, programs had begun to enjoy higher income thresholds. Cowen suggests this might have resulted from “pop-up” private schools wanting to cash in on available dollars or the shortage of high-quality schools for at-risk students. He concludes, “The idea simply did not work. The bigger and more recent the voucher program is, the worse the results have been.”
The clout of grievance politics
The author continues: “The decade of voucher research that began in 2010 provided as close to a one-sided conclusion as social science gets. If evidence meant anything to education policy, the story of school vouchers would have ended here.” But it didn’t. In 2016, Trump was elected president. In 2017 Betsy DeVos herself took over the Department of Education. Cowen says this was the merger of culture war and white grievance politics at the very time that evidence of voucher impact was starting to show real harm.
So, what would be the next logical step? “Parents’ rights” was brought back to the forefront, reminiscent of the original 1954 plan to avoid racially integrating students. Now the viable alternative was parental rights, refueling the culture wars, this time around gender as well as race. Trump himself called school vouchers “the civil rights issue of our time.” The wealthy conservative individuals, families and organizations mentioned repeatedly above now added “grievance politics” as a new part of the message behind their decades-long voucher agenda.
In The Privateers, Cowen cites the “symbiotic relationship” between Donald Trump and White evangelicals and the huge role played by those conservative think tanks. White evangelicals, he writes, would leverage Trump’s “racial animus” and “strong-man politics” to create new authority for religious organizations. And, of course, they got themselves a new judiciary too. These things benefited the movement even after they left office; the pandemic experience further elevated the voucher agenda.
That conservative beachhead established so long ago now had to be protected against a wave of negative publicity for vouchers. Proponents of the program chose to focus on the anti-regulation explanation and to highlight the good results for parents and choice, minimizing student test scores. In fact, the claims went, “nonacademic measures were a better way to gauge voucher success,” regardless of test scores. And then came the suggestion for ESAs: Education Savings Accounts by which families would simply be handed tax dollars to invest in their child’s education however they chose, even to “fund” homeschooling.
Organizers, funders and education proponents were visited by politicians, authors, and conservative influencers. John Bolton and Rob Portman became fellows in Friedman’s American Enterprise Association, now called AEI. Lecturers included Paul Ryan and Dick Cheney. Just as the 1954 message of resistance to integration had been framed as questions of “individual liberty” and “marketplace values,” the voucher story was now couched in the language of “innovation, entrepreneurialism, and the free exchange of ideas.”
Is educational freedom religious freedom?
A big win came to the movement in the form of two more Supreme Court decisions, one in Missouri and the other in Montana. The court said that “denying funding to organizations precisely because they are religious violated the constitutional Free Exercise provision for religious liberty.” Once again, the fights to get these cases to the Supreme Court were funded by Koch and Bradley.
(If you would indulge me here, dear reader, I would like to insert a purely personal reflection: The above suggests to me that there is absolutely no end to the convolutions one might employ to manipulate parts of the US Constitution to force its support of whatever end one has in mind – if there’s enough money involved.)
The 2017 annual report of Harvard’s Program on Education and Policy Governance revealed that the Koch Foundation had funded research at Harvard on “educational entrepreneurship and school reform in the US.” And Paul Peterson said of Betsy DeVos, she “holds fast to her integrity and principles after the best that atheists can throw at them.” And with that, the privatization of education was called “educational freedom.”
But Cowen tells us there was another consequence, a new form of discrimination. Now, according to the Supreme Court, discrimination against LGBTQ+ children and families was simply “religious Free Exercise.” The goal had shifted from anti-gay marriage to preventing the application of equal LGBTQ+ rights in places of business and public service such as schools. Now the right to discriminate in that way was called “religious freedom.” Jeff Sessions told federal agencies to “ignore civil rights laws when they conflicted with the ideology of the Religious Right.” He claimed that Christians were being forced to choose “between living out their faith and complying with the law.” Betsy DeVos, head of the Department of Education, removed the Obama administration guidance on transgender bathroom use and initiatives related to racial disparities.
President Trump went on to appoint leaders in the departments of Justice, Education, and Health from far-right religious think tanks and organizations, laying the groundwork for Free Exercise exemptions to civil rights protections in education and pushing for “religious liberty” in government oversight. And all the while, voucher programs were delivering poor performance data. As the author explains, “The ‘values’ based push for vouchers... replaced academic success as the overt objective.”
Cowen now reminds us how we got from 1954 to 2017. Back in the ‘50s, the “right of parents” was a race-neutral path to avoid school integration. Twenty-five years later, the premise was that parents have the right to use public tax dollars to facilitate self-segregation. The ultimate goal was a ruling that states must offer taxpayer support for religious education, or a Supreme Court ruling establishing a constitutional right to school vouchers. Interestingly, 37 states have Blaine Amendments. (I had never heard of this.) This amendment prohibits the use of taxpayer dollars for religious education in that state. The Wisconsin state constitution has such an amendment. (This was originally anti-Catholic, the author explains.) Apparently the DeVos family felt they had suffered religious persecution because they opposed LGBTQ+ rights.
And still the outcomes data for voucher schools around the country was dismal. Howard Fuller, known as the “godfather” of Wisconsin vouchers, admitted the data in Milwaukee showed lack of “deep, wholesale improvement in academic results.” Louisiana’s 2009 data and Indiana’s 2010 data showed “devastating harm to student achievement – up to twice the size of the Covid-19-induced test score drops years later.” Ultimately the first Trump administration did not see a huge expansion of vouchers, but, Cowen tells us, he “put the politics of exclusion and resentment back into the voucher movement.” From there, the right to simply opt out of basic civil rights requirements became central to Republican ideology, pushing it away from “academic improvement” to avoidance of civil rights guidance. The return to the original Friedman appeal had been accomplished.
To put the icing on the cake, in 2022 Christopher Rufo (a conservative activist linked to Ron De Santis who focuses mostly on critical race theory) said, “to get universal school choice, you really need to operate from a premise of universal public school distrust.” And so, from March of 2022 to March of 2023, more than 100 bills related to school vouchers were proposed in 40 states. Seven more states added voucher schools. Nine states expanded their voucher programs; all but two were red, Trump-loyal states. In most cases the “vouchers” had become ESAs, those Education Savings Accounts that took tax dollars from the local school district and paid them directly to families to educate their children as they please.
In 2023, Ron De Santis made vouchers universal in the state of Florida. It was noted by some that 69% of students receiving vouchers were not transitioning from public school for a “better education” – they were already private school students, now taking advantage of free tuition paid for by the public school system.
The door is thrown open
Nationally, Cowen says, the theme seemed to be “the year of universal change,” with a focus on “escape” – from certain books, from diversity, from gender identity and sexuality. In fact, Arkansas and Iowa passed restrictions on “teaching of race, of issues related to gender identity, and on certain books in public schools and spaces.” Texas attempted such a move, but it failed to pass. In all three states – Arkansas, Iowa, and Texas – the Betsy DeVos American Federation for Children had a huge presence. The Federation spent $9 million in those states – $2.5 million coming directly from Betsy and her husband, Dick.
During 2022 and 2023, states also saw 140+ pieces of so-called “parental rights” legislation and more than 80 legislative items related to book bans. Cowen says the Heritage Foundation “churned out a veritable mass production of self-proclaimed studies and reports... on issues of ‘educational freedom.’” And The Heritage Foundation, in its “Education Freedom Report Card,” went so far as to rank each state on how well it now aligned with “Milton Friedman’s Vision.” Who do you suppose ranked #1? Florida!
And now, in this era of “universal change” came the Dobbs decision, ending the right to a legal abortion. In many cases, Cowen says, groups pushing for the end of abortion rights shared funding and personnel with the “education freedom” movement. In the very same week that they handed down the Dobbs decision, the same six justices extended “free expression” voucher laws in Missouri and Montana. Then came a decision called Carson v. Makin, ruling that “tuition assistance” to private schools cannot be withheld for religious status or because the tax dollars would be used for religious purposes. In other words, vouchers were now going not just to religious schools but for religious education.
The states with the biggest school voucher programs, for some reason, saw an explosion of bills to ban abortion: Florida, Iowa and Arkansas. Within a year of the Dobbs decision, 24 states “moved to fully ban or severely restrict abortion.” Cowen points out that this all happened in the “year of universal choice,” pulling together the issues of race, gender, sexuality, and educational privatization. The “Student Physical Privacy Act” now put the focus on school bathrooms, locker rooms and playing fields. It does not escape our author that Mike Johnson, who would become Speaker of the House, was formerly a staff attorney for Alliance Defending Freedom, and his specialty was “conversion therapy” for LGBTQ+ people.
And it will not surprise you that, during this same time period, Moms for Liberty was formed in Florida (with strong connections to De Santis), ostensibly due to pandemic issues such as masking, vaccines and shutdowns. Within two years they had 120,000 members in 300 chapters, focusing on “parent power.” Cowen calls the group the “parents’ rights version of the Obama-era Tea Party.” At their 2022 annual summit, guest speaker Betsy DeVos gave a speech called “End the Education Department.” (Give me a minute here to catch my breath.)
With an official slogan of “We don’t co-parent with the government,” Moms for Liberty enjoys funding from the Heritage Foundation and Koch offshoot Parents Defending Education, and other conservative sources. A small glitch appeared in 2023 in the form of a lawsuit from a woman claiming she had consensual 3-way sex with the Moms for Liberty founder and her husband, and was assaulted by the husband. (Oh, well...)
“A righteous sense of moral valor”
To put it all in perspective, Cowen summarizes 2021-2023 thus:
The explosion of legislation of “overt hostility” to LGBTQ+ people, curriculum regarding race, and transgender identification
Expansion of the school voucher program
Rise of the Moms for Liberty
The federal government’s end of reproductive freedom
He also notes the obvious through-lines of the Heritage Foundation, the Koch network, and Betsy DeVos. We moved, he says, from a school voucher movement to a parents’ rights movement to religious nationalism through 30 years of right-wing policy making, dependent on soldier-scholars. And behind it all was Paul Peterson. Cowen characterizes the movement this way:
The appearance of expertise, pedigree, and prestige
Quick, unvetted data points culled from preliminary reports
“The direct and deliberate creation of dubious facts to support a predetermined ideological objective”
Cowen sees parallels with this movement and the run-up to the Iraq War, and he also notes another concurrent phenomenon: our nation’s opioid crisis. He points out these similarities:
Industry-sponsored campaigns
“A fundamental altering of established professional practice”
An “imperative” to “establish literature” of support for the universality of our position
He notes, “Something truly radical is taking place... Evidence is not the same as truth.” Now invoking the word “freedom,” he warns, “should bring, if not doubt, a healthy degree of skepticism.” These movements, the author asserts, were all “propelled by ideology and a righteous sense of moral valor.”
And they are succeeding. Specifically, Betsy DeVos and the American Federation for Children (formed in 2004 as the Alliance for School Choice) had fared well in the period from 2010 to 2023:
Mustered $250 million
Scored 200+ legislative victories in 26 states
Scored 1828 electoral victories in 19 states
Here the author outlines a terrifying web of cross-funding and cross-staffing, all relating back to those original funders and names we now know so well. He says, “The link between profiteering and proselytizing in the voucher movement” is the embodiment of today’s “education freedom” campaign: “White, male, aggressive, and well financed.”
In fact, Corey DeAngelis, a senior research fellow at the DeVos Federation for Children, wrote an article called, “Legalizing Discrimination Would Improve the Education System.” DeAngelis, now seen as “the public face of the effort,” said that the voucher push “started winning when it stopped making statistical arguments about performance metrics and started making moral arguments about parental rights and the content of the curriculum.”
Cowen calls the words of DeAngelis “a full embrace of discrimination.” A new voucher bill in Arkansas revealed, through local sources, that “95% of initial voucher recipients had never been in Arkansas public schools.” In that state they call vouchers “Education Freedom Accounts.” Finally, the author says, it all comes down to parental rights and religious nationalism.
Cowen’s Call to Action
How to save the public schools so fundamental to democracy? We are told there is no advocacy group forpublic education anything like the one against it. And there are few agreements about how to counter this “voucher” movement. The author offers some possibilities. First, he says, we must have a commitment to “direct and sustained investments in public education.” That includes a commitment to its purpose:
Whole-child approaches
Schools as communities
Learning as a lifelong endeavor
We must defend public education, Cowen says, as a matter of human rights. What we’ve witnessed over the past 20 years, nationally and internationally, he claims, is the same organizational focus: huge dollar investment, including backing by “dark money,” and “radical disengagement from shared civic responsibility.” He warns that the problems of American life will continue to show up as problems in our schools.
Cowen summarizes the current situation thus: Religious nationalism is against any child who does not look, love, or pray the way its supporters do. It therefore leaves every child outside a church sanctuary abandoned to fend for self.
Whew!
And so, I’ve come to the end of this book, challenging to me in every way. For starters, it’s not an easy read. And to be very honest, it’s filled with concepts and passions to which I’ve given little attention in my lifetime. The themes of this book are almost otherworldly to me. I’ve never felt my religious freedom threatened, nor have I ever sought to curtail the religious freedom (including the freedom not to attach to religion) of anyone else. What I have encountered is an annoying determination by the Christian right to force Christianity on me and all Americans; that I have endured, and it gives me pause.
As for parental control, I see firsthand every day as a school board member the great lengths to which public school teachers and administrators go daily to involve parents in their children’s education, to adapt to family needs and preferences. Now, if parents prefer a non-public option for their children, as my parents did for me and I sometimes did for my children, they are free to withdraw from public school and pay the required tuition for the school of their choice. What more control do they need?
Concerning the influence of big money via the likes of Koch, DeVos, Walton, Bradley and others, that’s new territory for me. I never give those organizations a thought, nor had I ever before heard of Paul Peterson or Greene or Wolf or Witte. Of course I’d learned of Milton Friedman in my college education courses; now I understand why he is so revered by the conservative Christian right. I see clearly now that the torch has never been passed: The same conservative, big-money influence has been demanding public funding of private, escapist education for 70 years. As an American citizen, I will not submit to that demand. I intend to fight to keep public education as strong and successful as possible, acknowledging the need for an informed, educated electorate as a foundation of our very vulnerable democracy.
Now, get The Privateers and read it!