Michigan State University Professor Josh Cowen, author of “The Privateers – How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers”. Photo courtesy of Josh Cowen.
This is the second part of a discussion with Josh Cowen, a professor of education policy at Michigan State University about his new book “The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers.” Part one of the interview was published on Thursday.
The effort to get school vouchers approved nationwide has a long and varied history, but Cowen’s book posits that it is essentially a Christian Nationalist attempt at undermining public education as we know it.
“The Privateers – How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers” by Josh Cowen. Photo courtesy of Josh Cowen.
Cowen, whose career as an education researcher in the early 2000s began with the expectation that vouchers, which allow public tax dollars for education to be spent for private school tuition, would ultimately benefit students. However, the reality that Cowen documents in the book turned out to be almost the exact opposite.
Starting in the immediate aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision which ordered an end to segregated public education, and ending with the rise of the conservative Moms for Liberty – a vocal opponent of LGBTQ+ rights – and Project 2025, an authoritarian blueprint offering detailed plans to broadly enhance executive authority during a second Trump term, Cowen describes the arc of the voucher movement as never being far removed from bigotry and intolerance, whether it be against Blacks or the LGBTQ+ community.
More importantly, however, Cowen describes in detail the academic framework, whether through universities or conservative-funded think tanks, that provides intellectual cover for the movement.
What follows is the second part of the conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity. Advance questions are in bold, and Cowen’s responses are in regular type.
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Obviously, what happens in November will say a lot about the future of this movement. In your book, you talk about how, in a certain sense, the Trump presidency saved this movement. It came along and revived it when it needed it most. The scores (from school voucher programs) were in. They were down. The statistics were not adding up, and now it’s given it this political boost. Where does it go from here?
Kevin Roberts, the head of the Heritage Foundation throughout Project 2025 was asked “What happens if you guys lose?” and he sort of said, “Well, there’s going to be a Project 2028 then. We’re going to keep going.” I’m not a political strategist. I don’t know that I can tie the future of this thing entirely to the election, but I both agree and acknowledge in the book that what Trump did and the reason it does depend in the short run on what happens in November is it takes something incredibly distracting, and I would argue controversial and sensational or sensationalized, to distract from the magnitude of the voucher-induced (testing) declines over the last decade. How many articles have you seen or maybe written yourself on COVID learning loss? We’re talking about something that is severe for reasons that I think researchers understand, but when you have vouchers in a state, it’s not as talked about. I just can’t imagine in a world of George W. Bush, for example, who signed the first federal voucher system into law. If that thing had just consistently rolled out the negative results that happened a decade after Bush left office, it’s really hard to imagine a world that would be found acceptable, until you walk into the world Trump made where these voucher results are coming out at the same time as Charlottesville, as George Floyd, all of these incredibly sensational moments in American politics. And then you have election denial.
You have kind of 30% or 40% of the American public just refusing to acknowledge what happened on January 6th and that Trump even lost in 2020. And so then when you put it in terms of J6 or election denial, and the reason I do it in the book is because they share some of the same organizations. But if you just think about it culturally, you compare negative school voucher results to something like that. I think negative school voucher results, however dreadful, begin to look a little technical and a little…
As if data doesn’t matter anymore?
Exactly. I say this not to be flippant or snarky, but what’s the point of debating data and evidence with folks who just say, “Trump won in 2020, Trump won.” It did not happen. And so you really are in a world where we’re even debating what reality is and it sounds a little farfetched, but this is really the world we’re in.
And it took that to offset and to give fuel and energy to the voucher push. In a real practical sense too, it’s important to remember that the Supreme Court plays a very big role in this, and Trump did appoint three Supreme Court justices who really have paved the way in the judiciary for vouchers in just the same way they they paved the way for for a rollback to Roe vs. Wade, the same week actually. So, there’s the kind of the cultural political moment Trump made, and then there’s just a very hard cold reality that three Supreme Court justices were added to the judiciary under Trump. And in a 6-3 vote, they crossed a bridge that the original court, 5-4 in 2002, was unwilling to cross, which is that now vouchers can pay for religious education per se and not just be used as payment to providers of a type of service.
Michigan doesn’t have vouchers, but I don’t know how many different private organizations the state partners with to deliver a service as a vendor. And what the court said in 2002 was that private schools are not necessarily exempt from that type of relationship just because they’re schools. You just can’t use it for indoctrination or proselytizing. But that’s basically exactly what today’s version of the court in 2002 said could happen. So there’s the cultural political stuff Trump made, and then there’s just the very cold hard reality that the justices also have really paved the way over the last 4 years.
But even with this disdain toward data, it can’t be denied that learning losses from voucher systems are far greater than COVID learning loss, correct? Groups like Moms for Liberty, in a sense, were born out of the idea of student learning loss due to COVID restrictions.
Exactly, and when Betsy DeVos was an elected official, she had to comment on this. It’s a lot different when you’re back in Ada, Michigan, and you can just tweet out something. But she’s on record. They couldn’t just ignore it. At the national level, they all understand these things existed, which is why the strategy pivoted to more culture war stuff while blaming kind of the old bugaboo of government regulation. While charter schools are really a different thing, if the charter transparency push in Michigan ever gets back off the ground, you’re going to hear this from the charter groups themselves about overregulation. “It’s going to have a chilling effect on our schools to have the state asking us how the dollars are being spent.” This is just the theory of action that the DeVos folks came up with to explain away the negative results. But what’s important for our conversation is that they didn’t deny the results existed. They couldn’t. Some of them were too stark and too well publicized.
(Note: A request for comment was made to Betsy Devos through the Dick and Betsy DeVos Family Foundation, but was not returned.)
You mentioned charter schools, which are public schools, although as you said, they’re a different animal than a voucher system. But they do represent another option for parents to make in terms of traditional public schools. So, where does parent choice fit in? Where should it fit in, in your mind?
Well, if you talk to Heritage or one of these guys, they’ll call me a school choice critic, which I emphatically reject. There are many of us that support certain types of charter schools. In Michigan one in four Michigan kids goes to school in a school of choice either through schools of choice, our inter-district choice system or charter schools themselves. There are 150,000 Michigan kids in charter schools today. I have some real reservations or problems with the way our charter school sector is structured, which is mostly run by for-profit managers. It concerns the teacher protections that are in those environments, teacher pay, and things. But the evidence in favor of some charter schools in other states is undeniable, and nothing like that positive evidence for charter schools really exists in the voucher research literature. And conversely, nothing like the negative voucher results exists in the charter school literature. They’re not only structurally different. The evidence based behind them is different too, but sometimes you do get these things lumped together because, in my view, the voucher folks are just trying to piggyback off of successful charter schools.
Even in our state here today, you’ll see (charter and voucher advocates say) “Michigan kids deserve more school choice.” I wrote a piece on this a couple of years ago in the Detroit News where I said we have choice, there’s a lot of choice. All they want is private school tuition covered. And you see some of the ancillary debates right now. Our universal school meals program in the state; there have been a couple of different reports on private schools in our state wanting to cash in on that too. And so I think it’s important that the nuance behind some types of choices is really important to this conversation because as you point out, charter schools are public schools. And not only that, but there’s just a substantially far greater sort of research base behind them. However, what there isn’t is a restriction in choice.
The book brings it full circle, starting with Brown v Board, ending with Moms for Liberty and Project 2025, and seeing this cycle. What do you hope to see happen from here?
I mean, at the end of the day, what I hope to see happen is an understanding that this is not really about fundamentally improving education outcomes for the vast majority of people. This is a separatist movement in American education, trying to take dollars to separate, isolate out into cordoned off spaces based on what they call religious values. I would say it’s Christian nationalism. I think others would would say so too.
I think at some point when this moment has passed in American politics, I would hope that there is a renewed effort to make improvements in public schools. There needs to be reinvestment. There needs to be a rethinking of some of the structure, some of the design, some of the curriculum. You know, there’s debates in our state about literacy. I strongly support new efforts to improve dyslexia education in our state, which does set me apart from some of the public school groups.
We have to have honest conversations about where public schools need to improve, but where those conversations can’t go, in my view, is toward a direction where the solution is taxpayer funding for this religious separatist movement in American education, where we’re just going to give people who are giving up on public schools community investment money to go learn in church schools. That’s not the answer. Folks can go learn in church schools if they want to, but if we’re at a point where we’re sending taxpayer dollars for that, I think it’s a fundamentally different vision of what American education is.