The State Commissioner of Education, in New Hampshire, Frank Edelblut, home-schooled his 7 children. He doesn’t like public schools. He’s a big supporter of “backpack funding,” where students can use public funds for anything of an educational sort. At his urging, the legislature adopted a voucher plan.
But a lawsuit was recently filed claiming that the funding of the voucher plan violates the state constitution by drawing down money intended for public schools.
CONCORD — The new Education Freedom Account program violates state statutes by using funds earmarked for public education for private programs, according to a lawsuit filed Thursday against Education Commissioner Frank Edelblut.
The suit challenging the funding for what has been described as the most expansive voucher program in the country, claims money raised by the Lottery Commission, and money from the Education Trust Fund may only be used for adequate education grants to school districts, citing the law creating the fund in 1999.
The suit seeks an injunction blocking the state from using any more of the Trust Fund Money to fund the EFA program.
“If the state desires to operate an Education Freedom Account or similar program, whereby it grants public money for parents to utilize for private use, it must separately fund it through additional taxation or another source of funds,” the suit claims, noting there currently is no mechanism for doing so.
The New Hampshire Constitution states “all moneys received from a state-run lottery and all interest received on such moneys shall, after deducting the necessary costs of administration, be appropriated and used exclusively for the school districts of the state,” according to the suit, which also notes the money “shall not be transferred or diverted to any other purpose.”
The law only allows the money to be used to distribute adequate education grants to school districts and approved charter schools, the suit claims.
The complaint, brought by Deb Howes as a citizen taxpayer, who is also president of AFT (American Federation of Teachers)-New Hampshire, was filed in Merrimack County Superior Court.
The complaint also claims the state is delegating its duty to to provide an adequate education to a private entity, The Children’s Scholarship Fund, which runs the EFA program without any “meaningful oversight” by the state.
“The state specifically earmarked this money for public education. Instead, the state is stealing from public school students in plain sight to pay for its private voucher program,” Howes said. “Public school students are losing out on millions of dollars that are needed to fix leaky old buildings, purchase and maintain modern computer equipment, buy books and materials published at least in the last decade to support student learning, and provide more social and emotional assistance and other needs that will help students excel.”
“If Commissioner Edelblut wants to continue with his cherished voucher program, he needs to figure out a legal way to fund it,” she said, “but definitely not on the backs of public school students.”
The controversial EFA program was approved as part of the two-year budget package in 2021 after it stalled in the House, but the Senate resurrected it and put it in the budget.
Since it began, it has cost much more than Edelblut told lawmakers to expect, which was essentially $3.4 million over the biennium, but has cost $23 million over that period.
Sold as a program to help students find different educational environments in order to thrive, instead about 75 percent of the participants attended private and religious schools prior to the program’s launch last year, meaning less than 25 percent of the participants were in public schools the year before the program began.
Parents can use EFA grants for tuition and fees for private schools and private online learning programs, private tutoring services, textbooks, computer hardware and software, school uniforms, fees for testing, summer programs, therapies, higher education tuition and fees and transportation.
So the program is more expensive than expected, and 75% of the students it serves were already enrolled in nonpublic schools.
The single biggest beneficiary of the program thus far has been Amazon, presumably for books and hardware.
Josh Cowen has demonstrated repeatedly that vouchers are a very bad public investment. The students who use vouchers fall behind their peers in public schools. He has cited the research behind his conclusions. He maintains that facts and evidence matter. But many state officials don’t know the facts or just want to assuage the people who want the state to subsidize their private school tuition.
One elected official who should look at the facts and the evidence is Josh Shapiro, who was recently elected to be governor of Pennsylvania. During his campaign, he expressed support for a voucher program because it would provide “opportunity” for some students.
Josh Cowen says the evidence is clear: Vouchers do not help students. They hurt.
He wrote:
Josh Shapiro — like Katie Hobbs in Arizona and Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan — is part of a class of Democratic candidates who this month won the key to the governor’s office for the next four years.
As a professor of education policy, I was struck by how public schools became a prominent issue in each of their campaigns, especially the debate over school vouchers — the use of tax dollars to fund tuition for private schools.
Unlike Hobbs and Whitmer, however, Shapiro has expressed some cautious support for vouchers — including (at least in principle) the “Lifeline Scholarship” bills that have already been introduced by the current legislature.
And since it appears that a Democratic majority in the Pennsylvania House is razor-thin, and Republicans will keep the Senate, Shapiro may be pressured or even encouraged by some to move forward with that support.
The governor-elect has defended his position by saying, “It’s what I believe,” and that vouchers provide students with additional avenues to “help them achieve success.”
Unfortunately, the data show exactly the opposite.
I used to be a cautious supporter, too. But I’ve been studying school vouchers for 17 years now, and I can say, without reservation, that study after study show that vouchers hurt academic achievement for children. That is especially true of the low-income students who would be eligible under the currently proposed plans in Pennsylvania to which Shapiro gave qualified support.
How bad are vouchers? Think about what the COVID-19 pandemic did to standardized test scores.
How bad are vouchers for students? Think about what the COVID-19 pandemic did to standardized test scores. Independent studies of voucher programs in Washington, D.C., Indiana, Louisiana, and Ohio have all shown catastrophic impacts on student achievement, with few-to-no offsetting gains on other measures such as educational attainment.
Some of the worst results have been found in Ohio, where voucher impacts on student learning were roughly twice the impact of the pandemic on academic outcomes.
Here’s another problem: Vouchers mostly just provide tax breaks to families whose kids are already in private school. In places such as Arizona, New Hampshire, and Wisconsin, we know that more than 75% of voucher applicants were in private schools anyway by the time they applied for state funding. Even those in low-income families.
As a practical matter, that could be fixed in Pennsylvania by tying voucher eligibility to time in public school first, as well as capping the fiscal loss public districts faced when students transferred to private schools — as one current proposal has done. But that’s a short-term strategy.
Over the long term, vouchers simply represent new budgetary obligations for Pennsylvania taxpayers. The governor-elect has said he doesn’t view vouchers and support for public schools as a choice — that these positions are not a mutually exclusive “either/or.”
That’s a false hope. As the experience in other states shows, there is no way that long-term commitments to funding public schools can be reconciled with commitments to underwriting vouchers.
And unlike the devastating impacts that vouchers have on kids, we know that major investments in public schools have sustained and positive effects on learning and nonacademic outcomes, such as reductions in crime.
Side by side, the evidence says investments in public schools pay off, while investments in vouchers push kids further behind.
Perhaps the only remaining argument for vouchers is simply faith-based: that tax dollars should support religious education, even if the evidence says those programs harm academics. The U.S. Supreme Court essentially did just that this summer with its ruling in Carson v. Makin, which found that voucher programs could not exclude religious schools. That ruling was in line with the court’s long-held position that vouchers can exist constitutionally.
But just because we can doesn’t mean we should.
Looking from outside the state at the Pennsylvania gubernatorial campaign, it was refreshing to hear someone like Josh Shapiro stand up for something he says he believes in — even if it rankles some supporters.
But at some point belief has to give way to facts. And the facts from across the country say vouchers are more of an anchor than a lifeline for kids.
Thom Hartmann is a journalist and blogger who hits the nail on the head with this post. I would add one suggestion to his post, under the heading of “what can I do?” Run for your local school board. Don’t let wacky rightwing extremists buy it.
Former Tea Party congressman and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo recently put a bulls-eye on the back of the president of the 1.7 million-member American Federation of Teachers.
“I tell the story often — I get asked ‘Who’s the most dangerous person in the world? Is it Chairman Kim, is it Xi Jinping?’” Pompeo told Semafor’s Shelby Talcott.
“The most dangerous person in the world is Randi Weingarten. It’s not a close call. If you ask, ‘Who’s the most likely to take this republic down?’ It would be the teacher’s unions, and the filth that they’re teaching our kids…”
I’ve known, respected, and admired Randi for years and she’s been a frequent guest on my program: her number one interest is providing the highest quality education to as many American children as possible. Full stop.
So why would Pompeo, pursuing the 2024 Republican nomination for president, risk triggering an American domestic terrorist to train his sites on her? Why would an educated man have such antipathy toward public school teachers?
Public schools are on the GOP’s hit list, just as they were in Chile during the Pinochet regime, and for the same reasons:
— Fascism flourishes when people are ignorant.
— Private for-profit schools are an efficient way to transfer billions from tax revenues into the coffers of “education entrepreneurs” who then recycle that money into Republican political campaigns (just like they’ve done with private for-profit prisons).
— Private schools are most likely to be segregated by race and class, which appeals to the bigoted base of the Republican party.
— While public school boards are our most basic and vigorous form of democracy, private schools are generally unaccountable to the public.
— Most public school teachers are unionized, and the GOP hates unions.
— Whitewashing America’s racial and genocidal history while ignoring the struggles of women and queer folk further empowers straight white male supremacy.
Umberto Eco, who had a ringside seat to the rise of Mussolini, noted in his “14 indicators of fascism” that dumbing down the populace by lowering educational standards was critical to producing a compliant populace.
“All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks,” he wrote, “made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.”
Ironically, this very use of public schools to promote a political agenda was the foundation David Koch cited when, in 1980, he attacked American public schools during his run for Vice President on the Libertarian Party ticket.
“We condemn compulsory education laws … and we call for the immediate repeal of such laws,” proclaimed his platform. “We advocate the complete separation of education and State. Government schools lead to the indoctrination of children and interfere with the free choice of individuals. Government ownership, operation, regulation, and subsidy of schools and colleges should be ended.”
It was a stark contrast from the founders of our nation, who well understood the importance of universal quality public education. The first law mandating public schools paid for with taxpayer dollars was passed in Massachusetts in 1647: to this day, that state is notable for its historic emphasis on education.
As Thomas Jefferson, who founded America’s first tuition-free public college (the University of Virginia), noted in a letter to Colonel Charles Yancey on January 6, 1816:
“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”
The American president who immediately preceded him, our second, John Adams, also weighed in on the importance of public education in a letter to his old friend John Jebb when, in 1785, Adams was serving in London as America’s first Minister to Great Britain.
He’d seen the consequences of poverty and illiteracy in both the US and England and was horrified:
“The social science will never be much improved, until the people unanimously know and consider themselves as the fountain of power, and until they shall know how to manage it wisely and honestly. Reformation must begin with the body of the people, which can be done only, to effect, in their educations.
“The whole people must take upon themselves the education of the whole people, and must be willing to bear the expenses of it. There should not be a district of one mile square, without a school in it, not founded by a charitable individual, but maintained at the expense of the people themselves.”
But the United States spends almost a trillion dollars a year on primary school education, an expense category just below healthcare and even more than the Pentagon budget: there are massive profits to be made if privatized entities can skim even a few percent off the top.
Those profits, in turn, can be used — with the Supreme Court’s blessing — to legally bribe elected officials to further gut public schools and transfer even more of our tax dollars to private schools and their stockholders.
This pursuit of America’s education dollars is nothing new. The first American president to put an anti-public-schools crusader in charge of the Education Department was Ronald Reagan.
At the time, our public schools were the envy of the world and had recently raised up a generation of scientists and innovators that brought us everything from the transistor to putting men on the moon.
Reagan’s Education Secretary Bill Bennett is probably most famous for having claimed that, “You could abort every Black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down.” And then aggressively standing behind his quote in repeated media appearances.
Reagan and Bennett oversaw the gutting of Federal support for civics education, cutting the nation’s federal education budget by 18.5%.
This lead to the situation today where the group that runs national exams of eighth-graders across the country, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, determined in 2018 that only 24% of US students were “proficient in civics.” It’s gotten so bad that the Lincoln Project is launching a K-12 civics program of their own called the Franklin Project.
George W. Bush continued the tradition, proposing an 8% cut to education and welfare budgets.
After initiating the privatization of Medicare in 2003 with the Medicare Advantage scam (a model for privatizing education), his Education Secretary, Rod Paige, calledthe nation’s largest teacher’s union, the National Education Association, a “terrorist organization.”
Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos then proposed cutting 12% or $8.5 billion out of the federal education budget, while allocating over $5 billion in taxpayer dollars to flow into the money bins of their private school cronies.
I started this article with Pompeo’s essentially calling Randi Weingarten a terrorist. Unions as saboteurs is a viewpoint widely held across the Republican Party and among rightwing billionaires.
But it’s simply not true: teachers’ unions have been a primary force in improving the quality of American education for almost a century.
Eunice S. Han is an economics professor and researcher at the University of Utah, and formerly was with Wellesley College. She did exhaustive research into the impact of teachers’ unions on teacher quality and educational outcomes: it’s the single-most definitive study done on the subject to date.
Her findings were unambiguous and rebut the GOP’s talking point that teachers’ unions “protect bad teachers”:
“[T]eachers unions, by negotiating higher wages for teachers, lower the quit probability of high-ability teachers but raise the dismissal rate of underperforming teachers, as higher wages provide districts greater incentive to select better teachers.”
Looking at the most comprehensive set of national data available on teacher quality and educational outcome from “the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES): the School and Staffing Survey (SASS) for three waves (2003-2004, 2007- 2008, and 2011-2012), its supplement Teacher Follow-up Survey (TFS) for each wave of the SASS, and the School Districts Finance Survey (SDFS),” she found:
“The data confirms that, compared to districts with weak unionism, districts with strong unionism dismiss more low-quality teachers and retain more high-quality teachers. The empirical analysis shows that this dynamic of teacher turnover in highly unionized districts raises average teacher quality and improves student achievement.”
But don’t bother trying to tell that to Republicans: they know that unions are terrorists, or at least give nightmares to bad bosses and poorly run businesses that exploit their workers. As Trump’s Education Secretary Betsy DeVos told an ALEC meeting of Republican state legislators and corporate lobbyists in July, 2017:
“They’ve made it clear that they care more about a system, one created in the 1800s, than they do about individual students.”
In other words, “Don’t bother me with facts.”
John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were right about public education, and privatizing it is as much a crime against the commons and our democracy as was privatizing our prisons, over half the Pentagon budget, and Medicare.
Rightwing billionaires are now funding “Liberty” and “Freedom” groups to attack and take over public school boards, seeking to ghettoize their schools, drive out unionized teachers, and impose a gender-bigoted, white supremacist, and anti-science curriculum. (Only 40% of our schools today even teach evolution, as that’s become so “controversial” again.)
Of all our democratic institutions, from Congress to state houses to city councils, the most on-the-ground, closest-to-the-people are school boards.
They’re the most vibrant and often most important of our governmental bodies, designed to express and facilitate the will of local parents and voters. And a great springboard to other elected offices: many members of Congress began their political careers running for a school board.
Private schools, of course, don’t have school boards. They’re accountable to their shareholders and CEOs.
Steve Bannon and other rightwing personalities have, for the past several years as part of their effort to destroy public education, been aggressively encouraging their followers to run for public school boards and, where they don’t win, show up at every meeting to make their members lives miserable.
It’s an area where Democrats and progressives have dropped the ball, big time.
If you’re a parent or grandparent, or even just a concerned citizen, there is no better or more crucial time to show up at your local school board than now. And bring your friends and neighbors with you.
Peter Greene wrote in Forbes about the bizarre decision by the Gates Foundation to give nearly $1 million to the Reason Foundation, a libertarian foundation that doesn’t believe in public schools and seldom believes in anything the government does on behalf of its citizens. They believe, I suppose, in a feral society where there is minimal government, minimal taxes, and everyone fends for him or herself. I remembered that the Gates Foundation once gave a grant of nearly $400,000 to the far-right American Legislative Executive Council (ALEC), which opposes public schools, unions, environmental regulations, gun control, and most every other government activity.
Greene writes:
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has awarded a grant of $900,117 to the Reason Foundation. The award’s stated purpose is “to ensure that State funding adequately and equitably supports the pursuit of improved educational outcomes for low income, Black and Latinx Students.”
The Reason Foundation is a think tank whose stated purpose is to advance “a free society by developing, applying, and promoting libertarian principles, including individual liberty, free markets, and the rule of law.” They use “journalism and public policy research to influence the framework and actions of policymakers, journalists and opinion leaders.” They favor limited government and market-friendly policies.
According to the Gates database, they have never before given a grant to the Reason Foundation. The two are not an obvious match; in fact, Reason was highly critical of the Common Core initiative that Gates spent millions to promote.
It is not clear what the actual project behind this grant might be. Search the Reason website for “low-income students” and it turns up many articles about how school choice and voucher programs would improve school for these students. The same for a search for “Black students.” (”Latinx students” does not appear on the website at all.)
The grant language is also interesting in that it suggests that Reason’s program is not about establishing a program, but about finding ways to influence the path of state funding. The end result of this may not simply be about spending Gates money, but about spending taxpayer dollars as well.
This is a strange grant because Reason has never showed any interest in education other than to promote vouchers.
Dr. Helen F. Ladd is one of the most eminent economists of education, possibly the most eminent. She has written important studies that document the importance of poverty in the lives of children and its impact on their educational outcomes. She has written critically about No Child Left Behind. And she has written international studies of school choice with her husband Edward Fiske, a veteran journalist.
I sponsor an annual lecture series on education at Wellesley College, my alma mater, and was delighted when Sunny Ladd, as she is known, accepted my invitation to be the first post-pandemic lecturer. She prepared this paper, which has been published by the National Education Policy Center.
She maintains that charter schools disrupt sound educational policy making.
This an overview of her important paper:
As publicly funded schools of choice operated by private entities, charter schools differ from traditional public schools in that they have more operational autonomy, their teachers are not public employees, and they are operated by nonprofit or for-profit private entities under renewable contracts. The main sense in which they are public is that they are funded by taxpayer dollars. This policy memo describes how charter schools disrupt four core goals of education policy: establishing coherent systems of schools, attending to child poverty and disadvantage, limiting racial segregation and isolation, and ensuring that public funds are spent wisely. The author recommends that policies be designed both to limit the expansion of charters and to reduce the extent to which they disrupt the making of good education policy.
A tweet by Mark Wiggins, a pro-public education lobbyist in Texas, spread the news that the Republican-dominated State Board of Education came out against vouchers.
*NO VOUCHERS*
As one of its 2023 legislative priorities, majority Republican @TXSBOE urges #txlege to reject vouchers in all their forms. #txed
This post is so important that it is the only one I have scheduled today. Please read it and share it with your friends, your local newspaper, your local radio station, your elected representatives, social media, anyone who cares about the future of our society. This is not a reprint. The author, Josh Cowen, wrote this post for this blog.
Josh Cowen, a professor at Michigan State University, has been studying vouchers for more than 20 years. He has been a member of the teams conducting major studies of vouchers. When I read his article in The Hechinger Report, where he declared that he was convinced that vouchers were disastrous for students who use them, I wanted to know more about him and his experience. I wanted to ask him, “Why did you change your mind?” That’s the question that’s been asked of me hundreds of times. I have a simple answer and a complicated answer: the simple answer is “I was wrong.” The complicated answer is contained in my recent books, starting with The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education.
I invited Josh to explain his views for my blog, and he graciously accepted. I consider this piece to be one of the most important statements I have posted in the decade this blog has been live. Please note two points he makes:
One, vouchers harm the children who leave public schools to use them.
Two, most of the early voucher research was conducted by researchers who were partisan supporters of vouchers.
Josh Cowen writes:
It’ll be a few more days for the final election results to be tallied nationwide, but it seems clear that with midterm wins by voucher supporters in places like Oklahoma, Texas and even Pennsylvania—where even the Democratic gubernatorial victor is on record in cautious favor—voucher opponents are going to have to keep working hard to block public funding of private and religious schools.
School vouchers have devastating effects on student outcomes. Full stop. That’s something even the nation’s voucher advocate-in-chief Betsy DeVos has had to admit, because the data are so stark.
Large-scale independent studies in D.C.,Indiana, Louisiana, and Ohio show that for kids who left public schools, harmful voucher impacts actually meet or exceed what the pandemic did to test scores. That’s also a similar impact in Louisiana to what Hurricane Katrina did to student achievement back in 2005.
Think about that next time you hear a politician or activist claim we need taxpayer support for private schools to offset what the pandemic did to student learning. Here, their cure would in test score terms be quite literally worse than the disease.
There’s another data point you need to know up front: vouchers overwhelmingly fund children who were already in private school without them. In states that have released those numbers—Arizona, New Hampshire, and Wisconsin—we know more than 75% of voucher applicants came from private schools.
The bottom-line: most kids using vouchers didn’t need them to go to private school, and the few kids who actually did use vouchers to transfer sectors schools suffer average test score drops on par with what a once-in-a-generation pandemic did to test scores too.
If you’re a picture person, our friends at the National Coalition for Public Education were kind enough to put their considerable talents into two graphics based on these data I provided to them.
Notice the citations these graphs include. They’re the same as the hyperlinks above. These data come from independent sources and from non-partisan journalists. That’s a critically important part of this story.
And then there’s this, before we get into the details: the same people pushing vouchers are the same people working to undermine fair elections and the right to vote.
None of these are metaphors, and this is not a drill.
So how did we come to this?
1. A Quick History of Voucher Research
First let’s talk about the evidence.
I came into the school voucher research community early. It was around 2001 or so, as a young graduate student assistant for a study of privately funded vouchers led by the conservative professor Paul E. Peterson who was based at both Harvard and the conservative Hoover Institution at Stanford (never heard of Hoover? Think Condoleeza Rice.)
Peterson and his protégé Jay Greene had already done one study of Milwaukee’s publicly funded voucher program, as well as the one in Cleveland that was about to be the subject of the U.S. Supreme Court’s first favorable ruling on voucher funding. That work generally showed positive results for vouchers. As did the research of a young academic named Cecilia Rouse, who is now President Biden’s chief economist.
But they were small programs. What policymakers and researchers call a “pilot phase.” Back then when both parties cared at least nominally about evidence, you wouldn’t expand a program like vouchers without testing it. So those early tests seemed somewhat positive.
The first research I joined was Peterson and team’s next project: multi-site studies in Dayton, New York City, and Washington D.C. Those programs were also pilot-size. And the New York site in particular showed some limited evidence of voucher success. But overall the lead researchers focused as much on things like parental satisfaction and measures of civic engagement as metrics. That work resulted in a book called The Education Gap. You can find my name in the credits if you own a copy. If you don’t own one, don’t waste your money.
No one knew it at the time, but the mixed results documented in The Education Gap were to be the best vouchers were ever going to do—and ever have done since by an academic based team looking at voucher test scores.
Just a short time later in 2005, I joined a new voucher evaluation led by Patrick Wolf, another Peterson protégé and contributor to The Education Gap. Wolf was by then ensconced with Jay Greene at the University of Arkansas Department of Education Reform, a Walton Family-funded academic group that was about to train a new generation of voucher advocates. Most notably Corey DeAngelis, now at Betsy DeVos’s 501(c)4 voucher lobbying group American Federation for Children.
The Milwaukee evaluation, which was officially done for the state of Wisconsin, lasted from 2005-2010. We found no evidence in five years that voucher kids outperformed public school kids. Two exceptions: we found limited evidence that graduation rates and college enrollment were somewhat higher for the voucher kids. We also found that voucher kids improved when the state required private schools to participate in the same No Child Left Behind-style accountability systems as public schools. In particular once voucher schools knew their performance would be made public they—shockingly!—improved their outcomes.
At the same time as the Milwaukee evaluation, Patrick Wolf and other Arkansas colleagues were working on a new evaluation of Washington D.C.’s federally funded voucher program. That study showed no difference in test scores, but large positive graduate results.
That pattern of “no test score benefits, some attainment benefits” has stuck in the research narrative even among voucher skeptics. But as I recently explained in a piece for the Brookings Institution, it’s just that: a narrative. Other studies in New York, Louisiana and Florida all show no real advantages for vouchers on educational attainment.
And certainly nothing to offset the cataclysmic results that began to come out after the early-stage evaluations I just described. The newer D.C.,Indiana, Louisiana, and Ohio studies that took place after 2013 and have showed pandemic and Katrina-sized harm to student test scores are all of at-scale voucher programs.
What do I mean by “at scale?” I mean that despite limited evidence in those pilot programs, vouchers have been steadily expanding across the country, and within states. So those D.C., Indiana Louisiana and Ohio studies represent our best understanding to date of what happens when you expand vouchers beyond the initial test phase. The answer: horrific impacts on student outcomes.
There are a number of reasons this could be, but I tend to argue we need not overthink this. Vouchers just don’t work. The kids who stand to gain from private schooling were and are already there. For the vast majority of kids, they’re better off in public schools. That’s what the latest voucher research shows.
As an example of what I mean: consider that in Wisconsin (which has not had a statewide study since ours ended in 2010), 41% of voucher-receiving schools have opened and then closed and failed since public funding began in the early 1990s.
That’s what happens when policymakers divert tax dollars to private schools: it’s like venture capitalism for education. It’s like Theranos but for private schooling. New providers race to gobble up new taxpayer money, but most of them have no business near kids.
Now, to fully understand why these terrible policies exist and in fact have never spread faster and further than they are today, we need to understand the politics. And to understand the politics, we need to understand the money.
On the one hand it’s pretty simple. Once you understand that the same people pushing vouchers are the same people funding groups that insist Donald Trump won the election and are now organizing a similar “Big Lie” for 2022’s results, you understand a lot. But read on.
2. Funding Vouchers, Funding Election Lies
It’s difficult to tell how much money has been spent to advocate for school vouchers over the years. But we know perhaps the biggest single funder—perhaps even larger than Betsy DeVos herself—is the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. The Bradley Foundation is a little-known group based in Wisconsin and they’ve given tens of millions of dollars to voucher activism over the years.
Bradley not only funds voucher activism, it funds voucher research too. It was a major funder of the Milwaukee evaluation I was part of and described above. I don’t think they directly influenced our results, but generally speaking you don’t want activism and research funding to mix. Think about it this way: should the Sackler family fund research on the addictive properties of oxycontin? Should Exxon fund studies about the existence of climate change?
For me though, the real problem today is that the Bradley Foundation is hardly limiting itself to supporting research and political advocacy for private schooling. As the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer has meticulously documented in her reporting on financing behind Big Lie activism sowing doubts about President Biden’s 2020 victory, the Bradley Foundation is the convening funder around those activities—the “extraordinary force”, in Mayer’s words, funding and coordinating the Big Lie and other efforts to undermine the integrity of democratic elections.
Bradley is not alone. The Heritage Foundation, a right-wing organization known for its pro-voucher advocacy is, according to Mayer, “working with the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)—a corporate-funded nonprofit that generates model laws for state legislators—on ways to impose new voting restrictions.”
In recent months, Heritage has also distributed talking points that under the guise of objective research attack school diversity and inclusion and directly question health care support for LGBTQ children. Heritage has recently released a report-card style rubric rating state laws on a so-called “Education Freedom” index for tax-supported private tuition. That report card includes the extent to which issues like diversity or sexual preference are components of public school teaching curricula.
The author of each of these documents is a Heritage Senior Fellow named Jay P. Greene. The same Jay Greene who while a conservative scholar at the University of Arkansas was co-director of that Bradley-funded voucher project that hired me back in 2005.
Greene is not alone in the Heritage-Bradley nexus. Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer who participated in Donald Trump’s infamous phone call to the Georgia Secretary of State demanding evidence that would overturn the state’s election results, was actively training poll watchers to question voters leading up to the 2022 midterms in places like my own state of Michigan. The night before the election, the New York Times even ran a story about Mitchell’s work in Michigan. The headline read: “Fueled by Falsehoods, a Michigan Group is Ready to Challenge the Vote.”
Mitchell is a known elections conspiracy theorist, according to CNN, and figures prominently in Mayer’s New Yorker reporting on broader election-related organizing. In her spare time Mitchell is on the Board of Directors of—wait for it!—the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. She’s actually an officer on the Board too.
Michigan is important because we have a voucher proposal waiting to go to the state legislature—even though voucher opponent Gretchen Whitmer has won reelection. That proposal, backed by billionaire and privatization advocate Betsy DeVos, exploits a quirk in the state law allowing lame-duck Republicans to pass the voucher plan without the governor’s signature.
The spokesman for the DeVos voucher campaign is a man named Fred Wszolek. Wszolek is also the strategist for a group that tried unsuccessfully to prevent abortion access from becoming enshrined in the Michigan state constitution. And he heads a political action committee (PAC) called Michigan Strong, which has worked to elect now-defeated DeVos-backed GOP gubernatorial candidate Tudor Dixon.
Also working for Dixon was Kyle Olson of the Education Action Group, an entity devoted to right-wing education reform that’s received money from Charles Koch, the DeVos Family and Harry Bradley—he of the Bradley Foundation.
That’s just one example, but you get the idea: the same people working to push school vouchers are the same people working to undermine elections. And in some cases even reproductive rights.
3. So Why Now?
I’ve spent the last six months writing column after column in opinion pages across the country trying to warn ordinary readers who aren’t education lifers about the dangers of vouchers. You can read samples here or here or here or here if you like. There are more than 10 in all.
Because of my long career working in the middle of all these voucher advocates and researchers, I’ve been asked multiple times what changed my mind. Or, more specifically, why am I speaking out today?
I hope the story I’ve told you above answers some of that. But the reality is, I was also doing other things. I had a young family, other research interests, and other professional tasks like editing the country’s premier education policy journal.
Most of all I had a naïve sense that the facts would speak for themselves. Remember, those pandemic-sized voucher failures began appearing back in 2013. I was an associate professor then, newly arrived at Michigan State University after receiving tenure at the University of Kentucky.
To me, after a decade of mixed-at-best results that I outlined here, I assumed that catastrophic results like those in Louisiana—and then confirmed in Indiana, Ohio, and D.C.—would have killed vouchers a thousand times over.
It’s sort of quaint now, that assumption of mine. In my research community, which is centered in the Association for Education Finance and Policy, we talk a lot about using evidence to inform policy. It’s a nice idea, but vouchers are the big, glaring and alarming counterpoint. We have never seen such one-sided, consistently negative research results as we have for school vouchers in the education research community.
And yet they thrive.
To me, the piece to that puzzle is politics. Negative voucher results aren’t the only thing to happen since 2013.
2016 happened. Donald Trump happened. January 6th happened. Dobbs v. Jackson happened.
Voucher advocates are overwhelmingly on one side of those events. And they’ve racked up some wins.
We know voucher programs exist today not for how they might help some kids, but for how they might exclude others. We know private schools taking public money can and often do discriminate against certain children. In Florida for example, one private school barring LGBTQ kids has received $1.6 million so far in taxpayer funding. In Indiana, more than $16 million has gone to schools refusing to admit LGBTQ kids—or even kids with LGBTQ parents!—or about 1 out of every 10 private schools on the taxpayer dime.
I wish I had come around earlier to the level of alarm I’m raising today. Others have even without having to take a kind of road to Damascus like I did.
I’m a tenured full professor now. I’ve had a successful career working hard to bring evidence to public policy. I firmly believe that school vouchers are a fundamental threat not just to student learning, but also to democracy and to human rights.
So on vouchers I’ve come to the same view any number of us would if we stumbled onto a massive fraud in our workplace, or if we saw a young child being bullied simply for being who they are. None of it is okay.
And if you see something, you have to say something.
Denis Smith is a retired educator in Ohio. He urges voters to take Republicans at their word. When they say they will cut Social Security and Medicare, believe them. When they say they will enact a national ban on abortion, believe them. When they say they will cut taxes for big corporations, believe them.
He writes:
What Are You (We) Going to Do About It? It’s Very Simple. Take Republicans at Their Word.
According to some recent polling, Americans, concerned about rising energy and consumer prices, are expected to give control to Republicans for at least one house of Congress, most likely the House of Representatives. Yet other polls show that the Democrats are on the rebound, with many House and Senate races still too close to call. How appolling is this? Pun.
Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post framed the ambiguous forecasting this way:
“Will an issue such as abortion motivate voters who usually skip midterms, turbocharging Democratic turnout? Will unease about the economy tip the scales toward change, boosting the GOP across the board?”
“The fact that we don’t know is unnerving…”
But while the result of the midterms might be in doubt, all of us should have no doubt about what will happen if Republicans regain control of one or both houses of Congress.
In their own words, Republicans have told us what to expect if they are victorious on November 8. We should have learned to trust them by now in looking at what they’ve said as a predictor of what they will do.
Some examples:
Social Security and Medicare. The two most popular government programs may be subject to attempts to sunset them as a way to wreak havoc on the debt ceiling. How ironic that the mastermind of the sunset plan is Florida Senator Rick Scott, who famously took the Fifth Amendment 75 times in a case involving the biggest Medicare fraud in American history that occurred during his tenure as CEO at healthcare giant Columbia/HCA.
Tax Cuts for Corporations. The GOP has promised to make permanent corporate tax levels enacted five years earlier in the first months of the Trump administration, reverting to their modus operandi of starving other programs to pay for such largesse. But to be a Republican means that you are a walking contradiction, driven to revert to past bad behavior by favoring corporations and high-income taxpayers at the expense of everyone else, including seniors.
The Post’s Jeff Stein painted this picture of what to expect in a Republican victory.
“Many economists say the GOP’s plans to expand the tax cuts flies against their promises to fight inflation and reduce the federal deficit, which have emerged as central themes of their 2022 midterm campaign rhetoric.”
Defund the IRS. Republicans plan to curtail plans for increased spending at the IRS to replace 1970s systems and increase customer service levels to avoid future backlogs on processing tax returns. Some of the new funding would go toward hiring additional auditors to “crack down on high-income and corporate tax evaders who cost the American people hundreds of billions of dollars each year.” At least 50,000 IRS staff are expected to retire soon, but the GOP has spread wild claims that staffing levels will increase by 87,000 when in fact the funding will be needed to replace retiring staff, invest in new technology, and add more robust auditing for tax cheats, both individual and corporate.
Defund Ukraine. From the looks of it, the defense of democracy may be waning in the Republican congressional caucus. In the last month, House Leader Kevin McCarthy has warned about not giving a “blank check” in the future for more aid to Ukraine, as have other Republicans who want more money to build a wall on the southern border. Never mind that any pullback from support for Ukraine will seriously undermine NATO, something that Donald Trump wanted to do all along by his desire back in 2018 to withdraw American membership from the North Atlantic Alliance.
“These guys don’t get it. It’s a lot bigger than Ukraine – it’s Eastern Europe. It’s NATO. It’s real, serious, serious consequential outcomes,” said Joe Biden about GOP plans to cut support for Ukraine.
Help Big Pharma – At Your Expense. In the recently enacted Inflation Reduction Act, you will be shocked, shocked to learn that Republicans want to help pharmaceutical companies at the expense of consumers. The Ranking Republican on the House Ways and Means Committee has vowed to roll back caps on drug costs allowed in the IRA “because those drug provisions are so dangerous, by discouraging investment in life-saving cures.” The legislation allows Medicare to negotiate its costs for the most expensive drugs and cap out-of-pocket costs for seniors at $2,000 per year.
Investigations Ad Nauseum. Remember Benghazi, Benghazi, Benghazi? In an interview on Fox News a full year before the 2016 presidential election, House Leader Kevin McCarthy opined that “…everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right? But we put together a Benghazi Special Committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping.” You can bet your bottom dollar that if Republicans take control of Congress, we won’t have to wait long to discover probes into the Departments of Justice for alleged prosecutorial activism, Homeland Security for border issues, and for the current president for having the same surname as Hunter Biden. You can also bet that all active congressional probes related to the January 6 insurrection will be stopped as quickly as you can say stop the steal, with the effect of absolving possible criminal behavior on the part of some members of Congress and White House staff who may have aided and abetted the aborted coup in some fashion.
And we also need to be reminded that if the Republicans take control of the House of Representatives, the likely new chairman of the Judiciary Committee will be Jim Jordan, the less than urbane resident of Urbana who helped to give us Benghazi, Benghazi, Benghazi a decade ago. His clownish antics back then may prove to be his dress rehearsal for wielding a gavel to create more chaos and circus-like behavior in what was in another era referred to as the people’s house. In order to drive home the strong probability of chaos in the new Congress, consider Jordan’s new 1,000 page report, where he alleges that both the FBI and the Justice Department have been politicized. Hmm, he must have never heard of William Barr. At any rate, the “report” is filled with air, containing hundreds of pages of letters, signature pages, and only 46 pages of narrative. As is typical with Jordan, there is nothing but hot air and bluster as he wrestles in incessant witch hunts.
And last but not least:
Impeachment. Revenge. Payback. Impeachment will be on the table if the Republicans win in November. Ask Ted Cruz. Ask Marjorie Taylor Greene. For that matter, just ask the lunatic fringe that is now in control of the Republican Party. And the reason for a new impeachment? No, not for a president pressuring the Ukrainian leader to help him with collecting dirt on a political opponent, not for violation of the Emolument Clause in charging the Secret Service more than $1,600 per night for lodging in his properties, and certainly not for being central to a conspiracy for overthrowing a democratic (small d) election that led to the January 6 coup attempt at the nation’s Capitol. And the charges? Details. Details. They’ll fabricate something later because after all, the subject is revenge. Payback. “What’s good for the goose is good for the gander,” Ted Cruz said in September. For once, Lyin’ Ted, as Trump christened him, was being straightforward.
So if you know all of this now, what are you going to do about it? In 1871, the great cartoonist Thomas Nast posed that same question. When it comes to the Republicans’ upcoming agenda, we should believe Ted Cruz. And Kevin McCarthy. And all the rest of an anti-democracy, anti-government, election denying lunatic cult that once was identified as a responsible, conservative political party.
But perhaps the scariest part is that what has been detailed here merely represents the short list of Republican objectives in January if they win. After all, that’s what the GOP (Great Obstructionist Party), with no plan for providing principled governance yet having a detailed plan for obstruction and mayhem, is all about.
Yes, that is the GIP.
No, that’s not a typo. The GOP is also becoming known as the GIP, the Great Insurrectionist Party. When you threaten to cut Medicare and Social Security and take funds from Ukraine, a democratic country fighting for its life against an authoritarian onslaught, the result is that we’ve been GIPped.
And never forget that the leader of the rape of Ukraine is a former KGB agent who was defended by Donald Trump in 2018 at a meeting in Helsinki against allegations by 17 American intelligence agencies that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election.
“No prior president has ever abased himself more abjectly before a tyrant, the late Senator John McCain said at the time about Trump’s performance in defending a brutal dictator who murders journalists and jails those who dare to object to his tyranny.
In the end, if you now know about this agenda that the GOP is expected to unleash but you go ahead and vote for any Republican who denies the validity of elections and supports the authoritarianism personified by Donald Trump, you are guilty of aiding and abetting the dissolution of our democracy.
Election Day is at hand. What are you – and what are we – going to do about it? From the looks and sounds of it, we are running out of time.
Journalist Nora de la Cour describes the dire situation in Wisconsin, where incumbent Governor Tony Evers is in a close race with an election denier/school privatizer, Tim Michels. There are many other states where education is on the ballot. Wisconsin was once known for its great public schools and public universities. Former Governor Scott Walker declared war on both. Twenty-five years ago, the far-right Bradley Foundation funded the voucher movement in Milwaukee, which has spread to other parts of the state and to other states. The Trumpist base of the Republican Party has declared war on public schools, based on lies and fantasies spun by rightwing think tanks.
She begins:
New research finds that market-style education reforms, like those pioneered in Wisconsin decades ago, have devastating consequences for students. This election, Wisconsin and the rest of the nation must choose whether to plow ahead or reverse course.
Wisconsin’s Democratic governor Tony Evers is neck and neck with his challenger, Trump-endorsed Tim Michels, whose campaign has lauded abortion bans, election denialism, and a beefed up carceral–policestate. Robert Asen, who studies political discourse at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, told Jacobin that because education has gotten relatively less airtime, it is “a bit of a stealth issue analogous to [labor law in] Scott Walker’s 2010 gubernatorial campaign,” which didn’t prepare voters for Walker’s vicious attacks on workers. But make no mistake: this election will determine the existential future of K-12 schooling in the state.
Following the now-familiar Chris Rufo playbook, Michels plans to sign a restrictive “parents’ rights” bill and move up the timeline on a universal school choice plan that would destroy what’s left of Wisconsin’s once-great public schools. Formerly the state’s superintendent of public instruction, Evers has pledged to increase school funding and prioritize the public system. In reality, though, even if Evers prevails he’ll at best continue to be “the man of a thousand vetoes,” given that Republican opposition will prevent him from pursuing his agenda. So as Marquette University senior fellow and veteran education reporter Alan Borsuk put it when speaking to Jacobin, this governor’s race amounts to a choice between treading water and veering hard right.
In many ways, Wisconsin blazed a trail for the rest of the country with market-style reforms that increase competition by weakening teachers’ unions and privatizing schools. Decades later, researchers have mapped the devastating impact of these reforms on Wisconsin students. So, as voters across the United States face grave education questionsup and down the ballot, it makes sense to look back at what’s happened in the Badger State.
Please open the link and read this important article.
The Walton Family Foundation has poured hundreds of millions, possibly billions, into privatizing America’s schools via charter schools. It recently announced that it would add another $100 million, in alliance with the PNC bank, to enable charters to grow.
The curious aspect of Walton’s devotion to charter schools is its complete indifference to the failures, poor performance, scandals, and frequent closures of charters.
Clearly the foundation has a goal that is unrelated to performance or success. The funders criticize public schools for poor performance, but in many states, the public schools outperform the charter schools. Nonetheless, Walton keeps pouring in more money.
Its goal seems clear: not to provide better opportunities for kids, but to undermine and disrupt public schools.
If they cared about students, the Waltons would pour hundreds of millions into improving public schools, which enroll 85-90% of American students.
Diane Ravitch's blog 