Josh Cowen is the voucher lobby’s worst nightmare. He was a participant in voucher research from its beginnings. He knows the research as well as anyone in the country. He knows that vouchers have failed. And unlike many others in this tight-knit world, he declined to climb aboard the gravy train funded by billionaires. He determined to tell the truth: vouchers hurt kids.
In this article, as in many others that he has written, he explains that there is no upside to vouchers. They subsidize kids already in private school. They harm the kids who leave public schools. They defund the public schools that the vast majority of children attend.
He begins:
What if I told you there is a policy idea in education that, when implemented to its full extent, caused some of the largest academic drops ever measured in the research record?
What if I told you that 40 percent of schools funded under that policy closed their doors afterward, and that kids in those schools fled them at about a rate of 20 percent per year?
What if I told you that some the largest financial backers of that idea also put their money behind election denial and voter suppression—groups still claiming Donald Trump won the 2020 election. Would you believe what those groups told you about their ideas for improving schools?
What if I told you that idea exists, that it’s called school vouchers, and despite all of the evidence against it the idea persists and is even expanding?
And that’s only the beginning.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
When students leave their abysmal voucher school and return to the public school, “conservatives like to say that’s the market correcting itself.”
Where is the proof that the market is the best place for education? We have been forced to adopt this erroneous assumption for the past two decades without any evidence that it is true. Education should be about addressing the needs of students. The goal of a market is to extract profit through competition. Any plan that involves politicking and dark money is based on manipulation, not the so-called market. Capitalism is based on the profit motive, and it has done a poor job in any type of human service. This includes nursing homes, adolescent detention centers and privatized prisons. Even our rationed, privatized health care system, where we spend twice as much as other countries for no better results, leaves a lot to be desired. Overall, privatization results in more expensive services with worse results for the client, unless someone has the means to purchase even more service. When capitalism is applied to human services, the human cost is too great because companies make money when they cut costs. Then, people are harmed or die.
Public education was never intended to be part of a market. It is a community based service that serves academic, civil and social interests.
It is a public good, paid for by the public. It is not a personal good. Public education should be in the hands of professional educators, not politicians and profiteers.
Brilliantly said!
Reblogged this on Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé and commented:
What if I told you there was a plot to destroy public education in the United States and throw the country back to 1900? Find out who is funding this plot to destroy our country.