Josh Cowen, a professor at Michigan State University, has been a voucher researcher for two decades. The more he studied vouchers, the more he realized that they harm children. In this post, he looks at the students who use a voucher, but change their minds and return to public schools.
Cowen writes:
Author: Josh Cowen
We don’t talk enough about children who give up their school vouchers.
One of the many problems with the “Education Freedom” marketing campaign for school privatization—and it’s a problem with the market approach to education more generally—is that schools are anything but products to sample.
Betsy DeVos likes to say that schools shouldn’t be “one size fits all.” She’s conceding more than she knows with that analogy because unlike clothing, or a car you can test drive down at the Ford dealer, there’s a real cost to trying a school on and having it fail to fit.
Study after study has shown how harmful school mobility is for kids, both those who actually move between schools and those whose classrooms are full of peers coming in and out.
“The research literature suggests that changing schools can harm normal child and adolescent development by disrupting relationships with peers and teachers as well as altering a student’s educational program.”
And in the general population of public school children, we know who’s likely to be more mobile. They’re students of color, students from families with lower levels of income, students with special academic needs, and students with housing insecurity.
No one’s saying student mobility isn’t an issue for public schools, but public educators don’t see student churn as a feature instead of a bug. For example, a key element of the federal McKinney-Vento Act designed to help homeless kids is a set of best practices to help kids stay in one single public school even if they can’t remain in one stable home environment.
States with large-scale voucher programs are beginning to report out statistics for how many users come from public or private schools each year. And by the way these statistics put a lie to the claim from activists that vouchers are needed for families to choose, because we know from states like Arizona, New Hampshire, and Wisconsin that more than 75% of voucher kids were already in private school without taxpayer support.
But now we need more statistics reported on the mirror image: how many new students give up their vouchers each year. Recent numbers from Florida indicate roughly 60% of new voucher users give the voucher up after just a couple of years.
Think about that number as the voucher equivalent of a public school mobility or drop-out rate—both statistics used by critics to help indict public educational quality.
When I was working on an official evaluation of Milwaukee’s voucher program more than a decade ago, I led two reports on exactly these sorts of children. We found that around 15% of kids gave up their vouchers every year. Meaning that, as in Florida, more than half the kids we were studying left private schools over a short period of time!
Who were those kids? They were more likely to be Black, lower scoring on the state exam, and more likely to be enrolled in schools that had lots of other voucher-using kids (i.e. newer schools that popped up to take tax dollars once the program was created, rather than more established private institutions).
What happened when they left? Well actually that was a bit of good news. In still the only study to track kids over time after giving up their vouchers, we found that they enrolled in Milwaukee Public Schools and then improved substantially after arriving. The shame of it was they had to lose some academic growth in the voucher program before their parents realized it was a poor fit and fixed the problem.
Sometimes though, kids may even want to stay in their private school but the school itself shuts down and they have to move anyway. Voucher activists pushing an entrepreneurial approach to education don’t talk enough about the consequences of failure. For example, in Milwaukee, 41% of private schools that ever took tax dollars eventually shut down.
Imagine what critics of public schools would be saying right now if public schools had a 41 percent failure rate!
We’re not talking about a local Burger King that shuts down and a family has to drive a few extra blocks to get that Whopper they crave from the next closest franchise. Or has to go to Taco Bell or Arby’s instead. We’re talking about potentially major academic and social setbacks for kids.
Finally, there’s one more reason voucher leavers matter—and it’s a bit technical so bear with me. Social scientists prioritize randomized control designs to estimate impacts of policy interventions. And when randomization isn’t possible, we try to find approaches that come close.
The problem that student exits from voucher programs causes for researchers is they create additional hurdles to estimating accurate impacts of those programs. All of the randomized studies of voucher programs have showed similar exit rates to our study in Wisconsin.
And in at least one study of Louisiana vouchers, the authors had to acknowledge that those exits—precisely the students who as in Wisconsin were not doing well in the program—probably caused any positive estimates of the program to be overstated. There are techniques researchers can use to adjust for that error, but no one agrees on exactly the right approach, so it continues to be a problem.
So to summarize: we need to know a lot more about kids who give up their vouchers. Most importantly because the evidence we do have tells us that school mobility is on balance a setback for kids, and we know kids exiting voucher programs are already more likely to be at some form of risk than those who stay.
But we also need to know because as a practical matter, voucher exits can cause analytical hurdles to studies estimating voucher impacts on learning or on educational attainment.
And what that means is that in the future, if voucher supporters trumpet a new study—credible or otherwise—that purports to show positive impacts over time, the very first question we need to ask is: how many kids left the program because it wasn’t working for them?
Based on the data already available, the answer will be another indictment for voucher programs.
Former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos recently spoke at Calvin University in Michigan. As one of the university’s most prominent graduates, her remarks were received with respect.
Dr. John Walcott, a professor of education at Calvin University, wrote an article for the school newspaper in which he expressed respectful disagreement with her ideas. The full article is worth reading. It takes courage for a professor to take issue with a state and national leader such as DeVos, especially in a religion-focused university.
Be sure to open the link and read the comments.
He began:
On Nov. 17, Calvin University hosted an event with Betsy DeVos. DeVos served as Secretary of Education during the Trump administration and is a graduate of Calvin University. In making the announcement, President Boer described the event as part of efforts “to hear from people who bring diverse backgrounds and perspectives to important conversations.”
DeVos served as Secretary of Education during the Trump administration and is a graduate of Calvin University. In making the announcement, President Boer described the event as part of efforts “to hear from people who bring diverse backgrounds and perspectives to important conversations.”
I understand and respect the desire of our university to welcome to our campus a distinguished alum who has a long history of involvement at local, state and national levels. Furthermore, I agree that it is important to provide space for “diverse perspectives” and “important conversations.” We must strive to be a community willing to ask tough questions and engage deeply with important issues in our world.
I believe that an opportunity for additional engagement with these issues is especially necessary because of the problematic nature of much of what Secretary DeVos proposes when it comes to education. For example, her call to support “students and not systems” fails to recognize that student learning can be supported by teachers, curriculum, financial resources, school administrators and, yes, in many cases may even require a building conducive to learning. It is easy to demonize systems, but the use of this sort of false dichotomy is ultimately unproductive.
In that spirit, I suggest that we continue the conversation started at this event. The event used an interview format that did not provide opportunity for the sort of conversation and debate that are required to dig deeply into important issues related to educational policy and the state of education in our nation. Near the close of the event, Secretary DeVos stated her ongoing desire to “debate and advance” the policies for which she advocates. I agree that we need to debate these policies and, as a university community, think deeply about issues that relate to education and political engagement and how God calls us to seek justice and be agents of renewal in our world.
I believe that an opportunity for additional engagement with these issues is especially necessary because of the problematic nature of much of what Secretary DeVos proposes when it comes to education. For example, her call to support “students and not systems” fails to recognize that student learning can be supported by teachers, curriculum, financial resources, school administrators and, yes, in many cases may even require a building conducive to learning. It is easy to demonize systems, but the use of this sort of false dichotomy is ultimately unproductive.
We also need to carefully consider Secretary DeVos’ focus on parental choice and individual rights as the basis of her calls to change our educational system. This perspective ignores the function of our schools as a public good, an institution at the core of our desire to promote democratic values and the flourishing of all students. We need to think carefully about the purpose of education in a democratic society and about the role of public schools that have been part of our nation’s commitment to education since before the writing of the U.S. Constitution. Our call to seek justice and be agents of renewal in our world may push us to prioritize the needs of our community and of the most vulnerable in our society over individual rights.
As an educational scholar and researcher, I recognize the need to carefully examine the impacts of policies that use the language of choice and freedom on student learning and on public schools. For example, advocates for school vouchers, which allow parents to use public education funds for tuition in private schools, argue that these policies can be the key to improving student outcomes while ignoring research that does not support these claims. For example, Dr. Christopher Lubienski (Director of the Center for Evaluation and Policy Analysis at Indiana University), summarizing research since 2015, states that “every study of the impacts of statewide voucher programs has found large, negative effects from these programs on the achievement of students using vouchers.”
A thorough discussion will explore the impact of DeVos-supported policies on school funding. Recent reports from Florida note that this year, school vouchers will divert $1.3 billion from public schools, and reports from states like Arizona, New Hampshire and Wisconsin show that the overwhelming majority (80%, 89% and 75%) of students utilizing vouchers were already in private schools before the programs began. We need to ask if public funds should be given to schools that are in some cases not required to comply with regulations related to special education, federal civil rights laws and curriculum standards. We should engage critically in questions regarding the role of teachers’ unions before dismissing out of hand their role in public education. And we should critically examine the rhetoric that is currently a part of the so-called “culture wars,” especially as it relates to education. I am concerned that Secretary DeVos has contributed to a misrepresentation of critical race theory and may be perceived as aligning with groups and individuals that have advanced a harmful narrative directed at the LGBTQ+ community.
These are just a few of the many complex and vitally important issues that need to be a part of a deeper conversation. I am not criticizing the decision to host Secretary DeVos, a distinguished graduate with years of activism in the public sphere. However, as a faculty member in the School of Education, it is important to me that the broader educational community understands that this does not signal an endorsement of her policies and perspectives by the School of Education. And I remain hopeful that we, as a community, will embrace the opportunity to not only offer diverse perspectives, but also engage deeply in important conversations of what it means to think deeply, act justly and live wholeheartedly as Christ’s agents of renewal in the world.
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.
Ohio is a state dominated by Republicans. When progressive candidates won seats on the state board in the recent election, Republicans moved swiftly to strip the state board of its powers and transfer them to a new state agency.
The state board has 19 seats. Eleven are elected. Eight are appointed by the Governor, Republican Mike DeWine.
For the first time in years, progressive candidates will control the elected seats on the executive agency, regulating if a resolution is able to pass or not. Candidates are voted on as nonpartisan candidates, however, each leans conservative or progressive and will be endorsed by a party. School board candidates tend to share their beliefs publically.
Three of the five seats up for grabs were taken by liberal candidates. Tom Jackson, of Solon, beat out incumbent Tim Miller by about 50,000 votes. Teresa Fedor, a now-former state senator from Toledo, beat opponent Sarah McGervey by more than 30,000 votes. Katie Hofmann, of Cincinnati, beat out incumbent Jenny Kilgore by around 30,000 votes.
“We’re just looking forward to getting back to Columbus and doing the people’s work,” Jackson told News 5.
Now, seven of the 11 elected seats are held by Democrats. The elected seats ensure that the total board can’t pass all resolutions it wants, since it needs a 2/3 majority. Of the 19 total seats, eight were appointed by Gov. DeWine. Now, with 12 GOP seats, a Democrat would need to switch over for policy to pass. This could change depending on attendance.
Even though Republicans hold a majority, they don’t have a 2/3 majority, and they won’t be able to pass resolutions without at least one Democrat.
Gov. Mike DeWine said Wednesday he supports an Ohio Senate bill that would overhaul the Ohio Department of Education, gut powers from the Ohio State Board of Education and give his office more oversight of education.
“I think virtually every governor for 40 or 50 years has wanted to have more control in regard to the Department of Education,” DeWine, a Republican, told reporters. “So this governor is not going to be different. You know, I support the bill.”
Senate Bill 178 would put the Ohio Department of Education under a cabinet-level official in the governor’s office and rename the agency the Department of Education and Workforce, which would be called by the acronym DEW. The cabinet official would oversee the department, a task currently held by the state school board. The department would have two divisions: one for primary and secondary education and one for workforce training.
The 19-member state school board, made up of 11 elected members and eight members appointed by the governor, would continue to exist, but it would be stripped of most of its duties. It would oversee educator licensing and select the superintendent of public instruction, who would be a secretary to the board and an advisor to the DEW leader in the governor’s office.
“Candidly, the bill was not our idea, but I support the bill,” DeWine said. “I think what the public expects is accountability. And it’s hard to have accountability under our current system. You know, having the Department of Education with kind of a joint control between the governor’s office and the governor on certain areas, and other areas be the state elected Board of Education, I think is a very significant improvement.”
We have seen the same anti-democratic move in other states, like Indiana and North Carolina, where the legislature removed powers from the Governor or state superintendent so as to keep control of education in Republican hands, disregarding the voters’ wishes.
Josh Cowen is a veteran voucher researcher, having worked in the field for more than 20 years. He is a professor of education policy at Michigan State University. After two decades as a researcher, he concluded that vouchers are a disaster for the children who use them.
Today, he writes an inside guide to voucher research. All pro-voucher research is actually disguised advocacy for vouchers, especially if it funded or produced by the organizations listed here.
I hope you will share this post with your friends on social media, post blogs about it, and get it into the hands of journalists. The public deserves transparency.
Josh Cowen writes:
The entire base of evidence to support school vouchers comes from a small, interconnected and insular group of research-activists with direct ties to Betsy DeVos, Charles Koch, the Waltons and other privatization financers.
If you stopped reading this post right now, that’s the take-home message right there: the case for vouchers relies entirely on data and evidence contributed by what amounts to industry-funded research and advocacy on behalf of the cause.
But if you’re a journalist, an educator, or just a committed public school supporter (thank you!) and you want the links and the details, read on.
WHO’S WHO IN THE VOUCHER RESEARCH/ADVOCACY WORLD?
If you’re a professional journalist either in the education space or a broader policy/politics issue, you’ve probably heard of some of these people and certainly their institutions before. But you’re busy, you’ve got deadlines to meet and editors to approve your copy, and it’s not always easy to connect some of the important dots in this area.
But they need to be connected. The single most difficult task I’ve found in my writing on school vouchers has been to explain to journalists how the question of whether vouchers “work” for kids is not some obscure academic ivory-tower debate in which both sides have a nuanced, complicated and reasonably well-founded point.
There is credible research on one side—that vouchers are largely a negative force for student outcomes—and politically oriented reports on the other. That’s it.
So the next time you see a press release, or are given a quote, or talk off record to a voucher supporter saying that vouchers work, try this little exercise and see what you find for yourself:
STEP 1: DOES THE RESEARCH COME FROM ONE OF THE FOLLOWING ORGANIZATIONS?
• American Federation for Children: the 501(c)(4) advocacy organization co-founded by Betsy DeVos to lobby for vouchers. DeVos was so close to this group she had to recuse herself as Secretary of Education from contact with the group in her first year in government.
• Cato Institute: A Right-wing advocacy think tank co-founded by Charles Koch (although Koch later sued for lack of direct control of the group).
• EdChoice: Formerly the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, named for conservative economist who first proposed vouchers. Enough said.
• ExcelInEd: The advocacy group founded by Jeb Bush to expand vouchers and other conservative education priorities from the model Bush developed while he was governor of Florida.
• Goldwater Institute: A self-described libertarian think tank in Arizona that is chiefly oriented toward litigation on behalf of a number of different conservative policy priorities—most recently school vouchers.
• Harvard University Program on Education Policy and Governance (PEPG): A research center at Harvard run by Professor Paul Peterson, also of the Hoover Institution, and the father of modern-day pro-voucher research.
• Heritage Foundation: the most influential Right-wingthink tank in the country, devoted in part to privatizing schools and exploiting culture wars. Also directly tied to voter suppression efforts, per deep reporting by The New Yorker.
• University of Arkansas Department of Education Reform: A university-based doctoral training department responsible for producing nearly all of the currently active voucher research-advocates working at the institutions above today. This department was founded by a $10 million gift from the Walton Family Foundation in the early 2000s.
STEP 2: IS THE AUTHOR, CO-AUTHOR OR SOURCE FOR BACKGROUND OR ATTRIBUTION ONE OF THE FOLLOWING PEOPLE?
The Original Voucher Research-Advocates
• Jay P. Greene Currently Senior Fellow at Heritage, former founding head of the University of Arkansas Department of Education Reform, received his PhD under Paul E. Peterson.
• Paul E. Peterson Currently Professor at both Harvard and the conservative Hoover Institute at Stanford University, and the primary intellectual force behind the original positive voucher studies of the late 1990s.
Their Students, Colleagues and Acolytes
• Lindsay Burke Currently at the Heritage Foundation and a member of GOP Governor Glenn Youngkin’s transition team.
• Corey DeAngelis Currently Research Director for DeVos’s American Federation for Children group. But so much more: a regular Fox News contributor and active campaigner with far-Right governors like Kari Lake in Arizona and Kim Reynolds in Iowa.
• Greg Forster Currently at EdChoice and a co-blogger with Jay Greene.
• Matthew Ladner Currently at ALEC, EdChoice, Goldwater, and the Charles Koch Institute.
• Martin Lueken Currently a research director at EdChoiceand former PhD student of Jay Greene and Patrick Wolf at University of Arkansas.
• Mike McShane Currently a research director at EdChoiceand former PhD student of Jay Greene and Patrick Wolf at University of Arkansas.
• Neil McCluskey Currently “Director of Education Freedom” at the Cato Institute and a member of the editorial board for the Journal of School Choice—a publication edited by Robert Maranto of the University of Arkansas.
• Patrick Wolf Currently interim-head of the University of Arkansas Department of Education Reform, former colleague of Jay Greene and a former PhD student of Paul Peterson.
Not all of these organizations or individuals occupy the same problematic position. For example, I happen to make a point of reading everything McShane publishes, for example, because I respect his writing and the way he talks about the world even though I fundamentally disagree with his conclusions.
And the University of Arkansas group also includes a robust and insightful group of researchers examining the needs of teachers in the Ozarks and other high-poverty areas. I’m a great admirer of Professor Gema Zamarro and her students, who are doing some very important work on the role that the COVID0-19 pandemic played in teacher workforce conditions.
For that matter, some of what we know about the devasting effects of vouchers in Louisiana actually comes from Patrick Wolf’s reports. I’ve written with him myself on studies like one showing how critical strong oversight is to voucher program performance. Wolf is in fact the only person on the list abovewith a long and commendable history of publishing negative voucher impacts in top academic journals. The point here is not to disparage the individuals but to judge the insular and self-citing base of research that supports vouchers.
The point here is to be critical consumers of this line of research. Think of it this way: no news editor would release a story on an explosive topic going on the say so of a single source. At minimum that editor would require two and usually more sources. The problem for voucher advocacy research is that it is usually the only source for positive voucher impacts available. And it’s been that way for a decade or more.
What’s the take home point? It’s this: not all voucher advocates publish exclusively pro-voucher studies, but all pro-voucher studies come almost exclusively from pro-voucher advocates.
STEP 3: WHO FUNDED THE WORK YOU’RE READING OR THE SOURCE YOU’RE CITING?
The Bradley and Koch Foundations—along with Heritage—are directly involved in Big Lie, election denialism, and voter-suppression funding, as reported by Jane Mayer of the New Yorker in painstaking detail last summer.
The next time you read a report, or talk to a source for attribution, ask first about their funding sources. If they decline to provide those sources, consider declining to report their results or their viewpoint. It is common for philanthropists to request non-disclosure of their donations—that is their right. But it is your right as a reporter, and certainly the right of your readers, to decline to print their material.
Transparency is just the name of the game for credible research. You can see my own research funding right here. You can see that I once upon a time also received grant funding from the Walton Foundation. And from Bloomberg, and the Laura and John Arnold Foundation. My only current active funding comes from the U.S. Department of Education Institute for Education Sciences—awarded to my research team while Betsy DeVos was education secretary!
Do I believe those organizations swayed my earlier research? Of course not. And the advocates above would say the same thing. But I don’t get to decide what to think and neither do they. That’s for the reader to judge, and that can’t happen without full transparency.
WHAT DOES ALL THIS MEAN?
This all may seem like inside baseball. A bunch of current and former voucher researchers arguing about who’s who and what’s what. A bunch of annoying and self-centered PhDs.
But in some sense that’s the entire point.
Whether an educator, reporter, researcher, policymaker or just avid reader of Diane’s blog here, you would be hard-pressed—if not find it absolutely impossible—to find a single study of voucher participant effects (how vouchers impact outcomes) that did not come from one of the few organizations or few individuals listed above, or a handful of others with direct ties to Greene, Peterson, or Arkansas.
That’s a problem, because what that means is that hundreds of millions of dollars, and hundreds of thousands of school children are being affected every day by the advocacy of a small group of people. In many cases advocacy disguised as objective and credible research.
As a counter point, consider this humble list of studies showing far more nuance and at times outright negative results from voucher programs. To create that list, I made a simple rule: no studies from organizations listed in Step 1 above. Notice the variety of names and the diversity of venues and outlets. That’s what a credible research base looks like.
A LITMUS TEST: IS THE PRO-VOUCHER EVIDENCE I’M READING POLITICAL/IDEOLOGICAL?
If at this point you’re still not convinced that the entire structure of pro-voucher research amounts to industry-funded research—think the Sacklers funding research on oxycontin’s addictive properties, or ExxonMobil funding research on fossil fuel environmental effects—there is also this:
Many of the organizations and individuals noted above also contribute to other areas of politically engaged conservative education reform.
Greene even put right in print for you to see that these culture war issues are useful to Right wing activists pushing the privatization of schooling.
In other words, pro-voucher research exists right alongside—and is often published by—the same people and organizations pushing other far-Right education outcomes. You need to know that to have a full picture of what voucher research truly says.
Pro-voucher research is pro-voucher advocacy, and pro-voucher advocacy is part of the larger effort to undermine public education, undermine a more humane approach to tolerating difference and diversity in our schools, and in many cases undermine free embrace of democracy itself.
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.
With the help of the teachers’ unions, the people of Ohio elected three new members of the state board of education who support public schools. This is great news because the politicians in the State House and the Legislature have been frantically diverting public funds to charter schools and vouchers, as well as endorsing extremist policies on race and gender. The state constitution explicitly authorizes a system of public schools and forbids public funding of religious schools. Ohio’s charter schools are among the lowest-performing in the nation and are lower performing than the state’s public schools. Half of those authorized by the state have closed.
Anti-culture war candidates win three seats on Ohio State Board of Education, with big boost from teachers’ unions
COLUMBUS, Ohio – Voters elected three candidates to the Ohio State Board of Education on Tuesday who oppose fights over LGBTQ students in bathrooms and attempts to control how American racism is discussed in social studies classes. The Ohio Federation of Teachers and the Ohio Education Association contributed tens of thousands of dollars to help the campaigns of former state senator Teresa Fedor of Toledo, Tom Jackson of Solon and Katie Hofmann of Cincinnati, who each won their races against more conservative candidates. Candidates the unions did not support, including one who ran unopposed, won races in two districts.
The unions were involved in recruiting the three candidates. Fedor and Hofmann are each former teachers and members of OFT. Jackson, a businessman, is a volunteer coach at Solon High School and serves on the Solon City Schools Strategic Planning Team. Their members volunteered to knock on doors and spread the word about the candidates.
They also gave their candidates a big fundraising boost. In addition to writing checks for each candidate’s campaign — OEA gave $13,700 to each candidate’s campaign and the OFT gave $12,000 to Fedor and Jackson and $13,700 to Hofmann — the unions spent at least $100,000 to get them elected through an independent super PAC called Educators for Ohio. The PAC is normally controlled by OEA, but OFT this year was also involved in it, said Melissa Cropper, president of the OFT.
The super PAC spent money only on the three state school board candidates, said Scott DiMauro, president of the OEA. “The three individuals who won those contested races are all strong advocates of public education, they have strong records on that,” DiMauro said. “I would anticipate they would work closely with other members of the state board who have been pushing back on some of those (culture wars) attacks. How everything is going to play out still remains to be seen, because you still have an extremist faction that is pushing some of those resolutions. Some of those members are still there.”
Fedor defeated Sarah McGervey, a Catholic school teacher who talked about parental rights against perceived liberal bias in education and keeping LGBTQ protections out of Title IX. Jackson defeated incumbent Tim Miller and Cierra Lynch Shehorn, who was ran further to the right of Miller. Hofmann defeated conservative incumbent Jenny Kilgore.
Hoffman, Jackson and Fedor vastly outraised their opponents. Kilgore individually raised $5,800 in 2022. Hofmann raised nearly $44,000. Jackson raised $53,000 this year, compared to Miller’s $7,600 and Lynch Shehorn’s $4,800.
Fedor’s and McGervey’s campaign finance reports are more complicated. McGervey ran for the Ohio House in August. After she lost that race she ran for the state board. Her total fundraising haul was $15,000. Fedor was a sitting senator in 2021, the beginning of the two-year funding cycle, and she raised $95,000 during the two-year period.
Other candidates who won but were not supported by the unions include incumbent member John P. Hagan, a conservative on the board, who beat a challenge from Robert R. Fulton. Neither candidate in that race received the unions’ endorsement. Ohio State Board of Education President Charlotte McGuire won reelection unopposed. Ohio Value Voters, a conservative Christian organization, backed the conservative slate of candidates, including Hagan.
As Ohio students fell academically behind from remote learning during the pandemic and Ohio has been without a permanent state superintendent for more than a year, conservatives on the state school board pressed to take on several controversial issues over the last year.
More recently, conservatives on the board have been pushing a resolution that would urge local school districts to defy Title IX protections for LGBTQ students that are being proposed by President Joe Biden’s administration, potentially putting federal money for free and reduced lunch and special education in jeopardy. The resolution remains under consideration. Board members have spent 10 hours taking public testimony and discussing it since September.
Most of the state school board campaigning and fundraising took place in just the past two months, Cropper said.
“Remember, this election cycle, no one knew what the lines were going to be,” she said. Every 10 years, the boundaries for the Ohio State Board of Education shift when Ohio Senate boundaries are redrawn. Gov. Mike DeWine changed state school board boundaries Jan. 31, a move panned by critics as gerrymandering. DeWine didn’t change the school board map, even as state mapmakers shifted the Senate’s boundaries found to violate the Ohio Constitution, and on July 14, Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose notified county boards of election to use the Jan. 31 changes DeWine made. Candidates for the state school board, which are nonpartisan, had to file to run for the seats Aug. 10, which left just a few months to campaign.
“It really was a crunch in trying to get quality candidates to run,” Cropper said. “We had incumbents we know that were not pro-public education, who were in my opinion, pushing these culture war issues at the state board level. And it was just critical to us that we could get them out of there. So we definitely were looking for people who understand public education, who have been engaged in conversations about equity, social-emotional learning, the whole child approach, all the things that are really important to us.”
The whole child approach refers to the state board’s 2019-2024 strategic plan that says the state is concerned with the “whole child,” not just academics but stressors children experience at home that can influence learning. In 2019, the Ohio Department of Education unveiled social-emotional learning standards that aim to help children become successful in their interactions with others, to establish positive relationships, manage their emotions, and make healthy, drug-free choices in life.
“My estimation is that people rejected extremists and the extreme issues that they’re bringing to the table and children are caught in the middle,” Fedor said Wednesday. “I believe this is an overall rejection of using our children as political fodder.” Fedor had the most name recognition among the state school board candidates. In addition to her legislative career, she was on the Democratic gubernatorial ticket this spring with former Cincinnati Mayor John Cranley. Fedor said that as she campaigned, she talked about reducing the number of standardized tests kids have to take. She talked about her own time in the classroom, when she worked an additional part-time job at the Toledo Zoo to make money for classroom materials.
She said she learned that people were horrified that Hill led Ohioans to the Jan. 6 rally. “There was a flood of different ideas and thoughts about what’s going on,” she said. “And they did not support the extremists who are bringing the extreme issues forward. The culture wars in the classrooms have to end so we can get to the business of educating our children with quality public education.”
Billionaires have been pouring millions of dollars into state and local school board races for at least the last dozen years. These elections are often flooded with money from out-of-state billionaires who support expansion of charter schools and invalid ways of evaluating teachers.
It’s great to see the unions step up and support state school board members who care about public schools and teachers and care about issues that matter, rather than divisive conflicts that don’t help anyone. The amount of money spent by the unions was small compared to what the billionaires spend, but it made a difference.
Republican Ellen Weaver, one of the state’s foremost champions of private school choice, has been elected South Carolina’s next superintendent of education.
A non-educator who has spent her career working in Republican politics and leading a conservative think tank, Weaver defeated Democrat Lisa Ellis, a veteran teacher and founder of grassroots teachers group SC for Ed, by nearly 13 points, according to unofficial election results.
South Carolina voters seem determined to undermine their low-performing public schools and allow students to go to any religious or private school that will take them, at public expense.
Voucher researcher Josh Cowen of Michigan State University says, after 20 years of studying them, that they set children back academically and that learning loss for vulnerable children at voucher schools is greater than the loss caused by the pandemic.
Diane Ravitch's blog 