Josh Cowen is a Professor if Educatuon Policy at Michigan State University who spent nearly two decades involved in studying the effects of vouchers. In this post, published here for the first time, he responds to a school choice advocate, Chad Aldeman, who recently made his case for his views.

Josh Cowen writes:

Can’t we all just get along?

That’s the question underlying a new column by education reform specialist Chad Aldeman.

Although he avoids saying so directly, he’s talking about the latest rush to expand school vouchers in state legislatures during the current lawmaking cycle. It’s mostly happening in red states, and supporters have broader names including the all-encompassing “school choice,” which Aldeman uses, to the more jingoist “education freedom.”

It’s worth reading and considering. I’ve done so in part because, as Peter Greene has pointed out, Aldeman is among the more serious thinkers on education reform issues and because he hints at questions I get myself a lot from journalists covering reform: what would it take to get me to support voucher programs today?

Aldeman lays out what he calls the “progressive vision” for these programs. And by merging vouchers in that vision with charters and inter-district choice, he makes it difficult to distinguish meaningful differences between each in both origin, intent, and policy result.

But if you read my own stuff, most recently in Time Magazine,you know I’m concerned above all right now with vouchers—much as I have other critiques too, such as the increased Christian Nationalism of the charter school movement that Carol Burris and others have recently noted.

The focus of Aldeman’s vision is the idea that a.) public schools aren’t so strong on academic outcomes, or in their history of discrimination and that b.) it’s possible to acknowledge that while backing reasonable restraints on voucher-like programs to prohibit discrimination with public funds and to safeguard educational quality.

There are two overarching blindspots in that vision. Active discrimination against children is fundamental to the voucher movement. Today it’s LGBTQ children, but 60 years ago it was against Black children as vouchers popped up in places like Texas to avoid desegregation orders. Now, tens of millions of dollars already go to private schools that exclude gay families. And a recent report from Wisconsin carefully details how voucher schools work the system to avoid what anti-discrimination rules do exist, not just for LGBTQ kids but students with disabilities too. In short: they admit all students (as Aldeman recommends) but then expel them, because legal protections are much stronger on the front end than the back end.

Most current legislation protects schools’ right to maintain their “creed” (do a word search on whatever state code you want, you’re likely to find it). That’s an all-encompassing word that allows schools to hide behind religious beliefs when it comes to excluding certain kids. Removing that word, as Aldeman’scolumn rightly implies would have to be done for an equitable voucher system, is politically impossible.

And that gets to the second blindspot in Aldeman’s vision. The education freedom movement, with school vouchers at its core, has been a Right-wing political operation for 30 years. It’s more than Betsy DeVos. It’s Charles Koch. It’s the Bradley Foundation, which has funded nearly every academic study to find positive school voucher effects, funds groups like the Heritage Foundation’s education arm, and helped fund election denial in the post-2020 months.

Kenneth Starr, of Clinton/Lewinsky fame, was actually the lead counsel defending vouchers in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, the original Supreme Court case that ruled vouchers constitutional way back in 2002. Vouchers are that ingrained in Republican Party politics—both the old guard establishment that Starr came from, and the MAGA wing today that’s carrying on the legacy.

Aldeman’s case would have progressives simply ignore the political realities of the voucher movement. In essence, in the spirit of compromise, we’re to ignore decades of efforts to divert tax dollars toward unregulated markets, fundamentalist religious organizations, and anti-labor movements in the interest of moving education policy forward.

(The last point itself ignores substantial evidence that vouchers fail on academic terms in the first place).

But so-called “educational freedom” is too existential a question. Not for nothing, but this latest push comes on the heels of the Supreme Court’s removal of reproductive freedom among our constitutional protections. In my state, the same political operatives fighting to pass school vouchers in 2022 were also fighting to keep reproductive rights off the ballot. That’s not an accident.

On the voucher-backing Bradley Foundation’s board of directors is a lawyer named Cleta Mitchell. Mitchell was on the phone with Donald Trump during his infamous Georgia phone call, and all over the January 6th report. More recently she suggested that young citizens should lose the vote, and has been active in other voter suppression efforts. Speaking of January 6th, a vice president at Hillsdale College—the same Hillsdale so active in education freedom and Christian Nationalism more broadly—was partly behind the Michigan chapter of the fake electors scheme. Again: not an accident.

So when Aldeman suggests that progressives are being a bit overdramatic by worrying about threats to democracy, he’s either ignoring this evidence or he’s asking us to engage in a thought experiment that pretends that evidence doesn’t exist.

Here’s my own thought experiment: in a world in which none of us is perfect, and all of us are wrong some of the time, how would you rather be wrong?

For my part, I’d rather be too worried about LGBTQ exclusion, too worried about the loss of reproductive freedom, too worried about the ties between voucher backers and voter suppression. If I’m wrong, the worst that would happen is a few extra people already in private school would have to keep paying for it on their own.

But if the danger is real, then the erosion of civil liberties, of human rights, and—yes—democracy will have happened not just because of MAGA Republicans or Charles Koch or Betsy DeVos. It’ll happen because the progressive vision, as Alderman calls it, was either blinded or simply asleep at its post.