Despite hard evidence that they work, school voucher programs are still gaining steam. Josh Cowen, professor of education policy at Michigan State University, joins host Krys Boyd to discuss why “school choice” is such a hot-button issue, the influential people behind its growth, and why this push is signaling distrust of public schools. His book is “The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers.”
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Transcript
Krys Boyd [00:00:00] School choice is a hot topic right now. Many supporters argue that K-12 public schools are failing to prepare all students for a prosperous future or instill basic values while succeeding at exposing them to critical race theory, pro LGBTQ politics and the risk of gun violence. Many opponents of school choice deny that public schools are training grounds for progressive ideology and say public school students suffer when funding is diverted away from their campuses. Wherever you land on school choice and there are plenty of people somewhere in the middle. It is worth asking how did so many Americans stop trusting public schools? From KERA in Dallas, this is Think. I’m Krys Boyd. One big surprise for me in reading a new book about this was just how old the idea really is. In fact, the neoliberal economist Milton Friedman first floated a version of a school voucher program 70 years ago in 1954, which perhaps not coincidentally, was the same year the Supreme Court ruled against school segregation in the landmark case Brown v Board. Josh Cowen is professor of education policy at Michigan State University. His book is titled “The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers.” Josh, welcome to Think.
Josh Cowen [00:01:15] Yeah, thanks for having me.
Krys Boyd [00:01:17] Before we get into how we got to now, we should probably start by outlining what school choice policies actually do. I know they can be different in different states, but broadly speaking, what does the school choice program offer to the families who take part?
Josh Cowen [00:01:31] Yeah, So great question. Again, thanks for having me. So school choice is a broad set of policy designed that range of everything from choice within the public sector. So choosing between public school districts and charter schools that are independently run public schools to kind of what we’re talking about today and what’s sort of the flavor of the year really, and the the the Trump and so on, which is public funding for private school tuition, a big difference from those other sorts of things. And there are different ways that states can use to kind of create public funding for private school tuition. But when we’re talking about these things, which are sort of school vouchers, so public funding for private school tuition, we’re talking about any public program that diverts taxpayer dollars to private tuition, number one. And number two, something you have to leave public school to be eligible for.
Krys Boyd [00:02:26] So how are voucher amounts per student determined?
Josh Cowen [00:02:32] They are. That does depend on the on the state. Often what they’ll do is they’ll set it to some percentage of public school funding per student, usually a little lower than that, and then they’ll kind of go from there.
Krys Boyd [00:02:44] So what happens if a parent’s choice of private school costs more than the amount of the voucher? They just have to pay the balance?
Josh Cowen [00:02:52] Yeah, and that’s one barrier. The other barrier, which is common across all these things, which is protected in all the voucher legislation today, is the schools are the ones that are doing the choosing. It’s really important to remember that when it comes to vouchers sets it different from charter schools or other school choice programs. With these publicly funded private school tuition, the schools do the choosing, whether it’s setting tuition prices, whether it’s who to admit who to turn down, who to expel and so on and so forth. So the parents really don’t get that kind of say on this, that I think the marketing, the marketing would would would suggest.
Krys Boyd [00:03:25] I see. So private schools that accept this voucher funding to defray student tuition, they’re not required to take all comers.
Josh Cowen [00:03:33] Exactly. They are actually it’s protected in the newest versions of these things over the last 4 or 5 years, it explicitly says private schools don’t have to do anything that is different from what they call their creed or values. And it’s it’s baked into that statement in each of these pieces of legislation that allows the private schools to frankly, to discriminate on whatever basis they’d like.
Krys Boyd [00:03:56] Okay. So every area, every city at least has its share of, you know, the fanciest private schools who takes advantage of voucher programs to defray the cost of those in places where those schools exist and are very, very expensive.
Josh Cowen [00:04:10] Yeah. So it’s it’s important to know that overall about 70% of voucher users across the country are already in private school to begin with. These are mostly just sort of new subsidies for existing choices already. And that that’s related to what I said a second ago about schools doing the choosing. And one of the reasons the vast majority of voucher users are already in private school to begin with is they’ve already gotten it and the schools have already done the choosing regardless of ability to pay. Many of those schools, some of those schools are, you know, kind of these elite providers that you’re talking about, especially in suburbs or big urban areas. But many are not. Many are what I call sub prime private schools. They’re financially distressed. They’re sort of barely hanging on, maybe academic or they’re not overly interested in academics. They may be run out of, say, a church basement or a little lot next door to the church and so on. And they’re they’re really organized around kind of a much more like a religious education framework. And that’s really kind of what’s part of driving today’s version of this is is part of this larger culture war we’re in that’s associated with sort of what we’re going to say and not say with public dollars in terms of religious education.
Krys Boyd [00:05:18] So for those schools that offer explicitly religious education and accept voucher funding, are they restricted in any way from receiving what amounts to public money in the form of those tuition vouchers?
Josh Cowen [00:05:30] No. And in fact, that’s been the subject of the last two Supreme Court rulings, 1 in 2020 and 1 in 2022. Just three days before the same six justices rolled back reproductive rights. They actually expanded the rights of private schools to take public dollars and explicitly use them for religious education. Until two years ago, it was a little unclear whether they had to just use those dollars for secular education inside religious schools or what they could do with it. Now it’s anything goes. They can use these dollars for religious education, too.
Krys Boyd [00:06:01] Does school choice allow parents to move their child to any public school they wish, like in districts where, say, one particular high school is seen as the very best?
Josh Cowen [00:06:09] Well, those programs exist already in nearly every state, including, say, my own, where we do not have public funding for private tuition, but where fully one out of every four kids here in Michigan go to a different district than they are residentially assigned to or to a charter school, an independent public school. So, yeah, there’s a lot of public school choice in sort of apart from this this kind of private private education on the taxpayer dime.
Krys Boyd [00:06:38] All right. So let’s dig into the origins of using public education money to defray the cost of nonpublic education. In 1954, of course, the Supreme Court ruled that racially segregated public education violated the Constitution. So you have this economist, Milton Friedman, who wasn’t necessarily all in on the question of race, but opposed government mandates both for and against school integration.
Josh Cowen [00:07:05] Yup. Yeah, that’s basically it. And, you know, there’s a lot of debate today among historians and sort of fans of Milton Friedman about whether Friedman himself was a personal segregationist or not. But what I don’t I don’t think that’s overly interesting today because what is true, what is inarguable, is that segregationists in 1955 and beyond, sort of after Brown immediately saw that the potential of this voucher type proposal to add to their ability to resist Brown by using public dollars to create what they called segregation academies and other types of private schools that were kind of, again, publicly funded in some indirect way through parents, but not technically public schools. And that’s kind of the origin story for these things.
Krys Boyd [00:07:51] Just to be clear, those segregation academies were not labeled as such by the people who started them and attended them. Right. That was by critics.
Josh Cowen [00:07:58] Well, at that at that time, a couple would have I mean, they weren’t very clear that but now many of these academies still exist as private schools, and certainly they don’t call themselves that today.
Krys Boyd [00:08:11] So how did Milton Friedman’s ideas influence the thinking and ultimately the spending of Charles Koch and his descendants?
Josh Cowen [00:08:19] Well, yes. So good question. So Koch is a libertarian octogenarian, comes out of the oil and gas industry and the Koch brothers. Charles is the surviving brother really from the 70s, been very interested in what they call getting government out of the economy. Very libertarian, sort of no regulation, no oversight on spending. And there’s a reason for that. They’re in the oil and gas industry. And they saw that that type of oversight as interference to their business plan. But Friedman, all working on vouchers, also kind of created all kinds of intellectual frameworks for that type of anti-regulation, anti-government. So it’s not just an education fact, not even primarily in education until later in his life. So this was very appealing to the Koch folks. And Charles Koch son has joked in interviews that he had to, as a child growing up, had to read Milton Friedman are on the family fireplace. So taken was his father with Friedman’s ideas. So there’s a deep, long line between Friedman himself and the Koch Industries and the Koch network today. Yeah.
Krys Boyd [00:09:28] So you write about this kind of melding of the economic politics of the Koch’s and then the religious politics of the DeVos family. People may remember that Betsy DeVos was secretary of education under President Trump during the first administration, the Southern Baptist Convention, and this group known as the Council for National Policy. What should we know specifically about the CNP and its priorities?
Josh Cowen [00:09:52] Well, this is basically like a professional association that folks all over the country have one in their line of work. Right. You go to a trade convention maybe a couple of times a year, even a CNP is a little bit like that for right wing donors and wealthy folks who want to network and get things done. Betsy DeVos’ husband called this a mingling of the, quote, donors and the doers, folks who had the money to play and to participate, and also doers who were sort of policy experts and so on and so forth. And they helped create and network around all kinds of policy priorities, whether from vouchers, this issue we’re talking about to, you know, energy policy, to health care policy in a number of other areas as well.
Krys Boyd [00:10:31] Christianity is not an explicitly racist belief system. So what accounts for the synchrony between private, effectively segregated education and some schools organized to convey Christian beliefs?
Josh Cowen [00:10:44] Yeah, I’m a Christian man and go to church every week. And this is an area that, you know, I think a lot of thought in the Christian tradition has to to come to terms with both now and sort of in the historical record. It is a bigger conversation than the one today. But but I think there’s a long standing history of folks in this country dating back to the 19th century of using the Christian framework or using their identity as Christians to to to really push for explicitly racist policy. I mean, listen, no less than Abraham Lincoln himself in his second inaugural said both the South and the north prayed to the same God and both asked for God’s aid in their warfare against the other. So I think folks are going to take any religious faith and sort of pervert it to meet their ends. And there’s a particular role of race in this country’s history that we really haven’t escaped being able to talk about and reckon with. That’s true for Christianity in particular in the United States. But it’s also true about American politics, the American economy and everything else as well.
Krys Boyd [00:11:43] Surely there came a point where being really openly racist was not an easy sell to a lot of people in terms of, you know, talking about these school vouchers. One made it make the way to make the case for vouchers was to portray public schools and whatever regulations govern their operation as somehow violating the rights of parents to decide what was best for their children. Talk a little bit about the case that school voucher advocates made in that direction.
Josh Cowen [00:12:11] Right? So in the 50s, the phrase parents rights explicitly referred to the ability of parents to self segregate their children away from Brown v. Board’s order. So that that particular phrase, it’s not to say that parents who demand a say and have the right to a say their child’s education or. In any way racist. And let’s be very clear about that. And just just as we’re rejecting kind of so-called Christian faith motivating this stuff, either. Being a parent does not does not in any way lead to or sticking up for your rights, lead to some idea that you have to racially segregate your children. But that is the rallying cry from the 50s on to today when vouchers first began as a policy framework in modern form in the 90s and the early 2000s. They were at that time very narrowly targeted toward lower income communities, communities of color and so on. And so there was kind of this reprieve for a while. We’re still conservative in origin, still very interested right wing sort of religious political leaders pushed for these things for their own purposes, but did have some bipartisan support as as attempts to create policy for vulnerable people. But it’s really been in the last 5 or 6 years that this phrase parents rights has become weaponized again and gone back to its sort of darker origin stories from the 50s in this country around separating out and isolating out anyone that parents feel are undesirable for the kids to be around in a public school framework. It back then it was explicitly race. Today it’s a little bit on the issue of race. We talk about DEI, CRT, “woke” so-called stuff, but often it’s increasingly around issues of gender and particularly the transgender stuff. And those are all framed in today’s parents rights view, too. And they really go back to that origin story of isolating, separating out different children in the name of parents, Right?
Krys Boyd [00:14:07] Josh, Why do billionaires care where the vast majority of American students go to school?
Josh Cowen [00:14:13] This is ultimately about remaking American public policy the way that they see that it should be done. And that’s, again, true across every sector. Right? Why does Elon Musk care where kids go to school? He’s even weighed in and said vouchers are great. When you talk about the two big billionaire players in the space, at least historically, Betsy DeVos and Charles Koch. As we’ve talked about, there’s this sort of religious nationalism version that Betsy DeVos pushes, which is using, in her words, to vouchers to advance God’s kingdom on Earth. It’s nothing less than that. It is trying to replace public schools as centers of community and place them with churches. She said this. This is her words, not mine. The Koch folks are a little bit more. It’s about they see public schools as government. And to the extent you’ve got five public schools in your community, that’s government buildings in your community. And the Koch network see government as as regulation, as oversight. Again, they come out of the oil and gas world. So so for them, it’s much more about kind of getting government out for the DeVos orientation of this stuff, it’s really about pushing forward a vision of Christianity and a very conservative vision of Christianity at that that that sort of takes over American public policy and decision making.
Krys Boyd [00:15:30] But nobody’s gone so far as to say there’s not a public interest, therefore a government interest in ensuring that every child gets an education. Right.
Josh Cowen [00:15:40] Well, they’re getting close to that. I mean, they’re getting close to Friedman’s voucher paper. Originally, the one from 1955 said the ultimate goal should be getting government funding out of education entirely, not even vouchers, just no money spent on education, public or private. So there are some that would kind of walk in that direction. I think those would be more the Koch oriented view of the world. But the thing that the that links the kind of DeVos worldview with using public dollars for religious education to all of the other things that are going on in this conversation about education and education, adjacent stuff like book bans and bathrooms and team sports and all the stuff is really about it’s less about education as a public good and it’s more about public policy as a means to further religious and specifically this version of Christian decision making when it comes to American public life.
Krys Boyd [00:16:31] Supporters of voucher programs will often point to the fact that private schools do a better job of educating students than public schools do. Let’s unpack that. Is that actually a fact?
Josh Cowen [00:16:43] Not when it comes to private schools that are funded by vouchers, no.
Krys Boyd [00:16:46] And what’s the difference between private schools funded by vouchers and private schools funded exclusively by parent tuition parents?
Josh Cowen [00:16:53] Yeah. So the elite academies of public imagination and of reality in many places prep schools, boarding schools, things like that, they do exist. And many of them, I mean, I think you could argue, probably do an amazing job and are some of the very best schools in the country, if not the world. But those are not the typical school that takes on voucher dollars and that the typical schools, these subprime providers, these financially distressed schools, often a chat attached to church lots, church basements, the DeVos organization, American Federation for Children’s, actually running an entire campaign right now called Save Our Catholic Schools. It’s about bailing out catholic schools that have suffered from loss of enrollment, loss of dollars of lawsuits to the Catholic Church, specifically on the issue of sexual abuse, real fundings drop stuff. And so the results actually show this. They track with this the typical schools that these folks go to when they’re able to get in using public dollars, don’t have an academic mission. Or if they did they they’ve lost it. And that’s part of why they’re having trouble filling seats. And the results show that the academic kinds of kids who leave public schools to go to private schools and again, that’s only 30% or so of users. Most are already in private school to begin with. But the academic declines for those kids who transfer from public to private school using a voucher are some of the worst losses academically we’ve ever seen on any research question in this In this field.
Krys Boyd [00:18:16] When states add voucher programs, do they tend to see some gold rush of people setting up these little schools to cash in on vouchers?
Josh Cowen [00:18:25] Yes, exactly. There’s a whole set of pop up schools that flood the market, many of them close within 2 or 3 years. It’s hard and expensive to run a school, but you do see these pop up providers run in trying to set up schools, some of them again, attached to churches. Churches may say, let’s restart that school we ran 30 years ago. Others are just kind of hanging out a shingle at at an old empty Kmart or an old empty, you know, front storefront calling into school and seeing if they can get the dollars.
Krys Boyd [00:18:51] You mentioned this briefly earlier, but I think it bears repeating. How are charter schools distinct from both private schools and public schools?
Josh Cowen [00:19:00] Well, you’re you’re putting your finger on a real fault line, a potential site for battle on this front. So charter schools are right now they are publicly funded, publicly run, but independently organized and operated public schools. They just aren’t run by districts. Some districts can authorize them, some to traditional school districts, but they’re just standalone public schools. They’re kind of in the middle of a spectrum between kind of public education on one hand and full privatization on the other. They’re they’re kind of occupying the center space. The reason I say that you’re you’re touching on a very hot topic is there is a court case percolating up through Oklahoma and into the federal judiciary right now. They’ve asked the Supreme Court to take it on. That would allow the nation’s first religious public school art, specifically Catholic public school, using the charter model, a Catholic run charter school, which again, a Catholic run public school. Most states do not allow that, including Oklahoma. And so there is a lawsuit that’s trying to kind of pry that that that wall open or that door open to allow publicly, excuse me, religiously run public religious schools through the charter model. We’ll see what happens there.
Krys Boyd [00:20:14] So is the argument that if Catholic schools are already allowed to accept, say, voucher funding, what’s the difference between just funding them publicly lock, stock and barrel there?
Josh Cowen [00:20:25] There is some of that argument there. The distinction that the law has made and that policy makers have made is that, you know, there is some sort of mechanical difference between parents walking up to a private provider, whether it’s a McDonald’s or a church running a school and handing out cash and saying, give me the service. I’m asking you for whether it’s religious education or Big Mac. There’s a difference between that and, say, the government opening a hamburger joint and selling the Big Macs and operating it and imposing sort of all those rules that go alongside it. So who runs the building, even though the funding, as you suggest, is basically, you know, most folks will look at that and say it’s public money. Either way, you’re either giving the parents money to deposit in the cash register at the Catholic Church or the Catholic Church is just running the store and they’re getting the money directly from the feds or from the state. That that does seem to be a distinction without a difference in terms of the dollars around. But who operates it and who actually owns it tends to tends to make all the difference, actually, according to the law when it comes to the ability to discriminate, when it comes to the ability to be eligible for certain funding streams and stuff. So in that difference that does seem small comes a world of of impact when it comes to, again, who has access to these things and the right to discriminate, which is what all of these providers in the private site really want the ability to do.
Krys Boyd [00:21:50] Josh, How common is it for public school students who use vouchers to transfer to a private school to end up returning to regular public school after some period?
Josh Cowen [00:22:02] Super common. So about about 25 to 30% transfer back or to for the first time a public school every year out of these folks. It’s a revolving door in and out.
Krys Boyd [00:22:13] Is this about money? Is it about conditions in the new school? What do we know about the reasons that people change back or change to kids?
Josh Cowen [00:22:22] You know, these kids tend to be lower income. They tend to be students of color. They tend to be lower scoring on the exams that we have any information on academically. So that that that pattern fits with one of two things that probably are both going on. One is that the groups that I just described, lower income students of color, academically lower, lower scoring kids tend to be more mobile in general. They tend to transfer a lot between schools. And as parents are moving around and things like that job to job. But it’s also fully consistent with the pattern that we know is also happening, which is that those private schools are asking them to leave and are pushing them out, perhaps before accountability time. If there isn’t accountability, perhaps for behavioral issues, perhaps just because they say it’s not a fit for us. That would also be one explanation that we know from important reporting, investigative reporting on this issue has shown that pattern of well, of push out and expulsion.
Krys Boyd [00:23:19] Do private schools that receive voucher funding have an obligation to offer services for students with special learning needs?
Josh Cowen [00:23:29] No. Another big area of debate and controversy right now. So they many of them will tell you they will offer an alternative that come as you are. We will educate you even with your special need. But we’re not going to sign that piece of paper that says we’re obligated to we’re not going to sign that that IEP, that individualized plan, the contract for special needs services. We’ll just take you and we’ll see if we can work it out together. That’s kind of the messaging. The federal government, as well as a number of state based watchdog groups, as well as a handful of attorneys general in states, have actually put out explicit warnings and they framed them as consumer fraud. Warnings parents who may be tempted by voucher programs, who have a special needs child to read the fine print and to be aware of the loss of rights that they have when it comes to actually being served with disability does not mean there are no private schools that don’t take special needs kids. There are many private schools that will say, We’ll take this kid, but there’s a very big difference between accepting them and offering the service to accommodate for them. And that’s often another hidden source of some of that mobility out of those private schools that you describe, that just the schools just say, we can’t we can’t make this work and the parents are left to their own devices again.
Krys Boyd [00:24:45] Okay. So what do we know about the effect of voucher programs on public schools that might otherwise enroll those students who use vouchers to go elsewhere?
Josh Cowen [00:24:54] So this is one area if you want to look for a bright spot, this is one area that kind of I think the data would would add a little bit of credibility to the voucher lobby’s argument. There is some limited evidence that introducing what they call competition from vouchers in very specific historically underserved communities, frankly, in places like Florida or places like Louisiana has shown that there has been some uptick in public school academic outcomes. When you introduced that competition measure idea, the idea being the threat of losing students to voucher programs somehow pushes academic accountability and academic outcomes up. There’s a couple of really big caveats to that. One is these competitive effects, while not negative, are very small positive. Put them in perspective. Something like a 10% increase in voucher spending leads to something like moving a child on average from the 50th to the 50.2 percentile in public school academic outcomes. That’s tiny, and that’s about ten times less than an equivalent spending increase, directly investing in that public school to begin with. So the net take home point there is if if improving the public school outcomes through competition is the goal. You can achieve that goal ten times over simply by just diverting the money specifically to the public schools in the first place, Which makes sense if you think about how investments work at all. The other thing to remember is, too, with these competitive effects, which I will acknowledge exist with some studies, in some places they are only found in areas that have been historically under-resourced and have been do historically and in real time suffer from the biggest threat of potential funding loss because of the communities they live. And maybe they don’t have the tax base to to raise income taxes or to fund their local public schools highly enough. And so then I think you do have to talk about what’s right and what’s wrong. And even even though we know from the evidence that directly investing in those public schools is more effective than the competitive effect that exists, it’s also a question of what values are. And I would, for my part, declined to accept the idea that pitting vulnerable communities against each other to compete for scarce resources is moral public policy. I think it’s wrong, and at some point I think we need to kind of talk about that in terms of what’s right and wrong, not just what the numbers say.
Krys Boyd [00:27:26] Josh It is entirely understandable that schools, public schools suffer when they lose funding because that money gets diverted in the form of vouchers. But is there a fair argument to be made that failing public schools don’t deserve more money?
Josh Cowen [00:27:40] We know that rate of failure is almost directly proportional to the investment that’s been made in them. But on the right, there’s been this kind of myth that’s created for the last 30 or 40 years that more money does not lead to better public school outcomes. And that’s just, in their words, throwing money at the problem. But in fact, that’s just not what the research shows. The research shows that there’s almost a perfectly linear relationship between the amount of money invested in a school and its academic outcomes and not just its academic outcomes, by the way, but even community based outcomes like wages improving later in life, like life expectancy, raising later in life, and reductions in community based crime rates, for example. So there’s like whole scale investments that do pay off here. So it is true that there are some public schools that are really not living up to the bargain that they have implicitly made with parents and policymakers in their communities. But just if we’re just looking at which schools those are, those are one for one almost perfectly. The schools that have been invested in and from the first place.
Krys Boyd [00:28:44] It is, as you mentioned, parents who already have children in private school, you know, want to take advantage of voucher programs to do where defray their tuition expenses when that’s available. Do private schools tend to raise their prices when a significant number of parents are getting some kind of break in the form of school vouchers?
Josh Cowen [00:29:04] Great question. The answer is yes. And this is a new feature of the voucher spreading over the last 3 or 4 years. It used to be when I first started in this work, like 20 years ago, states would actually prohibit private schools from raising tuition above a very modest kind of cost of living type thing year to year. Now that rule is gone. So what you see where where this has been explicitly studied and investigated again by investigative journalists is Arizona and Iowa, for example, two states where this this has been widespread states, private schools are getting the voucher bail out, essentially, and then they’re jacking up tuition prices above and beyond that bailout, which further prices out many of the parents that that that might be newly interested in trying to enroll there sort of defeats the purpose unless the purpose is partly to create new funding streams for those private schools and keep them open, which I said is emphatically and explicitly a goal for some of these groups.
Krys Boyd [00:30:01] What should we know about the Zelman vs Simmons Harris Supreme Court case in 2002?
Josh Cowen [00:30:07] The Zelman v Simmons Harris was the first time the federal Supreme Court said vouchers don’t violate church state separation. You can. And in Zelman they said, you know, in 5-4 it was a very close decision. But they said sending money to religious schools doesn’t violate church state separation as long as those schools are not forcing kids to participate in religious services. In the last eight years, there have been three other Supreme Court cases, each one further building off of Zelman and walking back that wall that Zelman laid for nonparticipation in religious services and increasingly allowing for private schools to simply use the money overtly for religious education. As I said, the most recent version of that was 2022, just a couple of years ago. So there have been four total, beginning with Zelman and four Supreme Court cases that have increasingly expanded the ability for religious schools to receive public dollars and to do so increasingly for the express purpose of religious education.
Krys Boyd [00:31:13] Josh, What does it take to fairly and accurately compare the performance of public, private and charter schools?
Josh Cowen [00:31:21] Well, at minimum, they should. You need them all to be taking the same assessment, the state, the same exam. Now, there is a debate both in the public school advocacy community and the private school advocacy community about whether we should be using standardized tests at all. But what isn’t arguable is that today in today’s world, standardized tests are still used as the kind of coin of the realm to hold, in their view, public schools accountable. So if you’re going to basically ask private schools using public money to put their results on the table and actually sort of prove what they’re promising parents, then the only way to really do that is to compare kids outcomes on the same on the same exam.
Krys Boyd [00:32:10] And what sort of research did you contribute to in studying the effectiveness of a voucher program in Milwaukee school starting in 2006?
Josh Cowen [00:32:19] So the bigger and the more recent the voucher system, the worse the results have been. When I first started working on this in 2000, five, 2006 or so, the data weren’t really clear. There had been some pilot programs and I worked on some of them as a young researcher that that that, you know, seemed to have some promise in very small ways for both test scores and for graduation rates, mostly because the schools in those in those environments were okay or decent private schools. They accepted accountability. They were willing to to be good partners in exchange for providing private education. They would take the public dollars and understand their rules attached to public dollars when you do that. Since about 2017 or so, the results were almost uniformly bad. As these as these programs have expanded across the country, in places like D.C., in places like Louisiana, where I’ve done a lot of work in Indiana, Ohio and so on. So there really is kind of I was part of that, that that period of time where the results shifted. And this is part of why my view shifted, frankly, from cautiously optimistic 20 years ago, 18, 19 years ago, to a very emphatic critic. Today’s the results shifted over the last 20 years. The bigger and the and the more recent the voucher system, the worse the results have been for kids.
Krys Boyd [00:33:32] You mentioned yourself that it’s, you know, expensive and difficult to start a school, keep it going, you know, make sure that it’s providing a quality education. Is is it possible that these newer schools that are popping up and receiving vouchers are just getting started? Right. That in a few years, if they’re allowed to continue operating, they will be as good as they promise to be.
Josh Cowen [00:33:54] It’s possible. But here’s the thing that I think we don’t know, but we should be skeptical about. One is that any of these schools that are set up with alternative purposes, whether it’s we do know, for example, that when vouchers are passed, they become the dominant source of revenue for churches that are running the schools, taking those vouchers, private contributions to churches go down when the church is running a private school. So they’re taking some of that revenue for something else. And then the other new player in this space, especially what are called micro schools, which are very small private schools, eight, nine, ten children that grow out of the pandemic environment. There’s been a lot of new investment on the for profit sector in these micro schools in places like Florida. And that investment is coming from private equity. So I don’t think you have to beat up on for profit providers across various social services. You don’t have to necessarily even beat up on private equity per say. But I do think a healthy degree of skepticism is warranted when it comes down to whether it’s sort of sending revenue to churches or to sending profit margins to private equity if they really have the best interest of the kids academic career and lifelong learning at heart. Or if this is really about stretching those dollars as far as they can go to meet some basic modest level of of improvement for those kids while making the dollars and making say again in the case of private equity, making that profit as large as possible. I think we should be really skeptical about that.
Krys Boyd [00:35:24] If voucher supported schools fail to meet whatever standards states and districts set for public schools, are they still eligible to receive voucher funding?
Josh Cowen [00:35:34] No, but that the answer to that does vary a little bit by state. So in the newer states like Arizona or Florida, there’s really nothing that the state can do to throw a voucher school out of of of being a participant in a recipient of public funding. I mean, there are some very long hurdles they could cross to do. So it hasn’t really happened in older voucher states like Ohio or Wisconsin. There are some rules in place that do sometimes get operated as an example. There’s a pretty well known Catholic school in Wisconsin that had historical records of financial problems, but it but it managed to stay open for quite some time and was highly reputable in terms of academics. But eventually the state said, you know, you’re just not able to balance your books. All of all of what we’re doing is just sending dollars to a black hole in some sense. With respect to financial transparency. And they actually did remove that pretty famous school from the from the payrolls of the voucher program there. So it does depend on on how the states are thinking about accountability. And again, like so much of this, like the academic outcomes, the older programs allow for a lot more oversight and a lot more accountability when it comes to that. The newer programs, it’s anything goes.
Krys Boyd [00:36:49] Critics have noted that certain voucher advocates seem to be motivated by this belief that children in public schools are exposed to ideological concepts that particularly religiously conservative parents may disapprove of. Right. LGBTQ rights, books containing materials they find objectionable. So they set up and support ideological, ideologically conservative alternatives. Is there anything to stop very progressive entities from starting competing schools and pushing their ideas and getting paid vouchers?
Josh Cowen [00:37:17] Well, no. And in fact, that’s what the other side, the voucher lobby will actually argue is if you guys don’t like these academies that exclude LGBTQ teenagers or exclude parents from a divorced family or exclude teenagers who might get pregnant because we say it’s against our values system, then go start your own LGBTQ friendly academy, go start your own woke school and so on. You hear them making this argument and there’s certainly nothing that that that stops progressives from doing that. But then you do get into big, big debates about what a publicly funded education is, therefore, and whether or not that kind of separation and isolation and balkanization of children is healthy for for us society and healthy for democracy. I’ve called this voucher push the new religious separatism in American education. There’s a lot of that going on. And there’s just the idea that our religious tradition tells us in these folks words that these these people shouldn’t even exist, at least according to the identity they’ve identified for themselves. And we’re just going to separate ourselves out and isolate ourselves from from larger communities. You know, that is one argument for how public dollars should be used and what what American society should look like. It’s one I happen to do disagree with fairly forcefully.
Krys Boyd [00:38:35] What about are there any kind of national curriculum standards? Could I set up a school and choose not to teach anyone to read or do math because I’m focused on something else?
Josh Cowen [00:38:46] Yes, you could if you were using voucher funding. There have been fits and starts of curriculum standards that have been tried to be put in place from time to time at the federal level and at state levels. Right now, the federal law requires states to create standards and accountability and assessments, according to the state’s own set of preferences. The federal the federal government’s agnostic about what those standards are. For the most part, despite all the rhetoric on the right right now about getting the feds out of education so the federal government doesn’t dictate what’s taught in local public schools. There is some conversation to be had at your individual state level about what’s taught in your public schools, but that has nothing to do with the federal government. All of that, though, all of those minimal standards for what’s taught in public schools do go out the door when you’re talking about voucher funded schools. And I and others have written, for example, you mentioned not teaching, reading or writing. A number of these schools will teach, for example, creationism instead of more typical STEM based subjects. And this is yet another reason, by the way, why, when it comes to the assessments on STEM subjects, the voucher performance is especially bad, where it’s not quite quite so negative when it comes to reading. You do see wild variation when it comes to how these these folks approach math and science.
Krys Boyd [00:40:01] Josh President elect Trump has talked for a long time about eliminating the U.S. Department of Education, although some of its current functions would be taken up by other agencies. He didn’t do it. We should note, in the first term. But what effect might a move like that, a shuttering of the Department of Education, have on the future of voucher programs?
Josh Cowen [00:40:21] So it’s important to know that the best partner, but mostly its job is to distribute resources. It’s to distribute resources for vulnerable communities, lower income communities through what’s called it’s Title one programs. It’s important. It’s one of the most important anti-discrimination authorities in the United States when it comes to students, whether the students are three years old or 33 years old. And then a number of other programs specifically designed to kind of make sure that diverse learners, special academic needs, students with disabilities and so on, have their needs met. It is possible. You know, in theory to take all of those programs and redistribute them across the federal government and and send block grants to states and things to try to create those same services. But it’s going to be much harder to do, especially absent any kind of dedicated. Set of people, frankly, whose job it is to make sure that money gets paid to low income families, to students with disabilities, to rural communities. Four line items earmarked specifically for to fund those rural communities take away the anyone’s responsibility to actually pay those dollars out. In a way, government spending works, whether it’s the federal level or the state level, is often those funds get delayed. They may not even show up at all. And so, you know, if you’re in one of those groups or you care about those groups that I mentioned, rural communities, students with disabilities, vulnerable populations and so on, it’s worth being worried about that, Trump has the Department of Education in his sights.
Krys Boyd [00:41:53] For now, the president elect has named Linda McMahon as his nominee to head the Department of Education. Have you had a chance to look into the ideas that she might bring with her into the position if she’s confirmed?
Josh Cowen [00:42:03] Yeah, I mean, it’s it’s a real extension to some of the stuff I wrote about in the Privateers. So she Linda McMahon, started a big right wing policy organization called the America First Policy Initiative right after Trump left office. The first time she did this in collaboration with a Texas billionaire named Tim Dunn, who is explicitly behind very forcefully in public that state’s voucher push there and wants more Christian public policy, in his view. Trump’s announcement of Linda McMahon, the first paragraph mentions way well before he said anything about the department of it itself. He mentions that one of her jobs is to be a big advocate for universal vouchers or for vouchers at the federal level. So, you know, these are a fairly garden variety as far as kind of what the wealthiest of Trump’s supporters and loyalists have wanted in the education space. But I do think, you know, one thing that separates Linda McMahon out from some of the other contenders that that might have been on on my bingo card is just a longstanding history with Trump personally, a long standing loyalty to Trump personally.
Krys Boyd [00:43:07] What sort of future do you see for education voucher programs?
Josh Cowen [00:43:12] There’s going to be a push for a federal voucher system starting in January, led by the Linda McMahon’s of the world, another Trump administration of figures. We’ll see how it does in Congress. I mean, it has to go to Congress to do that. There’s some irony to the idea that this this rallying call of getting the federal department, the federal government out of education, while at the same time pushing for this massive expansion of vouchers at the federal level. Conservatives in this space tend to not really want to get rid of the federal government. They just want to read, divert federal resources to their policy priorities. And that in this case means vouchers. But listen, one thing I just want to say is that in three states, just on Election Day, vouchers actually lost on the ballot. They were explicitly on the ballot in Colorado, Nebraska and Kentucky. Nebraska and Kentucky also went for Donald Trump. 57% of voters removed a voucher law from the state rolls. In Nebraska, 65% of voters rejected a constitutional amendment that would have allowed for vouchers in that state. And 65% of voters in Kentucky voted for Donald Trump. Most of the theme here is that conservatives like Donald Trump. A lot of people liked Donald Trump in this election, but there’s deep skepticism toward these universal vouchers or to voucher schemes on the right as well as the left. And that skepticism comes in rural communities and communities where they don’t necessarily see how these schemes might help them, in part because of the things we talked about today, in part because they mostly fund existing private school students, in part because part of the goal is religious education, places they may like religion and like faith, but really want their kid to go to school to get a job or to to improve their economic and income standing. So there’s a lot of nuance and variation on this stuff. And despite the fact that at the Trump level, these things are being pushed by Trump and by right wing billionaires when it comes to real voters and real parents, there’s a lot more of a skepticism.
Krys Boyd [00:45:04] We’ve seen some rural pushback here in Texas as well. Is part of that because people in rural areas don’t have like an excellent private school nearby to send their kids to.
Josh Cowen [00:45:15] 100%. And, you know, if one theme that’s emerged from this election has been that, you know, the economic numbers that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and others sort of touted as to show we were in economic recovery, that those numbers didn’t necessarily translate into how families saw their economic circumstances. I think the parallel to this in the voucher push is all of the rhetoric from from voucher advocates and Betsy DeVos and Tim Dunn in your state and Jeff Yass and others saying vouchers are great when you go to world communities, when you when you talk about other things public schools do like Friday night football and 4H clubd, debate clubs and community meals and all of those things that make public schools really important. Some of these rural communities that may not have a private school at all. I think there’s a lot more skepticism.
Krys Boyd [00:46:04] Josh Cowen is professor of education policy at Michigan State University. His book is titled “The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers.” Josh, thank you for making time for the conversation.
Josh Cowen [00:46:17] Thank you so much. Really appreciate it.
Krys Boyd [00:46:19] Think is distributed by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Again, I’m Krys Boyd. Thanks for listening. Have a great day.
