If you’re probing a controversial issue, it’s heartening to find someone with wide-ranging experience and expertise in the field.
And, when it comes to school vouchers, Josh Cowen—author of The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers—fits the bill.
Among other things, Cowen’s book describes how the voucher movement emerged.
It began after the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. Eager to find a way to continue racial segregation in schools in the wake of that ruling, white politicians in the South latched onto a 1955 essay by Milton Friedman called “The Role of Government in Education.”
Friedman, an economist at the University of Chicago, maintained that parents should have the right to choose schools for their children. The government should finance schools, he felt, but it should refrain from running them.
His proposal: The government should give vouchers to parents, who could then use them at a variety of sites—secular as well as religious.
Early on, Cowen also summarizes what respected studies have revealed about these programs as they emerged.
One central finding: Voucher-fueled education hasn’t boosted academic outcomes.
Two major investigations conducted between 2005 and 2010—one in Milwaukee and another in Washington, D.C.—found that vouchers had no effect at all on student learning.
Starting in 2013, however, several research teams have concluded that they’ve caused “some of the largest academic declines on record in education research.”
In Louisiana, for example, two different research groups reported “negative academic impacts as high as -.40 standard deviations.” A federal assessment in Washington, D.C., and an investigation in Indiana both uncovered learning deficits of almost -0.15 standard deviations.
By comparison, it’s been estimated that the Covid pandemic lowered academic outcomes by -0.25 standard deviations.
One central cause of such dismal results: the advent of pop-up schools in states where voucher programs got under way. Such newbie educational providers, apparently eager to take advantage of a new market, often closed within a few years.
A study of the nation’s oldest program in Milwaukee showed that 41% of the private schools that accepted vouchers shut their doors during the program’s existence.
Pop-up schools took an average of four years to fail. The other sites that took in voucher students failed on average after eight years.
Researchers have also determined that voucher schools have on occasion pushed some students out to get the clientele that they wanted.
Cowen’s own research in Wisconsin concluded that almost one-fifth of the students in Milwaukee’s voucher program left each year. Often they were minority students or those who got below-average results on standardized exams.
Also at risk of being nudged out: disabled and LGBTQ+ students.
The impulse to segregate, it seems, has continued to be part of the voucher mindset to some extent.
The absence of positive research findings regarding voucher programs left its promoters in a quandary. As studies continued to undermine their claims and hopes, they changed their marketing strategy.
Backers now contended that more time was needed for the vouchers to realize their potential—or they scapegoated the government, claiming that voucher schools were struggling under the weight of overregulation.
Voucher proponents have also sought to cast doubt on the merits of public school education.
For example, they’ve argued that the system promulgates a threatening agenda and supposedly indoctrinates its charges in questionable ways.
Cowen quotes Christopher Rufo, a prominent supporter of vouchers who’s publicly admitted that he wants to erode confidence in public education. As Rufo himself put it, “To get universal school choice, you really need to operate from a premise of universal public school distrust.”
For all their efforts, however, vouchers continue to be unpopular with the public at large.
In her review of The Privateers, Diane Ravitch notes that no state referendum on vouchers has been approved since the mid-1960s. Last year, three states included referenda on their ballots and all three failed.
And yet the movement is continuing.
From March 2022 to March 2023, more than a hundred voucher bills were considered in 40 states. During that period, seven new states established voucher programs and nine others grew their existing programs.
H.R. 1, the House of Representatives’ reconciliation bill, includes language from the Educational Choice for Children Act (ECCA) that would take $10 billion away from public schools to pay for vouchers. At the same time, this ECCA language contains neither curriculum guidelines nor accountability requirements—a typical feature of new or reauthorized voucher plans.
As of mid-June, the Senate was still considering this measure.
The Privateers provides a bird’s-eye view of the issue—how it emerged and where it stands now—but that’s only part of the story.
Also important is how these efforts to sell the voucher gospel have affected a number of teachers and their instructional practices.
Gene Wickenkamp, a former teacher in Fairfield, Iowa, relates his experiences in a recent article in the online news site Barn Raiser.
As a principled social science instructor, he covered structural oppression with his eighth graders. “It would have been a disservice, for example, to frame chattel slavery as the result of a few prejudiced individuals rather than the state-sanctioned institution of captive labor that it was.”
He also signed a national pledge “to teach honestly about history.”
Such a stance caught the eye and the ire of his area’s state representative, who began to publicly lambast Wickenkamp’s teaching three years ago, complaining that he was leading his students to hate white people and to hate their country.
His administrators failed to support him, even as the attacks continued and festered.
His minority colleagues got worse treatment still. Some continued in their jobs; others have left the profession.
Then Nohema Gruber, another veteran high school teacher in town, was murdered by two white students. During their trial, a psychologist testified that “extremist rhetoric had been a contributing factor” in the crime.
Following the counsel of family members and his therapist, Wickenkamp left his job and his profession before the school year ended.
So what’s the way forward? Cowen argues fervently that public education needs more financial resources over the long haul. All other improvements in public schools depend on generous and reliable support.
Beyond that, a more united and robust opposition to the voucher crowd is sorely needed. Right now, he laments, there’s no anti-voucher equivalent of the well-organized groups that are pushing this agenda.
Crucial is to give voice to the widespread public distrust of this “reform.” For Cowen, the argument for vouchers “has always been a deliberate construction…This is no movement; it is rather more a coup, and it has been a right-wing political operation from the start.”
