John Thompson, historian and retired teacher in Oklahoma, wrote this thoughtful review of my memoirs, An Education: How I Changed My Mind About Schools and Almost Everything Else.
He writes:
Diane Ravitch’s An Education: How I Changed My Mind About Schools and Almost Everything Elseis dedicated to her wife Mary; her sons, Joe, Michael, and Steven; her grandsons Nico, Aidan, Elijah, and Asher; and her ex-husband Richard. An Education intertwines deeply emotional personal and family experiences with the history of how she became such a transformative education leader. Although Diane denies it, I believe she’s the most influential education advocate of the last century.
I’ve been reading Diane Ravitch’s work for decades, but An Education is my favorite book. And my favorite passage started with Diane’s citation of Robert Hutchins who said, “We have to learn to live with those whose opinions differ from our own. After all, they may turn out to be right.”
Then she wrote about Hutchins statement, “for three decades I didn’t realize that it was intended for me.”
Being from Oklahoma, I was captured by the first part of her book, about growing up in Texas. I especially loved her story about meeting Roy Rogers at the Rodeo when she was 9 years old. After Rogers slapped her hand, Diane said, “I determined on the spot that I would never wash that hand again!”
Diane was a tomboy who loved horses and dogs. But she experienced sexism and trauma. She said she “did not have an idyllic adolescence. No one ever does.” But her teenage years were “destroyed by my father abusing me.”
During the middle of her book, she recalled her complicated marriage to Richard Ravitch and, then, her wonderful wife, Mary. Mary worked with the progressive educator Deborah Meier and opened a progressive small school in New York City.
I was especially impressed by Diane’s communication with Al Shanker. He sought to allow teachers to start schools within schools to turnaround kids “in the back of the classroom with their heads on their desks.” Back in the late 1980s, it seemed like he might be able to bring diverse factions together. But, by 1994, charters had been high-jacked by corporate reformers and their winners and losers ideology.
In the middle of An Education. Diane revealed in so much detail the inside stories of her years as a conservative. Back then, when I was an academic historian, I learned the most about Diane when reading her 1983 book, “The Troubled Crusade: American Education, 1945 – 1980.” Although I couldn’t yet read her work through the eyes of a teacher, I was exceptionally taken by her calls for teaching background knowledge so students could develop reading comprehension skills so they could “read to learn,” and her placing education pedagogies in a broad historical context.
Diane recalls her support for meritocratic, standardized testing, and color-blind policies, when she questioned bilingual education, and even the benefit of the Equal Rights Amendment. This was the time when she made friends with Bill Bennett, President Reagan’s Secretary of Education, and Chester Finn, and Tennessee Governor Lamar Alexander. I knew she had ties to Daniel Patrick Moynihan, but I too thought that progressives’ criticism of him was too politically correct. And, until I read An Education, I knew little about the two sides of James Coleman’s research, whose earlier research had seemed persuasive to me.
Neither would I have thought that Chester Finn was like a “sibling” to Diane.
When explaining her then-conservative beliefs, I sometimes felt that Diane was too hard on herself. For instance, she was far, far from alone in failing to understand the wisdom of Gov. Ann Richards, who said, “If there ever is school choice in Texas, the hard-right Christians will get the money to indoctrinate children.”
Moreover, as An Education schooled me on the propaganda behind the so-called “Texas Miracle” it did more than foreshadow the “New York City Miracle,” the “Harlem Miracle,” and the “Mississippi Miracle.” It brought me back to the decades-long Oklahoma reality when our curriculum and policies were based on Texas’ accountability systems. During most of my career, our policies were informed by one Texas trick after another to jack up accountability metrics.
Diane served as member of the National Assessment Governing Board from 1997 to 2004, and she would dig deeply into the numbers and the methodologies behind NAEP. But, as she explained, few journalists read the fine print of the research and they wrote “breathlessly” about supposedly dismal results in traditional public schools. They certainly didn’t report properly about the way that students’ outcomes were linked to family income.
When serving in the Education Department, Diane took a lead in establishing national standards for every school subject. Drawing upon excellent historians, multicultural History standards were set. She hoped standards like those would remain voluntary and “unify their respective fields and establish a common ground for a curriculum without telling teachers how to teach.”
But the conservative Lynne Cheney “published a scathing denunciation of them.” Cheney said the History standards focused too much on people like Joe McCarthy and the Ku Klux Klan, and not enough on Ulysses S. Grant, and Robert E. Lee. This launched the modern wars over curriculum that have become especially destructive under President Trump.
Even so, in 2002, Diane hoped that Mayor Mike Bloomberg and Joel Klein (who knew nothing about education) would succeed in improving New York City Schools. Klein reorganized schools from top to bottom, with multiple schools per building drawing on funding by the Gates Foundation. (By the way, I saw the chaos Klein created when visiting dozens of hurriedly opened school, especially in Bedford–Stuyvesant. Usually, leaders of the new schools didn’t even know how many new schools were being opened in their building.)
And, even worse, Jack Welch CEO of General Electric pushed 20-70-10 “stack ranking,” meaning 70% of teachers would be in the middle in terms of effectiveness, and 10% should be “removed,” even if it took the use of invalid and unreliable metrics to evaluate all teachers.
Especially after Diane engaged in a seven-year debate with Deborah Meier, which further “broadened her perspectives,” she became an invaluable leader of the grass-roots opposition to corporate school reforms. She objected to top-down mandates on teaching reading. Diane was among the first to explicitly link in a detailed manner the reforms to the wider privatization movement. And she nailed it when identifying them as the “Billionaires Boys Club.”
Diane analyzed the public relations campaigns which sold “reforms” as the “New York City Miracle.” Drawing upon her insights from serving on the National Assessment Governing Board, she clearly explained why NYC schools flipped back and forth between A and F grades. Then, she linked President Obama’s flawed $5 billion RTTT experiment with the problems with Common Core curriculum and tests that were years above students’ reading levels.
Diane then quotes John Maynard Keynes who said, “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”
Today, Diane changes minds by clearly explaining the interconnections between Free Market ideology, and profits, and the mindsets of elites that push privatization. She also reports daily on the interconnected attacks on schools throughout the nation. And now she’s sharing the same wisdom when spreading the word about Trumpism and today’s attacks on democracy.
I always read Diane’s daily blog posts. And I so very much appreciate An Education, even if it briefly pulled me away from reading everything in the Diane Ravitch Blog.
On May 10, Dana Goldstein wrote a long article in The New York Times about how education disappeared as a national or federal issue. Why, she wondered, did the two major parties ignore education in the 2024 campaign? Kamala Harris supported public schools and welcomed the support of the two big teachers’ unions, but she did not offer a flashy new program to raise test scores. Trump campaigned on a promise to privatize public funding, promote vouchers, charter schools, religious schools, home schooling–anything but public schools, which he regularly attacked as dens of iniquity, indoctrination, and DEI.
Goldstein is the best education writer at The Times, and her reflections are worth considering.
She started:
What happened to learning as a national priority?
For decades, both Republicans and Democrats strove to be seen as champions of student achievement. Politicians believed pushing for stronger reading and math skills wasn’t just a responsibility, it was potentially a winning electoral strategy.
At the moment, though, it seems as though neither party, nor even a single major political figure, is vying to claim that mantle.
President Trump has been fixated in his second term on imposing ideological obedience on schools.
On the campaign trail, he vowed to “liberate our children from the Marxist lunatics and perverts who have infested our educational system.”Since taking office, he has pursued this goal with startling energy — assaulting higher education while adopting a strategy of neglect toward the federal government’s traditional role in primary and secondary schools. He has canceled federal exams that measure student progress, and ended efforts to share knowledge with schools about which teaching strategies lead to the best results. A spokeswoman for the administration said that low test scores justify cuts in federal spending. “What we are doing right now with education is clearly not working,” she said.
Mr. Trump has begun a bevy of investigations into how schools handle race and transgender issues, and has demanded that the curriculum be “patriotic” — a priority he does not have the power to enact, since curriculum is set by states and school districts.
Actually, federal law explicitly forbids any federal official from attempting to influence the curriculum or textbooks in schools.
Of course, Trump never worries about the limits imposed by laws. He does what he wants and leaves the courts to decide whether he went too far.
Goldstein continued:
Democrats, for their part, often find themselves standing up for a status quo that seems to satisfy no one. Governors and congressional leaders are defending the Department of Education as Mr. Trump has threatened to abolish it. Liberal groups are suing to block funding cuts. When Kamala Harris was running for president last year, she spoke about student loan forgiveness and resisting right-wing book bans. But none of that amounts to an agenda on learning, either.
All of this is true despite the fact that reading scores are the lowest they have been in decades, after a pandemic that devastated children by shuttering their schools and sending them deeper and deeper into the realm of screens and social media. And it is no wonder Americans are increasingly cynical about higher education. Forty percent of students who start college do not graduate, often leaving with debt and few concrete skills.
“Right now, there are no education goals for the country,” said Arne Duncan, who served as President Barack Obama’s first secretary of education after running Chicago’s public school system. “There are no metrics to measure goals, there are no strategies to achieve those goals and there is no public transparency.”
I have been writing about federal education policy for almost fifty years. There are things we have learned since Congress passed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in 1965. That law was part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s agenda. Its purpose was to send federal funds to the schools enrolling the poorest students. Its purpose was not to raise test scores but to provide greater equity of resources.
Over time, the federal government took on an assertive role in defending the rights of students to an education: students with disabilities; students who did not speak English; and students attending illegally segregated schools.
In 1983, a commission appointed by President Reagan’s Secretary of Education Terrell Bell declared that American schools were in crisis because of low academic standards. Many states began implementing state tests and raising standards for promotion and graduation.
President George H.W. Bush convened a meeting of the nation’s governors, and they endorsed an ambitious set of “national goals” for the year 2000. E.g., the U.S. will be first in the world by the year 2000; all children will start school ready to learn by 2000. None of the goals–other than the rise of the high school graduation rate to 90%–was met.
The Clinton administration endorsed the national goals and passed legislation (“Goals 2000”) to encourages states to create their own standards and tests. President Clinton made clear, however, that he hoped for national standards and tests.
President George W. Bush came to office with a far-reaching, unprecedented plan called “No Child Left Behind” to reform education by a heavy emphasis on annual testing of reading and math. He claimed that because of his test-based policy, there had been a “Texas Miracle,” which could be replicated on a national scale. NCLB set unreachable goals, saying that every school would have 100% of their students reach proficiency by the year 2014. And if they were not on track to meet that impossible goals, the schools would face increasingly harsh punishments.
In no nation in the world have 100% of all students ever reached proficiency.
Scores rose, as did test-prep. Many untested subjects lost time in the curriculum or disappeared. Reading and math were tested every year from grades 3-8, as the law prescribed. What didn’t matter were science, history, civics, the arts, even recess.
Some schools were sanctioned or even closed for falling behind. Schools were dominated by the all-important reading and math tests. Some districts cheated. Some superintendents were jailed.
In 2001, there were scholars who warned that the “Texas Miracle” was a hoax. Congress didn’t listen. In time the nation learned that there was no Texas Miracle, never had been. But Congress clung to NCLB because they had no other ideas.
When Obama took office in 2009, educators hoped for relief from the annual testing mandates but they were soon disappointed. Obama chose Arne Duncan, who had led the Chicago schools but had never been a teacher. Duncan worked with consultants from the Gates and Broad Foundations and created a national competition for the states called Race to the Top. Duncan had a pot of $5 billion that Congress had given him for education reform.
Race to the Top offered big rewards to states that applied and won. To be eligible, states had to authorize the creation of charter schools (almost every state did); they had to agree to adopt common national standards (that meant the Common Core standards, funded wholly by the Gates Foundation and not yet completed); sign up for one of two federally funded standardized tests (PARCC or Smarter Balanced) ; and agree to evaluate their teachers by the test scores of their students. Eighteen states won huge rewards. There were other conditions but these were the most consequential.
Tennessee won $500 million. It is hard to see what, if anything, is better in Tennessee because of that audacious prize. The state put $100 million into an “Achievement School District,” which gathered the state’s lowest performing schools into a new district and turned them into charters. Chris Barbic, leader of the YES Prep charter chain in Houston was hired to run it. He pledged that within five years, the lowest-performing schools in the state would rank among the top 20% in the state. None of them did. The ASD was ultimately closed down.
Duncan had a great fondness for charter schools because they were the latest thing in Chicago; while superintendent, he had launched a program he called Renaissance 2010, in which he pledged to close 80 public schools and open 100 charter schools. Duncan viewed charters as miraculous. Ultimately Chicago’s charter sector produced numerous scandals but no miracles.
I have written a lot about Race to the Top over the years. It was layered on top of Bush’s NCLB, but it was even more punitive. It targeted teachers and blamed them if students got low scores. Its requirement that states evaluate teachers by student test scores was a dismal failure. The American Statistical Association warned against it from the outset, pointing out that students’ home life affected test scores more than their teachers.
Race to the Top failed. The proliferation of charter schools, aided by a hefty federal subsidy, drained students and resources from public schools. Charter schools close their doors at a rapid pace: 26% are gone in their first five years; 39% in their first ten years. In addition, due to lax accountability, charters have demonstrated egregious examples of waste, fraud, and abuse.
The Common Core was supposed to lift test scores and reduce achievement gaps, but it did neither. Conservative commentator Mike Petrilli referred to 2007-2017 as “the lost decade.” Scores stagnated and achievement gaps barely budged.
So what have we learned?
This is what I have learned: politicians are not good at telling educators how to teach. The Department of Education (which barely exists as of now) is not made up of educators. It was not in a position to lead school reform. Nor is the Secretary of Education. Nor is the President. Would you want the State legislature or Congress telling surgeons how to do their job?
The most important thing that the national government can do is to ensure that schools have the funding they need to pay their staff, reduce class sizes, and update their facilities.
The federal government should have a robust program of data collection, so we have accurate information about students, teachers, and schools.
The federal government should not replicate its past failures.
What Congress can do very effectively is to ensure that the nation’s schools have the resources they need; that children have access to nutrition and medical care; and that pregnant women get prenatal care so that their babies are born healthy.
Former entertainment entrepreneur Linda McMahon is now U.S. Secretary of Education. She released her first statement, reiterating Trump’s attacks on “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” as well as “gender ideology” (I.e. recognizing the existence of ONLY the male-female binary and not recognizing those who are LGBT, such as Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent, who is openly gay).
McMahon’s views are closely aligned with those of Moms for Liberty. Check out the website of the America First Policy Forum, where McMahon was chair of the board.
This statement was released by the department’s press office.
When I took the oath of office as Secretary of Education, I accepted responsibility for overseeing the U.S. Department of Education and those who work here. But more importantly, I took responsibility for supporting over 100 million American children and college students who are counting on their education to create opportunity and prepare them for a rewarding career.
I want to do right by both.
As you are all aware, President Trump nominated me to take the lead on one of his most momentous campaign promises to families. My vision is aligned with the President’s: to send education back to the states and empower all parents to choose an excellent education for their children. As a mother and grandmother, I know there is nobody more qualified than a parent to make educational decisions for their children. I also started my career studying to be a teacher, and as a Connecticut Board of Education member and college trustee, I have long held that teaching is the most noble of professions. As a businesswoman, I know the power of education to prepare workers for fulfilling careers.
American education can be the greatest in the world. It ought not to be corrupted by political ideologies, special interests, and unjust discrimination. Parents, teachers, and students alike deserve better.
After President Trump’s inauguration last month, he steadily signed a slate of executive orders to keep his promises: combatting critical race theory, DEI, gender ideology, discrimination in admissions, promoting school choice for every child, and restoring patriotic education and civics. He has also been focused on eliminating waste, red tape, and harmful programs in the federal government. The Department of Education’s role in this new era of accountability is to restore the rightful role of state oversight in education and to end the overreach from Washington.
This restoration will profoundly impact staff, budgets, and agency operations here at the Department. In coming months, we will partner with Congress and other federal agencies to determine the best path forward to fulfill the expectations of the President and the American people. We will eliminate unnecessary bureaucracy so that our colleges, K-12 schools, students, and teachers can innovate and thrive.
This review of our programs is long overdue. The Department of Education is not working as intended. Since its establishment in 1980, taxpayers have entrusted the department with over $1 trillion, yet student outcomes have consistently languished. Millions of young Americans are trapped in failing schools, subjected to radical anti-American ideology, or saddled with college debt for a degree that has not provided a meaningful return on their investment. Teachers are leaving the profession in droves after just a few years—and citing red tape as one of their primary reasons.
The reality of our education system is stark, and the American people have elected President Trump to make significant changes in Washington. Our job is to respect the will of the American people and the President they elected, who has tasked us with accomplishing the elimination of bureaucratic bloat here at the Department of Education—a momentous final mission—quickly and responsibly.
As I’ve learned many times throughout my career, disruption leads to innovation and gets results. We must start thinking about our final mission at the department as an overhaul—a last chance to restore the culture of liberty and excellence that made American education great. Changing the status quo can be daunting. But every staff member of this Department should be enthusiastic about any change that will benefit students.
True change does not happen overnight—especially the historic overhaul of a federal agency. Over the coming months, as we work hard to carry out the President’s directives, we will focus on a positive vision for what American education can be.
These are our convictions:
Parents are the primary decision makers in their children’s education.
Taxpayer-funded education should refocus on meaningful learning in math, reading, science, and history—not divisive DEI programs and gender ideology.
Postsecondary education should be a path to a well-paying career aligned with workforce needs.
Removing red tape and bureaucratic barriers will empower parents to make the best educational choices for their children. An effective transfer of educational oversight to the states will mean more autonomy for local communities. Teachers, too, will benefit from less micromanagement in the classroom—enabling them to get back to basics.
I hope each of you will embrace this vision going forward and use these convictions as a guide for conscientious and pragmatic action. The elimination of bureaucracy should free us, not limit us, in our pursuit of these goals. I want to invite all employees to join us in this historic final mission on behalf of all students, with the same dedication and excellence that you have brought to your careers as public servants.
This is our opportunity to perform one final, unforgettable public service to future generations of students. I hope you will join me in ensuring that when our final mission is complete, we will all be able to say that we left American education freer, stronger, and with more hope for the future.
This article appeared in The New York Review of Books. As daily newspapers have shrunk or abandoned their book reviewing, the NYRB stands out as the nation’s leading journal of literature, the arts, and politics. It takes books seriously. This is an essay-review about the history of vouchers. I reviewed Josh Cowen’s outstanding book The Privateers, about the cabal that engineered the expansion of vouchers. I hope you will consider subscribing to the New York Review of Books and reading Josh Cowen’s important book.
For decades, the term “school choice”—and the programs it signifies, which divert public money to private schools—was widely and rightly dismissed as racist. Now it’s the law in thirty-three states.
Minnijean Brown, Thelma Mothershed, and Melba Pattillo, three of the first Black students to attend Little Rock Central High School, with Arkansas NAACP president Daisy Bates (third from left), 1957
Donald Trump promised that he will make public funds available to private as well as religious schools in every state, and this is what his party wants, too. Over the past quarter-century, Republicans have assailed America’s public schools by supporting vouchers, which divert money from public education systems to subsidize tuition at private and religious schools.
But most voters today do not favor vouchers. In fact, since 1967 no state referendum on vouchers has ever passed. In 2024 three states had referenda on the ballot, and vouchers were again defeated. Voters in two of those three states, Kentucky and Nebraska, cast ballots overwhelmingly for Trump—and in both states public funding for private schools was decisively rejected. The story of how Republican politicians have twisted this widespread popular opposition to vouchers into pervasive education policy across the country is one that requires a deeper historical view.
This opposition to public funding for private schools changed on May 17, 1954, when the Supreme Court ruled, in the Brown v. Board of Education decision, that de jure racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. The Court’s decision had little to do with school funding, but it set off a frantic search among white elected officials in the South to find, or create, a legal mechanism through which to protect racial segregation. The overwhelming majority of southern whites considered the prospect of racial integration repugnant, and their elected officials were determined to block it.
Until the mid-1950s most Americans believed that the government should not underwrite the cost of private and religious schooling. Catholic organizations had periodically sought public subsidies for their schools on grounds of fairness; as taxpayers, they said their schools were entitled to receive the same funds as public schools. But they were repeatedly rebuffed by Congress, the courts, and state legislatures; most state constitutions explicitly prohibited the use of public funds for religious school tuition.
Southern governors and legislators found the rationale and language they sought in the writings of Milton Friedman, a prominent libertarian economist at the University of Chicago, who in 1955 published an essay called “The Role of Government in Education.” The paper argued in favor of parents’ rights to choose any school they wanted, as well as educational freedom, the right for a child not to attend a neighborhood school—music to the ears of segregationists. Friedman said that the government should finance schools but should not be expected to administer them. He recommended that government distribute money—in the form of what he called vouchers—to parents for each of their school-age children, and that parents should be free to spend this allotment at any institution, whether its operations were for-profit or nonprofit, religious or secular, so long as the school met certain minimum educational standards defined by the local government.
If Black parents wanted their children to attend a segregated Black school, Friedman said, or if white parents wanted their children to attend a segregated white school, or if parents wanted their children to attend an integrated school—all should be equally free to do so. Competitive private enterprise and parental choice, he asserted, would promote a “healthy variety of schools” while making teachers’ salaries “responsive to market forces.” He predicted that private schools would “spring up to meet the demand.”
Southern governors used Friedman’s rhetoric and arguments to fight the implementation of the Brown decision. They adopted his endorsement of “freedom of choice” as well as his belief that private schools would provide a better education than “government schools”; indeed, advocates of vouchers began to refer to “public schools” as “government schools,” a term of derision that continues to appear in our ongoing debates about “school choice” today. As the historian Nancy MacLean demonstrated in “How Milton Friedman Exploited White Supremacy to Privatize Education,” a 2021 paper posted by the Institute for New Economic Thinking, Friedman taught southern leaders that the best way to protect Jim Crow schools was to use “race-neutral arguments” and to “embrace both an anti-government stance and a positive rubric of liberty, competition, and market choice.” As a result, seven states—Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia—enacted laws to subsidize the private school tuition of families fleeing the prospect of desegregated public schools.
In the following decades, existing private schools for white students expanded, and new private schools opened—“white flight academies” or “segregation academies”—to enroll students whose parents opposed racial integration. Often the enrollment of a single Black student in a previously all-white public school was enough to spur an exodus of white families. This happened in New Orleans in 1960 when six-year-old Ruby Bridges enrolled at the William Frantz Elementary School. She had to be escorted into the school each day by federal marshals, on the direct orders of the federal judge J. Skelly Wright. Each day Ruby withstood the screaming of angry white parents at the schoolhouse doors. And Ruby was the only child in her classroom; only a handful of white students remained in the school.
As late as 1965, less than 3 percent of Black children in the South attended schools with white children. Until then southern states engaged in a strategy of “massive resistance” to school integration, blocking the implementation of the Brown decision by providing “tuition tax credits” (a form of vouchers) so that white students could go to all-white private schools, by intimidating Black students so that they would not apply to attend white public schools, or by closing public schools altogether.
Virginia was at the forefront of this “massive resistance.” In 1959 its general assembly repealed the compulsory school attendance law and allowed localities to close their public schools. Prince Edward County was ordered by two courts to integrate its schools but chose instead to shutter its entire public school system. Officials provided tuition grants (vouchers) for white students to attend all-white private schools but made no such arrangements for Black children. Some Black families organized makeshift schools, but for five years there were no public schools for Black students in Prince Edward County. It wasn’t until 1968 that the Supreme Court outlawed Virginia’s tuition grants to private all-white schools.
After the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in 1965, which made federal funding available to public schools, the federal government had the legal and financial tools to end resistance to integration. Federal courts across the South struck down laws authorizing public funding for vouchers and private schools, as well as any other state laws intended to block racial desegregation. The US Office of Education informed school districts across the South that they would not receive federal funding unless they desegregated promptly. Because of this well-known history, the term “school choice” was so closely associated with resistance to the Brown decision that it was widely and rightly dismissed as racist. It fell into disrepute for decades.
Now, seventy years after Brown, vouchers have not only been rehabilitated, since the 1990s they have been enacted in various forms in thirty-three states and the District of Columbia. Some of these programs are euphemistically called “education scholarships” or “tuition tax credits” or “education savings accounts,” but the fundamental principle is the same in all of them: public money pays for private school, even—in fact, most often—for religious schools. Republican-controlled legislatures in states such as Florida and Arizona enacted voucher programs that started small (in 1999 and 2011, respectively), intending to “save poor kids trapped in failing public schools” or supposedly only for children with disabilities. Over time these programs expanded, increasing the number of eligible students. Now both states have removed all limits, and every student, regardless of family income, is eligible for a tuition subsidy, at a cost to taxpayers that is expected to rise to $1 billion a year in Arizona and $4 billion in Florida.
Josh Cowen, a professor of education policy at Michigan State University, explains this remarkable turnaround of voucher policy in his superb book The Privateers: How Billiionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers. Cowen has researched vouchers for most of his career. He worked with teams of academics who received millions of dollars in federal and philanthropic funds to study the results of voucher programs in different cities and states. Like many of his fellow researchers, he hoped that vouchers would provide better education for low-income students. But three years ago he published an article in The Hechinger Report, a nonpartisan education journal, in which he bluntly declared that vouchers were a failure.
Cowen explained that his initial enthusiasm for vouchers cooled as the evaluations were released. He participated in a study of Milwaukee’s vouchers from 2005 to 2010 that concluded that “there was very little difference on test scores” between students in public schools and carefully matched students in voucher schools. Furthermore, when low-income and Black students left voucher schools and returned to public schools, their academic performance in reading and math improved. At the same time that the Milwaukee study ended, a new report showed “shockingly bad early test score results for students in the Louisiana voucher program in the years following Hurricane Katrina.” Those poor results persisted and were replicated by studies in Ohio and Indiana.
The Privateers tells the story of how and why public policy on funding private and religious schools changed. As the consistent failure of state referenda shows, vouchers were never a popular idea; it was the politicians’ dependence on big campaign donors that made school choice a staple of Republican rhetoric. The widespread adoption of vouchers, Cowen explains, was basically a policy coup staged by billionaires who were libertarians or religious zealots or both. Cowen explains
how a small band of interconnected and insular groups of conservative advocates, tightly networked to some of the wealthiest and most influential players in right-wing US politics, invented a rationale for school privatization largely from nothing and out of nowhere.
He describes the agenda of that “network of scholars, lawyers, donors, and activists” as religious nationalism.
The main organizations in this movement to break down the wall of separation between church and state were two right-wing philanthropies, the John M. Olin Foundation and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, which funded both the Harvard professor of government Paul Peterson and the libertarian lawyer Clint Bolick. The Bradley Foundation, based in Milwaukee, supported the creation of the nation’s first publicly funded voucher program in that city in 1990 and played a crucial part in funding the three pillars of the voucher movement: research, policy advocacy, and litigation. Peterson became the point person for voucher research and advocacy; he also mentored a cohort of graduate students at Harvard who became the nation’s most prominent evaluators of voucher projects.
Bolick, who ran the libertarian Institute for Justice (funded by the billionaire Koch brothers), oversaw litigation and appeared on behalf of the Milwaukee and Cleveland voucher programs in state and federal courts. When more money was needed for research or litigation, members of a secretive right-wing group called the Council for National Policy were available to help; the CNPincluded the Koch brothers and the DeVos family, who used their fortune from the multilevel marketing company Amway to fund conservative candidates and think tanks and deployed their philanthropy to advance public funding of religious schools. Reviewing the players and their strategy, Cowen concludes that “there is nothing in education policymaking today that comes close to the conservative political apparatus accessed by and…even driving, at times, the creation of evidence on behalf of school vouchers.”
In 1990 the political scientists John Chubb and Terry Moe published Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools, in which they asserted that school choice would heal American education; the book was funded by the Olin and Bradley Foundations. Many seemed to have forgotten the racist origins of school choice. Chubb and Moe argued that small-d democratic politics was a handicap for public schools because it kept them in the grip of vested interests, like teachers’ unions and associations of school superintendents. The result of this stasis, they claimed, was poor academic performance. They maintained that “reformers would do well to entertain the notion that choice is a panacea.” School choice “all by itself,” they claimed, could transform American education. The book was a sensation in the education world because it offered a simple solution to complex problems and, of course, gave ideological and scholarly weight to the growing movement for charter schools and vouchers.
That same year, the Milwaukee voucher program started at the behest of the local Black leaders Howard Fuller, a militant social worker who became Milwaukee’s school superintendent, and Polly Williams, a state legislator. Fuller and Williams were disappointed by the academic performance of Black students in public schools. The Bradley Foundation, which was eager to see a demonstration of the success of vouchers in its hometown, quickly provided funding. The Milwaukee Parental Choice Program began as a project that enrolled 341 low-income students in seven private schools. By 1994 it had increased to 830 students in twelve schools.
The legislation authorizing the voucher program required that the students take a state test and that the results be evaluated by an independent researcher. The state superintendent, who opposed vouchers, appointed John Witte, a professor from the University of Wisconsin, to conduct the evaluation. When Witte eventually concluded that the program had minimal impact on students’ academic outcomes or attendance and that voucher recipients returned to public schools at high rates, voucher advocates denounced him as biased. Cowen says that Witte was fair and that his study was accurate.
The loudest voice deploring the negative evaluation of the Milwaukee voucher program was that of Peterson, who wrote a letter to TheNew York Times eviscerating the Witte study for minimizing the academic gains of the students and the importance of parental satisfaction. Cowen points out that Peterson was a political scientist with minimal experience in statistical evaluation. Peterson worked with his then graduate student Jay P. Greene on a study, funded by the Bradley and Olin Foundations, of the Milwaukee program. They concluded that, contrary to the state evaluation, vouchers produced significant academic benefits. The voucher system produced these positive results, they wrote, despite legislative burdens such as income limitations and the exclusion of religious schools.
Peterson and Greene’s favorable review persuaded the Republican-controlled Wisconsin legislature to renew and expand the voucher program in 1995 by including religious schools and increasing the number of participants to 15,000. The inclusion of religious schools led to a court battle that voucher advocates eventually won, litigated by Bolick and the high-powered lawyer Kenneth Starr, who later became famous for his part in the investigation of President Bill Clinton. The Bradley Foundation underwrote his firm’s fee of $300,000 for one month of work, Cowen writes.
Meanwhile the voucher push shifted to Ohio, where the Republican governor wanted Cleveland to be a model for the nation. The program was designed for low-income students, but—unlike in Milwaukee—it did not exclude religious schools; nearly all of the fifty-two participating schools were Catholic. The official evaluator, the Indiana University professor Kim Metcalf, found “few overall differences in student achievement,” but once again Peterson and Greene dismissed the official evaluation and produced their own report—this time funded by the Walton Family Foundation in addition to the Olin Foundation—which showed “large gains” for voucher students. Cowen notes that Peterson’s work was typically reported in newspaper editorials (usually the pro-voucher Wall Street Journal), not in peer-reviewed scholarly journals.
Cowen points out that Peterson’s research findings were more clearly directed toward the Supreme Court than toward other scholars: he filed an affidavit on behalf of the Cleveland program in the crucial 2002 case Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, which concerned the legality of public funding of religious schools. The Court decided 5–4 in favor of including religious schools in the voucher program—a significant reversal of numerous decisions upholding the separation of church and state. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor cited Peterson and Greene’s work in her concurring opinion.
Since that Supreme Court decision, vouchers have been sold to the public as a way to “save poor kids from failing schools.” School choice has been described as “the civil rights issue of our time” by Betsy DeVos, Ted Cruz, and Donald Trump. Republican elected officials adopted school choice as party dogma, and state after state enacted laws authorizing vouchers, despite a distinct lack of public support. Voters in Utah rejected vouchers in 2007, voters in Florida rejected vouchers in 2012, and voters in Arizona rejected vouchers in 2018, but the Republican leaders in all three states ignored the referenda and continued to expand voucher programs. Republican legislatures and state courts have also ignored explicit provisions in state constitutions that forbid the public funding of religious schools, claiming that the voucher goes to the parents, not to the religious schools where they pay for tuition. Where there’s a will, partisans find a way.
Voucher advocates continually promised academic gains, especially for the poorest students, but after 2010, as the voucher programs grew in scale, the academic results turned sharply negative. Cowen realized that poor kids were actually harmed by using them. Low-income students did not use vouchers to enroll in elite private schools, which mostly did not accept these students—either because they were behind academically or because the voucher was worth far less than the school’s tuition—but to enroll in religious schools whose teachers were uncertified or in pop-up private schools created to capture the government money. When the outcomes were disappointing, the right-wing foundations and Republican officials promoting vouchers moved the goalposts: test scores didn’t matter, they said, but graduation rates and parental satisfaction did. When the test scores and the graduation rates were surpassed by local public schools, the pro-voucher foundations, elected officials, and researchers shifted to a different rationale, one that was “always the underlying goal,” Cowen argues: to satisfy the “values” of parents. Just as segregationists in the 1950s invoked “the right of parents” to avoid integration, voucher advocates in the twenty-first century believe that parents “have the express right to use public dollars to self-segregate.”And these advocates claim that parents have the right to receive taxpayer support for their children to attend religious schools; denying them that “right,” they argue, infringes on religious freedom.
Cowen describes how he came to this understanding. From 2013 to 2016 two teams of researchers—one from MIT and another from the Walton-funded Department of Educational Reform at the University of Arkansas—reached the same dire conclusions about vouchers in Louisiana: they “caused unprecedented large, negative impacts on student achievement.” The Louisiana voucher students were mostly Black and low-income. They entered voucher schools at the fiftieth percentile in math; after a year in private school, they dropped to the twenty-sixth percentile. They improved in the second year but remained behind their peers in public schools. This was solid evidence from two separate groups of researchers “that voucher interventions actually caused damage” to the poor students they were supposed to help. Voucher advocates insisted that the experiment needed more time and that it was overregulated by the state.
The bad results kept rolling in: from Indiana, where independent evaluators documented negative outcomes in 2015; from Ohio in 2016, in a study funded by a conservative think tank; and from Washington, D.C., where evaluators found poor results in 2017 and 2018. Cowen concludes that
no explanation then or now has fully explained the learning loss displayed in locations so different as Louisiana, Indiana, Washington, and Ohio as does the simplest one: that for all of Milton Friedman’s purported brilliance, and for all the millions of dollars pumped into the effort by Betsy DeVos, Charles Koch, and the Bradley Foundation, the idea simply did not work. The bigger and more recent the voucher program is, the worse the results have been.
Republican-led states simply ignored the evidence that low-income students who used vouchers fell behind their peers in public schools, and they continued to enact the policies, thanks to large contributions from right-wing billionaires to the campaigns of like-minded state officials. Furthermore, several of the Republican-dominated states removed income restrictions and other limitations, thus abandoning the rhetoric of “saving poor kids from failing schools.” A dozen states currently have “universal” voucher programs, meaning that any family may apply for a voucher, without regard to their income. Tennessee enacted universal vouchers only weeks ago. Other states are likely to follow their lead.
Cowen reports that, with or without income restrictions, the majority of applicants to voucher programs were not trying to leave public schools; they were already attending private schools. This is the case in every state with vouchers. Right now between 65 and 80 percent of students who claim vouchers are using them to pay the tuition of private schools where they were already enrolled. Vouchers are also used in many states to pay the expenses of parents who teach their children at home. In Arizona, according to reports in The Arizona Republic and ProPublica, parents have used their “education savings accounts” to buy trampolines, swing sets, expensive Lego sets, horseback riding lessons, kayaks, trips to Disney World, chicken coops, skiing trips, cowboy roping lessons, and ice-skating lessons. Republican governor Doug Ducey led the campaign to make public funds available to all students in the state. His successor, Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, predicted in 2023 that the state’s voucher program could cost nearly $1 billion, with over 53 percent of all new funding paying for 8 percent of Arizona’s students.
Just as troubling to Cowen as the academic results of the voucher project is the publicly funded discrimination that these schools make possible. Right-wing rage in response to the pandemic enabled the eruption of the so-called culture wars over masking, vaccines, and teaching about race and sexuality in schools, as well as the presence of these topics in library books. In 2022 Christopher Rufo, the right-wing provocateur who first raised an alarm about “critical race theory” in public schools (few public school teachers had ever heard of the term; it refers to a course usually taught in law schools, if at all), called on conservatives in a speech at Hillsdale College to promote universal distrust in public schools in order to arrive at “universal school choice.” This distrust was fueled by right-wing groups, which made wild accusations about teachers allegedly “grooming” their students to be gay or Marxist, and about the curriculum allegedly turning students against their own country.
Vouchers appeal to those who want to escape lessons about racism, diversity, or gender equality. Religious and private schools that receive publicly funded vouchers are not bound by civil rights laws, and many openly bar the admission of LGBTQ+ students and the hiring of LGBTQ+ staff. Some bar students with disabilities. Some religious schools accept only students who are members of their own religion.
Trump issued an executive order on January 29 titled “Expanding Educational Freedom and Opportunities for Families,” which called for the diversion of federal funds to underwrite tuition at private and religious schools. He claimed that “rigorous research demonstrates that well-designed education-freedom programs improve student achievement and cause nearby public schools to improve their performance,” which according to Josh Cowen’s book The Privateers is not true. Trump issued the order on the same day as the release of the latest national test scores by the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Florida, which has a robust voucher program, experienced a sharp decline in its scores, the state’s lowest in twenty years on this test.
Cowen considers the manipulation of culture-war issues like race and gender to be a feature of vouchers, not a bug. Groups like Moms for Liberty and Parents Defending Freedom use the clarion call of “parents’ rights” to condemn the discussion of race and LGBTQ+ issues, as well as access to books about these subjects, in public schools. Such groups want to censor what is taught to all children, even those whose parents disagree with them and want their children to learn about race, gender, and sexuality. Imagine teachers in a segregated Black school being told by the state that they cannot teach accurate Black history. Why should those parents have no rights?
Cowen writes that the learning loss of poor children who used vouchers was larger than the learning loss caused by the pandemic, and at this point the evidence against their efficacy is overwhelming. Yet more states adopted vouchers in 2022 and 2023 than in any previous legislative sessions. Texas is the only large Republican-controlled state that has not enacted legislation to implement them, owing to the combined opposition of parent groups, Democrats, religious leaders who believe in the separation of church and state, and rural Republicans defending their district’s only public school. Yet Governor Greg Abbott has said that vouchers are his highest priority. He received millions of dollars from billionaires to defeat many of the rural Republicans who opposed vouchers. The issue will soon come to a vote in the legislature.
The reality is that when states offer charter schools and vouchers, public schools lose. Each time students leave for private alternatives, public schools must reduce their teaching staff, increase class sizes, and cut back on curricular offerings. States cannot afford to pay for three different school systems. Is the goal to eliminate public schools? That argument seems inherent to some who share Friedman-style thinking.
What does Cowen recommend?
Fund public schools. It really is that simple…. The more money we spend on schools, the better off children are, not simply academically, but in later-life outcomes like higher wages and fewer encounters with the criminal justice system.
Wealthy parents spend amply to educate their children—to make sure that they have certified teachers, small classes, a well-supplied library, and a curriculum that includes the arts and sciences as well as physical education and time for play. And, of course, wealthy children never go without food or medical care. We should give the same to all children.
Bear in mind that highly segregated private schools are subsidized by taxpayers in states that have enacted universal vouchers. The politicians today are fulfilling the fever dreams of segregationist governors in the South in the 1950s.
ProPublica reports:
Private schools in the United States are, on the whole, whiter than public schools, with fewer Black, Hispanic or Latino students. This may not be a surprising statistic because private schools can often be expensive and exclusionary, but it’s not a simple one to pin down. There is no central list of private schools in the country, and the only demographic data about them comes from a little-known voluntary survey administered by the federal government.
While reporting our project on Segregation Academies in the South last year, we relied on that survey to find private schools founded during desegregation and analyzed their demographics compared to local public school districts. Our analysis of that survey revealed, among other things, Amite County, Mississippi, where about 900 children attend the local public schools — which, as of 2021, were 16% white. By comparison, the two private schools in the county, with more than 600 children, were 96% white.
In the course of our reporting, we realized that this data and analysis were illuminating and useful — even outside the South. We decided to create a database to allow anyone to look up a school and view years worth of data.
Today, we are releasing the Private School Demographics database. This is the first time anyone has taken past surveys and made them this easy to explore. Moreover, we’ve matched these schools to the surrounding public school districts, enabling parents, researchers and journalists to directly compare the makeup of private schools to local public systems.
Until now, much of this data was difficult to analyze: While the National Center for Education Statistics, which collects the data, provides a tool to view the most recent year of Private School Universe Survey data, there was no easy way to examine historical trends without wrangling large, unwieldy text files.
As debates over school choice, vouchers and privatization of education intensify, making this repository of private school data accessible is more important than ever. The information is self-reported, but we have attempted to flag or correct some obvious inaccuracies wherever possible.
For schools, you can filter results by state, religious affiliation, school type and enrollment range. For some schools, you can also filter by founding year. By default, we only show results for schools that have responded to the survey at least once in the last few years, but you can turn off this filter to also include older data in your search results.
For public school districts, users can filter by state and sort results to see where the most students are attending private schools, as well as the gap between the district’s largest racial group and the school’s share of those same students. Because private schools can draw students from different districts, comparing their racial composition to a single district’s public schools is imperfect. Still, these comparisons can offer valuable insights into broader patterns of segregation and access.
Before the inauguration of Trump, The New York Review of Books invited me to write about his education agenda. I read three important documents in which his views and goal were spelled out: the education chapter in Project 2025; Agenda 47, Trump’s campaign document; and the website of the America First Policy Institute, the organization led by Linda McMahon, Trump’s choice for Secretary of Education. The three documents overlap, of course. Trump intends to privatize education; he despises public schools. He wants to eliminate the Department of Education. He and his supporters are obsessed with “radical gender ideology,” and they blame public schools for the very existence of transgender students. The election of Trump, it was clear, would mean the end of civil rights protections for LGBT students and a determined effort to defund and destroy public schools.
The NYRB invited me to participate in an interview.
This article is part of a regular series of conversations with the Review’s contributors; read past entries here and sign up for our e-mail newsletter to get them delivered to your inbox each week.
In “‘Their Kind of Indoctrination,’” published on the NYR Online shortly before Donald Trump’s second inauguration, Diane Ravitch writes about the troubling future of American public education. Referring to the president’s infamous remark from his first campaign—“I love the poorly educated”—Ravitch warns that his second term is likely to lead to “more of them to love.”
A historian of education, Ravitch worked on education policy in both George H. W. Bush’s and Bill Clinton’s administrations. She has spent her career analyzing the national and state policies that reshape public schools, like laws that implement high-stakes testing or that divert taxpayer money to charter schools. In addition to writing nearly two dozen books—including The Troubled Crusade: American Education, 1945–1980 (1983), Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools (2013), and, most recently, Slaying Goliath: The Passionate Resistance to Privatization and the Fight to Save America’s Public Schools (2020)—Ravitch posts regularly about American education policy on her widely read blog. Her memoirs will be published later this year by Columbia University Press.
I reached out to Ravitch to discuss the current state of American education, the forces threatening it, and her vision for how public schools can better fulfill their democratic promise.
Regina Martinez:How did you start writing about education? Were you influenced by your time in public schools in the South?
Diane Ravitch: I started writing about education when I was in college. The first paper I ever wrote was for a political science class in my freshman year at Wellesley in 1956. It was about the politics of the Houston public school system in the early 1950s, when I was a student there. Voters elected a new school board every two years, and control went back and forth between a group of far-right extremists, who saw Communists lurking everywhere, and moderates who just wanted to make sure that the schools were running well. At one point, books about Russia were removed from the high school library’s shelves. Under the moderates, we heard assembly speakers who spoke of racial and religious tolerance; under the Minute Women, the female wing of the John Birch Society, we were warned to beware of Communist influence. Also, while I was attending them, the schools were racially segregated.
In “Their Kind of Indoctrination,” you write, “One can only imagine the opprobrium that will be visited upon teachers who are not certified as patriots.” How do you imagine this will impact the teaching profession? What might it mean for teacher recruitment in the future?
The threat of political surveillance is chilling, as it would be in every profession. In many states, especially “red” states, teachers have to be careful about what they teach, what reading they assign, and how they handle topics related to race and gender. Trump recently issued an executive order stating that he would cut off the funding of schools that “indoctrinate” their students by teaching about “radical gender ideology” and racism. His effort to impose thought control is illegal but that hasn’t stopped him from trying.
This sort of political censorship is happening in K–12 schools but also in higher education. The number of people choosing to prepare to be teachers plummeted in the wake of the Bush-Obama emphasis on standardized testing. The threat of political loyalty screening can only make matters worse.
One of President Trump’s recent executive orders reauthorized federal agents to detain children at schools. What actions if any can schools, families, and students take to resist the incursion of the security state into schools?
The determination of the Trump administration to raid schools is terrifying for children and for their teachers, whose job it is to protect their students. Imagine a child being arrested in his or her classroom. It is indeed frightening. Many districts have urged teachers to get legal advice from the district legal officers. At the very least, educators should demand to see a warrant. If ICE agents are armed, resistance may be futile. Elected leaders will have to develop contingency plans, if they have not done so already.
You worked on education policy under both President George H. W. Bush and President Bill Clinton. What, if anything, was different about your work between a Republican and a Democratic administration? How do you think the Department of Education—and federal education policy more generally—has changed since the early 1990s?
I served as assistant secretary for education research and improvement under President Bush. Then President Clinton appointed me to the national testing board, known as the National Assessment Governing Board. There was a continuity of policy from the first President Bush to Clinton, and then from Clinton to the second President Bush to President Obama.
The first President Bush wanted to reform American education through voluntary measures. He convened a meeting of the nation’s governors in 1989, and they agreed on a set of six goals for the year 2000. He thought that the goals could be reached by exhortation, at no cost. The goals were indeed aspirational (they hoped, for example, that American students would be first in the world in mathematics and science by the year 2000), but no one had a plan for how to reach them, nor was there any new funding. President Clinton got credit for drafting them, so he and Bush shared that commitment. He was willing to spend real money to help states improve their schools, and added two more goals (one about teacher training, another about parent participation). He also believed that the nation should have national standards and tests. None of the goals was reached by the year 2000, except for having 90 percent of students graduate from high school. But that goal was a matter of definition. If it meant that 90 percent should graduate high school in four years, we did not meet that goal. If you counted the students who graduated in five or even six years, we surpassed it.
Since you launched your education blog in 2012, it has become a popular forum for discussions about education and democracy. Looking back, are there any positions you’ve shared on the blog that you would reconsider or approach differently today? Are there positions you took or predictions you made that you’re particularly proud of?
I started blogging two years after publication of The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Have Undermined Education. In that book, I renounced views that I had advocated for decades: competition between schools, relying on standardized testing as the measure of students, merit pay, and many other policies connected to accountability and standardization.
What I have learned in the past fifteen years has made me even more alarmed than I was then about the organized efforts to destroy public education. That book has a chapter about “The Billionaire Boys Club.” I focused on the venture philanthropy of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation. These billionaires used their philanthropy strategically to fund privately managed charter schools, high-stakes standardized testing, and a system that evaluates teachers by the test scores of their students and closes schools where students got low scores. I opposed all of these measures, which were endorsed by both the second Bush administration and the Obama administration. I demonstrated in that book and subsequent books that these strategies have been failures and are enormously demoralizing to teachers. They also turned schools into testing factories, crushing creative thinking and the joy of teaching and learning.
In the years since, I have learned that “the Billionaire Boys Club” is far larger than the three families that I mentioned. In my last book, Slaying Goliath, I tried to make a list of all the billionaires and the foundations that support charter schools and vouchers, and it was long indeed. Even now, I continue to come across billionaires and foundations that should be added to the list. What I suspected was that charter schools paved the way for vouchers by treating schooling as a consumer good, not a civic responsibility. What I did not realize was that the voucher movement is even more powerful than the charter movement. Its constituency is not just right-wing billionaires like the Koch brothers and the DeVos family, but Christian nationalists, white supremacists, extremist organizations like the Alliance Defending Freedom and the American Legislative Executive Council, affluent parents who want the state to subsidize their private school tuition, and Catholic leaders who have always believed that the state should underwrite Catholic schools.
There has been a lot of discourse recently about declining rates of literacy due to AI, the pandemic, phones, or a host of other causes. How significant do you think this risk is? What might be done to reverse the trend?
I too am concerned about declining rates of literacy, as well as declining interest in literature. In my field of study, I believe that standardized testing has been a culprit in shortening the attention span of children of all ages. Students are expected to read short snippets, then to answer questions about those limited passages. In the early decades of the twentieth century, the College Board sponsored college entrance examinations in which students were assigned works of literature in advance, then asked to write about what they had read. Teachers and professors read their essays and graded them. Now the exam answers may be read by a machine or by a person hired off Craigslist to read swiftly, giving only a minute or two to each written answer.
In my dreams, I would change expectations and ask high school teachers to assign books that are worth reading, then require students to write three or four pages about why they did or did not like the book.
While I welcome the expansion of the canon to include works by women and by people of color, I would also welcome a revival of interest in the great works that were once considered the classics of Western literature. In too many high schools, the classics have not just been marginalized, they have been ousted. That is as grave an error as ignoring the works of those who are not white men.
Given the increasing momentum behind the privatization of education, how do you envision the next generation advancing public school advocacy? What do you anticipate will be their greatest challenge?
Public schools are one of the most important democratic institutions of our society. In many states, they enroll 90 percent of all students. They have always enabled children and adolescents to learn together with others who come from backgrounds different from their own. There is a major movement today, funded by right-wing billionaires, to destroy public schools and to replace them with religious schools, private schools, and homeschooling. It is called “school choice,” but the schools choose, not the students or families. Private schools are allowed to discriminate on any grounds and are not bound by federal laws that prohibit discrimination and that protect those with disabilities. Racial and religious segregation will increase. More students will attend schools whose purpose is indoctrination, not building a democratic society.
The greatest challenge facing those who believe in the value of public education is that the money behind privatization is enormous, and it is spent strategically to win political allies. To my knowledge, there is no billionaire funder for public education as there are for privatization. In the world of public education advocacy, there are no equivalents to the Koch money, the DeVos money, the Walton money, the Texas evangelical billionaires Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks, the Pennsylvania billionaire Jeff Yass. I have been president of an organization called the Network for Public Education since 2013, and our annual budget is a pittance compared to the privatizers’ organizations. One pro–school choice organization spent as much on their annual dinner party as our entire annual budget.
The other side of this struggle to save public education is the reality that important Democrats still believe that school choice helps poor Black and Hispanic kids, despite overwhelming evidence that this claim is not true and is in fact part of the hustle. Representative Hakeem Jeffries, Senator Cory Booker, Governor Jared Polis, and Senator Michael Bennett are a few of the Democrats who have dampened the interest of their party in fighting for public schools.
What makes me hopeful is that the reality is becoming clearer with every passing day: those who are concerned for the common good must support public schools, not undertake to pay the tuition of every student who chooses not to attend public schools. Privatization benefits some, not all, not even most. Public money should pay for public schools. Private money should pay for private schools.
Annie Martin and Leslie Postal of the Orlando Sentinel have repeatedly exposed the fraud baked into Florida’s voucher program. It began in 1999 with the modest ambition of offering choice to low-income students in “failing schools.” It expanded to provide vouchers for students with disabilities. In past articles, they surveyed voucher schools and identified academic deficiencies, such as uncertified teachers and principals, and Bible-based textbooks. Now, they report on what happened after the state removed all income limits in 2023. Florida now offers money for all students, regardless of family income.
Most of the students getting the voucher money are not low-income, do not have disabilities, and are not escaping bad public schools.
The students getting vouchers are already enrolled in private schools. They don’t need the extra money but they are happy to take it.
They write:
A block from Winter Park’s tony Park Avenue sits St. Margaret Mary Catholic School, where tuition can top $14,000 a year for a K-8 education.
But at this school in the heart of one of Central Florida’s wealthiest communities, about 98 percent of students used taxpayer-funded scholarships worth roughly $8,000 to help pay tuition last year.
Only three percent of St. Margaret Mary’s students got that state financial aid just one year earlier.
The change – repeated at schools around the state – is one powerful measure of how a 2023 Florida law has supercharged a school voucher initiative that was already the nation’s largest.
Once reserved for low-income students and those with disabilities, state scholarships, often called vouchers, are now available to all – and they’re fueling an unprecedented pipeline of public money, estimated at $3.4 billion this year, into private, mostly religious schools across the Sunshine State.
All that money is doing more than just expanding Florida’s voucher program. The new rules are transforming it.
Since their emergence as a conservative educational talking point four decades ago, vouchers have been pitched as a way to provide “school choice” – the opportunity for families who couldn’t otherwise afford private education to escape a substandard neighborhood public school.
But when lawmakers dropped the income limits on Florida’s programs, the key element of the 2023 law, the system became something else:
Choice for lower-income families plus a wide-open taxpayer subsidy for the better off. More than 122,000 new students started using vouchers for the first time in the 2023-24 school year, and nearly 70 percent were already in private school, many in some of Florida’s priciest institutions, according to data from Step Up For Students, the nonprofit that administers most of the state’s scholarships. About 40 percent came from families too wealthy to have qualified previously.
So in many cases the new law did not expand these new families’ options. Instead, it provided state subsidies for the choices they had previously made and were able to afford on their own.
The implications of that shift are vast, an Orlando Sentinel analysis has found.
• Voucher use has jumped by 67% since the new law was approved. • Individual private schools are seeing even bigger surges, creating new reliance on taxpayer funding. The Sentinel found nearly 250 schools where the number of students using vouchers jumped by at least 100 children in the first year after the law changed. At St. Margaret Mary, the growth pushed total annual voucher funding from $65,000 to $3.5 million – in just one example of the multi-million dollar windfalls. • A significant amount of the money is flowing to Florida’s most expensive private schools, many of which served few voucher students in the past: Campuses that advertise annual tuition of $15,000 or more added more than 30,000 voucher students last year. • The proportion of private school students with state scholarships has topped 70% this school year. Ten years ago it was less than a third. • More Florida students use vouchers — a total of 352,860 — to attend private campuses than are enrolled in public schools in Osceola, Orange and Seminole counties combined.
Program critics say Florida is now spending an inordinate amount of its education resources on the wrong people – rather than focusing on system improvements that would be good for all students.
“This is just a subsidy for wealthier people — people who already have the advantage,” said state Rep. Kelly Skidmore, a Democrat from Boca Raton who voted against the expansion.
Skidmore is among those who fear the impact of the voucher explosion on public schools – which are losing money as students shift to private education – and the implications of handing millions in taxpayer dollars to private schools over which the state has little control.
These schools are free, as the Sentinel has reported previously, to hire teachers without college degrees, teach history and science lessons outside mainstream academics and discriminate against LGBTQ students and staff. They do not face the same accountability requirements as their public counterparts, whose students’ test scores and graduation rates are publicly reported. Without such numbers for private schools, it’s difficult to assess the impact of Florida’s voucher program on the quality of education students receive.
Nevertheless, the voucher push shows no signs of abating, with more than 10% of all K-12 students in Florida now receiving the subsidy.
On Jan. 10, Gov. Ron DeSantis celebrated Florida’s “choice revolution” at Trinity Christian Academy in Jacksonville, which now enrolls more than 1,200 voucher students.
“The debate about school choice I think is over. Clearly you’re better offering choice than not offering choice,” DeSantis said.
An Orlando mother of four sent them to The First Academy, affiliated with First Baptist Church of Orlando, where high school tuition is more than $24,000 a year. Nearly 90% of the students use vouchers now, up from about 20% two years ago. She paid the full cost for her two oldest, who graduated, and can afford to pay for her two youngest, but is delighted to take the state subsidy.
Florida is spending $3.4 billion annually to subsidize the state’s most affluent families.
Is it surprising that Florida’s NAEP scores fell to their lowest point in 20 years? The state is not investing in its public schools, which enroll the overwhelming majority of its students.
The U.S. Supreme Court announced yesterday that it will rule on whether Oklahoma taxpayers should pay for a religious charter school. The Court has been inching closer to shattering the wall of separation beteeen church and state. Its 6-3 rightwing majority seems to be eager to find a case where they can rule that states that refuse to pay tuition at religious schools are denying freedom of religion.
Is this the case?
If the Court does decide that Oklahoma must pay tuition for students at religious schools, the majority will have to stop claiming that they are Originalists, bound by the original intent of those who wrote the Constitution. It has never been the policy of any state to pay tuition at any religious school. The Supreme Court has issued a long line of decisions that rule against taxpayer responsibility for religious school tuition.
The effects of such a ruling would be to reduce funding for public schools, which enroll 85-90 percent of all students, to promote racial and religious segregation, and to endorse discrimination since religious and private schools are exempt from federal laws requiring the admission of students without regard to race, religion, gender, or disability.
The Supreme Court agreed on Friday to consider a high-profile case that could open the door to allowing public dollars to directly fund religious schools.
The widely watched case out of Oklahoma could transform the line between church and state in education, and it will come before a court whose conservative majority has broadly embraced the role of religion in public life.
The case centers on a proposal for the nation’s first religious charter school, St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School. The school would be online, and its curriculum would embed religious teachings throughout lessons, including in math and reading classes.
As a charter school, it would be run independently from traditional public schools. But public taxpayer dollars would pay for the school, and it would be free for students to attend.
The question of whether the government can fully finance a religious school has proved especially divisive within the school choice movement and across Oklahoma. Some conservative Christian leaders, including Gov. Kevin Stitt and Ryan Walters, the firebrand state superintendent who has sought to require teaching from the Bible in public schools, have backed St. Isidore’s creation.
They urged the Supreme Court to take up the case, believing the conservative-leaning court would decide in the school’s favor.
A coalition of religious leaders, advocates of public schools and some other state Republicans say the proposal is unconstitutional. Oklahoma’s Republican attorney general, Gentner Drummond, argued it would “open the floodgates and force taxpayers to fund all manner of religious indoctrination, including radical Islam or even the Church of Satan.”
After St. Isidore was approved by a state board in June 2023 in a narrow 3-to-2 vote, the Oklahoma Supreme Court blocked its creation. The justices wrote in a majority opinion that the school would “create a slippery slope” that could lead to “the destruction of Oklahomans’ freedom to practice religion without fear of governmental intervention.”
Still, as more Republican state legislatures move to support school vouchers and other options for parents to use public money to educate their children in private schools, including religious schools, some legal experts believe that charter schools would become another major arena in the debate.
Justin Driver, a professor at Yale Law School, said that a Supreme Court decision that allows religious charter schools “would represent nothing less than a sea change in constitutional law.”
“It is difficult to overstate the significance of this opinion for our constitutional order and the larger American society,” Mr. Driver said.
The case will present new education questions for the U.S. Supreme Court’s 6-to-3 conservative majority, which has shown an openness to religion in the public sphere. Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a member of the conservative bloc, recused herself from the case but did not explain why.
In a 2022 ruling, the court ruled that a high school football coach had the right to pray on the field after his team’s games.
Other recent cases have barred Maine and Montana from excluding religious schools from state tuition programs or scholarships to students in private schools. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote in both cases that states are not required to support religious education, but that those that opt to subsidize private schools cannot discriminate against religious ones.
Supporters of St. Isidore argue that blocking a religious charter school from receiving funding violates the First Amendment’s protection of religious freedom. Jim Campbell, the chief legal counsel for Alliance Defending Freedom, a legal group representing the Oklahoma state charter board, praised the court’s decision to hear the case.
“Oklahoma parents and children are better off with more educational choices, not fewer,” Mr. Campbell said in a statement. “There’s great irony in state officials who claim to be in favor of religious liberty discriminating against St. Isidore because of its Catholic beliefs.”
The school was initially set to open in August and would be managed by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Oklahoma City and the Diocese of Tulsa. Leaders of the school say it would accept students of all faiths.
But opponents say that it would run into conflict with the constitutional prohibition on government establishment of religion, infringing on religious freedom. “Converting public schools into Sunday schools would be a dangerous sea change for our democracy,” several organizations, including Americans United for Separation of Church and State, said in a joint statement on Friday.
For decades, the hybrid nature of charter schools — sharing features of both public schools and private institutions — has made it difficult for courts to determine how different education issues should apply to them, according to Preston Green, a professor at the University of Connecticut who studies educational law.
Still, Mr. Green said he believes St. Isidore’s argument “could be very attractive” to the conservative justices — and that if the court ultimately sides with the charter school, “the implications are potentially huge.”
In the movement to remove barriers to funding religious education, “charter schools are really the next frontier,” Mr. Green said. “And it doesn’t end here.”
Trump selected Linda McMahon to be the next Secretary of Education. She is well known for making it rich in the world of wrestling entertainment, in partnership with her husband. Less well known is her role as Chair of the board of the America First Policy Institute (AFPI). Trump is close to AFPI, which promotes school choice and the “parental rights” movement, which promotes censorship of books and curriculum about racism and LGBT topics. They oppose any teaching that might make students “uncomfortable,” like learning about the history of racism, or that might teach students that LGBT exist.
The Nation published an article by Christopher Lewis and Jacob Plaza. The article tells the story of the think tank McMahon leads. It was launched after Trump’s loss in 2020 and its policy agenda defines Trump’s plans. To understand what Trump intends to do, learn more about AFPI.
Lewis and Plaza write:
Amid the incoming Trump administration’s flurry of unqualified, corrupt, and/or vengeance-driven cabinet nominees, it’s been easy to overlook Linda McMahon, Trump’s pick to head the US Department of Education. McMahon is best known for her role in running World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) with her husband the longtime Trump crony Vince McMahon. Linda McMahon’s background in education is exceedingly thin; she served on the Connecticut Board of Education more than a decade ago, thanks to an appointment from another politically connected friend, then–Connecticut Governor Jodi Rell. McMahon has a teaching certificate but has never actually taught. Indeed, she was forced to resign her spot on the Connecticut board when the Hartford Courant reported that she’d lied on her résumé about having an education degree. Add in the alleged role of the WWE and its parent company in a sexual-abuse scandal involving “ring boys” for the wrestling league, and McMahon’s nomination, in any sanely administered political order, would be dead in the water. (McMahon and her husband both deny the abuse allegations in the pending WWE suit.)
Yet McMahon possesses one key credential for the next Trump administration—in addition, that is, to a proven track record to personal fealty to the president-elect, and a long string of Fox News appearances: She’s the former head of the America First Policy Institute (AFPI), the policy nerve center for MAGA governance. For all the attention focused on the Heritage Foundation and its Project 2025 policy agenda, AFPI has been Trumpworld’s principal policy network, serving as a haven for former Trump appointees during the Biden years. AFPI hands assembled a detailed blueprint for Trump’s return to power, including plans to make the Trump tax cuts permanent and purge the federal workforce of civil service workers deemed insufficiently MAGA. In addition to McMahon, Trump has tapped several senior AFPI figures for cabinet posts, including EPA nominee Lee Zeldin, Agriculture nominee Brooke Rollins (the think tank’s president and CEO), and its Georgia chapter chair, Doug Collins, Trump’s pick to head the Department of Veteran’s Affair
As education secretary, McMahon would be charged with administering a uniquely destructive suite of policies, even by the usual standards of Trump governance. That’s because the Department of Education has been a bête noire of the American right ever since Jimmy Carter founded the agency in 1979. By creating a layer of federal oversight over locally run schools, the DOE has, in the overheated imaginings of right-wing policy mavens, arrogated deep-state sovereignty over the rights of parents to preside over the best educational options and life chances for their children. And as the Education Department has sought to clarify and standardize anti-discrimination policy for LGBTQ+ students, it’s become a pet target for anti-trans culture warriors on the right.
McMahon probably won’t heed the growing chorus of conservative calls to abolish the DOE outright, but she can be counted on to aggressively pursue other key MAGA objectives in education policy. In line with her work at AFPI, McMahon will likely continue to promote the use of privately backed charter schools to defund public education—the most fundamental plank of right-wing education policy. In addition, she’ll probably resume her predecessor Betty DeVos’s campaign to deny basic Title IX protections to LGBTQ+ students. And it’s a safe bet that she’ll also re-up plans to promote Trump’s 1776 commission—MAGA’s agitprop answer to the 1619 Project, promoting a “patriotic” national curriculum to downplay and discourage honest discussion of America’s racial history in the schools.
Following the lead of billionaire right-wing donors, AFPI enthusiastically champions the charter-schools movement, while seeking to undermine the government’s role in providing quality public education. McMahon’s think tank has erected a whole policy infrastructure to promote charter schools, including direct public subsidies to them, the creation of education saving accounts (ESAs) for parents to enroll kids in charters, and proposals to weaken teachers’ unions in conjunction with the rise of open-shop charters. This agenda does more than harness the long-standing animus to government-backed education on the right—it advances the creation of a parallel education system for right-wing partisans. In this regard, as well as in its aggressive model of privatized education funding, the AFPI plan recalls the original role that neoliberal economics played in supporting the new ad hoc network of “segregation academies” launched in the American South after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling to desegregate the nation’s schools. The same basic dictum holds for today’s American right as it did then: If you can’t segregate with law, segregate with economics.
AFPI claims that charter school students have higher scores on standardized tests. In reality, the findings here follow what holds for better-funded public schools: namely, that well-funded charter schools tend to produce better test scores, while less well-off charters fare a bit worse, with some regional variations. Students in the competitive DC charter school system’s Opportunity Scholarships program, often cited as the gold standard by charter school advocates, actually performed worse on reading tests than those who did not attend the program.
School choice and voucher programs are a drain on the public’s coffers. For hard-right ideologues like the advisers at AFPI, that’s the whole point. Privatized education is part of the broader right-wing campaign to block the public sector’s ability to finance anything, especially if it would further racial equality. The National Education Association notes that voucher programs redirect scarce public funds toward unaccountable private school programs, and found zero evidence that these programs—which increase school segregation—improve students’ performance. In some cases, there are negative impacts.
What’s more, private management naturally leads to a focus on profit, financial self-sustainability, and expansion—mandates that typically lead to steep budget cuts in the schools, even if students suffer. According to the Network for Public Education, for-profit management companies run nearly one in seven charter schools.
AFPI has also endorsed federal legislation to create national education savings accounts. Like charter schools, ESAs seek to redirect public resources to market-driven gimmicks under the broad rubric of consumer choice. When parents open an ESA, they withdraw their children from the school district and receive a deposit of public funds in a savings account authorized by the government. Parents are then allowed to spend from that account on a range of educational expenses, including tutoring, therapy, or school supplies.
ESA plans create an obvious bind by forcing parents to navigate the education industry all on their own. The ESA scheme affords no safeguards for students whose parents made poor spending choices with the funds in their account. A report in Forbes recounted the story of a family using up its entire account before paying for a single English or math class. And like the broader charter model it upholds, the savings-account system reinforces, rather than weakens, the core inequalities of the US education system; it ensures that wealthier parents will be able to afford to send their children to the best schools.
For a bracing illustration of how charter and for-profit education schemes pillage publicly funded schools, consider Chicago’s experience. In 2013, the city closed 48 public schools to cover widening budget shortfalls. And Chicago’s public schools were going broke in no small part due to the rapid expansion of a parallel charter systemcaptained by ardent school privatizers. Since the insurgent charter schools operated outside traditional governance and accountability, they accumulated millions in debt while draining desperately needed funding away from public schools. Ultimately, 17,000 students were displaced, and Chicago was left with a more unequal and racially segmented school system than it had at the outset of the city’s charter-school fiasco.
It is my review of Trump’s plans for K-12 education.
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