School vouchers are conservative billionaires’ Trojan horse

Education researcher Josh Cowen understands that the movement to pass voucher bills in states across the country and the national rollback of reproductive freedom are not the same thing. “But they are driven by the same people,” he said. “What puts these two things together is their attempt to make America a Christian nationalist state.”

Who are these people? In a new book, Cowen says they’re conservative billionaires with tightly networked and well-financed political advocacy groups. Among them are former U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, who works through her American Federation for Children, and industrialists Charles Koch and the late David Koch, who created Americans for Prosperity.

In an interview about “The Privateers: How Billionaires Created A Culture War and Sold School Vouchers,” Cowen said school privatization has become the mission of a conservative cabal that has effectively masterminded “a political capture of the judiciary, the federal regulatory apparatus, and state lawmaking processes.”

Cowen is a Michigan State University professor whose early studies of small, select voucher pilots found they showed some promise. But as voucher programs expanded and became large-scale, Cowen documented increasingly dismal academic outcomes. Large-scale studies found students in Indiana, Louisiana, Ohio and Washington, D.C., who used vouchers to leave public schools for private schools experienced sizable learning declines.

Data from recently enacted state programs show the typical students using vouchers never attended public schools as they were already in a private school, home-schooled or enrolling in a private kindergarten. And the data also show many of these private schools raise tuition once states adopt vouchers.

Yet even as evidence mounts against their effectiveness, vouchers are spreading. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, this year, 19 states have already or will consider legislation on the issue of school vouchers or “education savings accounts.” 

Cowen says these determined billionaires are manipulating lawmakers and running roughshod over the will of voters, who remain wary of diverting tax dollars to private schools.

“It is not parent driven. It is not locally driven. This is a nationally coordinated movement. Vouchers and voucherlike programs still have never won a statewide ballot initiative,” Cowen said. That’s why, he said, proponents have resorted to conservative advocacy groups disguised as think tanks and aggressive litigation and legislative strategies.

“If they thought vouchers would even have a good shot on a direct ballot, they would do it as it would be cheaper and much faster,” he said. “Betsy DeVos wouldn’t have a super PAC targeting legislators in Texas right now if she thought there was public support.”

When rigorous evidence on school vouchers revealed some of the largest academic losses in the research record, proponents pivoted to the culture war argument that public schools were too woke and parents needed control over how schools talked about gender, LGBTQ families and race in America, an argument embraced and advanced by Donald Trump during his presidency.

Why is controlling the narratives around social issues in America so important to DeVos and other wealthy conservatives?

“They are true believers,” Cowen said. DeVos and her husband, Dick, have long funded Christian schools and evangelical missions, and spoken with admiration of private schools that impart moral and religious beliefs to their students, he said. As U.S. education secretary on her first visit to New York in 2018, DeVos visited private schools rather than public ones and delivered a speech where she criticized “powerful interests that want to deprive families their God-given freedom” to choose private schools.

In an October 2020 speech at Hillsdale College, a Christian liberal arts school in Michigan, DeVos condemned advice that conservatives should “accept that we really are living in a culturally post-Christian nation. That we’d best retreat to a makeshift monastery and leave culture and country behind.”

Instead DeVos urged action. “Rebuild the family, restore its power,” she said, “and we will reclaim everything right about America, and us.”

The catch, Cowen said, is that DeVos’ vision for America is not inclusive of all families in America. “It’s about one view of family, a specific type of family that fits into the larger frame of right-wing politics.”

“Vouchers are sold as a coupon that you can take and go wherever you want,” he said. But the voucher movement is not about school choice, but “the school’s choice.” In 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court cleared the way for taxpayer-funded vouchers to go to religious schools.

Now, private religious schools accepting public money can reject children from same-sex families. These schools can expel a teen who becomes pregnant. They can require that families sign sexual morality pledges and “statements of faith” that declare “homosexual behavior ... is sinful and offensive to God” and “no intimate sexual activity be engaged in outside of a marriage between a man and woman.”

Voters need to know that a voucher movement that initially drew on the language of free markets and now of religious faith has done nothing to improve education, Cowen said. And he also wants Americans to realize the fundamental threat to democracy posed by this religious nationalism around schools is “a notion of every child and family outside of a church sanctuary left to fend for themselves.”

Maureen Downey is a columnist for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.