How Billionaires Created a Culture War to Sell School Vouchers w/ Josh Cowen
In this episode, Brad Onishi interviews Dr. Joshua Cowen, a professor of education policy at Michigan State University, on the controversial issue of school vouchers in the US. They discuss the historical context of the voucher movement, tracing it back to economist Milton Friedman and its intersection with the Brown v. Board decision. The dialogue highlights the ideological motivations behind vouchers, linking them to conservative Christian nationalism and libertarian views on government regulation. Dr. Cowen offers a critical analysis of recent voucher programs in Milwaukee, Cleveland, and Washington, D.C., presenting evidence of their negative effects on academic outcomes. The conversation also delves into the cultural and political forces driving the voucher agenda, especially during the Trump administration, emphasizing the shift from evidence-based arguments to ideological ones.
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00:00 Introduction to Christian Nationalism and Education
00:41 Interview with Dr. Joshua Cowen
02:42 The Origins of the Voucher Movement
04:32 Libertarianism and Religious Right in Education
12:17 Voucher Programs and Their Impact
16:04 The Shift from Evidence to Ideology
25:10 The Rise of Culture Wars in Education
41:25 Hope and Future Directions in Education Policy
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It The Christian nationalism of Betsy DeVos meets the education industry of Charles Koch through this deep disdain of government, deep disdain of what they call regulation, and in a very practical sense, also deep antipathy toward labor unions.
Vouchers are the education equivalent of predatory lending.
When we really dig into what a lot of this panics about, it really comes back to pretty overt anti-LGBTQ stuff, too.
This is not all just about talking about human procreation, as they would call it.
They were talking about, like, Books about two women who are married and calling that pornography even though there's no mention of intimacy at all.
Today I speak to Dr. Joshua Cowan, Professor of Education Policy at Michigan State University and an author on all things related to education politics, school choice, and culture wars in the United States.
His work has appeared at the Dallas Morning News, Detroit Free Press, Hetchinger Report, Houston Chronicle, New Republic, Philadelphia Inquirer, Slate, Time, and others.
Dr. Cowan talks about the ways billionaires have concocted a scheme to weaken public schools and insert a voucher system that benefits those who want less regulation and more Christianity in our public square.
It's an eye-opening interview that demonstrates the decades-long effort to insert ideology over evidence when it comes to curriculum.
The ways that voucher systems have failed and yet they've been pushed forward, not because they work, But because of the ideology and theology behind them.
I'm Brad Onishi, and this is Straight White American Jesus.
As I just said, I'm joined today by Dr. Joshua Cowan and can't wait to discuss his book, The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers.
So, Dr. Cowan, Josh, thanks for joining me.
I was so excited when I saw this book.
It popped up on my feet a couple of months ago on X. You've been on X, Twitter, doing great threads and great, great stuff.
And I was excited because we have talked about this issue so many times in the show, but I feel like this was the book I've been looking for for years in terms of telling the story of school vouchers and connecting the dots in terms of how we got to Moms for Liberty, how we got to CRT Panics, and trying to convince folks this is not new.
There's a long history, but your book really is the work that I think draws it all together.
So Let's start at the beginning of the voucher movement.
This starts with an economist, Milton Friedman, and supposedly a drive for a kind of libertarian approach to education.
But as you point out, it coincides with a pretty landmark event in American judicial history, which is Brown v. Board.
So help us understand how those two things go together.
So Friedman kind of broke up his voucher idea or was writing it as the Brown Case was making its way through the judiciary.
Friedman published this a few months after Brown.
There's been some good archival work by Professor Nancy McLean at Duke and others, but I draw heavily on Dr. McLean's work in my book, pointing out that sort of Friedman was well aware of the Brown decision and was having a back and forth with his editors at this time and thinking about, well, okay, wait a minute.
It became immediately understood that this idea of using taxpayer funding to attend private school, get out of the public school system altogether, would be and could be and was seized upon by folks looking to avoid the ruling for mandatory racial integration that Brown put forward.
And sure enough, in the months after and in the years after, most of Southern states affected primarily by these rulings, even though it was a national ruling, in one way or another seized on the voucher idea.
Some successfully, some not so successfully in the legislatures.
But folks immediately understood, as did Friedman himself, that a voucher-type system could be used by parents.
To separate and isolate themselves according to their own preferences.
At that time, they were racial preferences.
As we'll talk about, there's different preferences perhaps today, but the idea certainly was using vouchers to separate and isolate folks based on parental preferences.
That was intended from day one.
Why would a libertarian like Friedman want there to be a voucher system?
I guess If we grant the benefit of the doubt that a staunch libertarian, whether it be a member of the Koch family or an economist, thinks that this is the best way forward for the education system, what would their argument be to kind of justify that?
All of this is based, if we take it seriously, as theory, which is a big if in my view.
But if we take it seriously as theory, all of this is reactive to two things.
One, this notion of government.
And two, relatedly, this idea of regulation.
So, Friedman and intellectual descendants of Friedman see public schools as one of the chief representatives of government, especially in local communities and states, and with them, regulation according to a whole host of things.
It's difficult to disentangle that notion of regulation in the education sector from its origins post-Brown, because once we start to talk about what regulation is in schools, as opposed to industry, you start very quickly getting to conversations about student admissions, racial makeup of kids, things like that.
But their argument would be government shouldn't be running schools, and to the extent there's government involvement, it should be highly deregulated and hands off those schools.
Ideally, in Freeman's view, ideally not even something that the public sector would be engaged in at all.
So this brings us into a history that I've written about in my book, I've talked about endlessly on this show, which is You have an economic libertarian theory, as you say, behind the idea of vouchers and school choice.
But that brings us into the realm of religion and a conservative Christian cosmos that in the middle 20th century, in the late 20th century, saw this philosophy and this theory as an opportunity To create an alternative school system in the form of schools that were attached to churches, but in many cases for white kids only.
I guess for me, this was just a wonderful, of so many of the religious historians and work I've done, to see you, an expert in the history of school choice, kind of bring in the history of the religious right and their reaction to Brown.
Can you help us understand that in a little more detail?
And is this, as a follow-up, is this how we get the DeVos family kind of as a titan of this whole movement?
So the first part of this...
There's so much good work out there by scholars, historians, reporters, who are sort of really stressing the role that race has played in the development of the modern Republican political party, up to and even including through the first Trump presidency.
And some of these folks will locate not just race, but specifically the issue of race in schools, in particular busing.
As an incredibly important fuel to the rise of Reagan in the late 70s, the Reagan presidency in the 80s, and on to the 90s.
So you have to talk about vouchers in this framework of the same sort of this Republican, this far right takeover of the Republican Party that It really goes all the way back to the Nixon years and the Reagan years.
They really didn't succeed at any sort of level of scale on the voucher side until 1990.
Where the DeVos folks come into this story really is the parallel processing, if you like, of other major religious right issues in the 70s, 80s, and into the early 90s.
You know, this was the same period of time that the Christian Coalition, Ralph Reed, and people like this kind of all started becoming prominent on the national scale.
It's not an accident that the first voucher program wasn't really in modern form passed until 1990, despite those origins.
All this stuff became politically pliable at the same, roughly the same time.
This brings me to one other family that I just want to make sure we get in.
So I think a lot of folks can imagine, if they've listened to this show, a situation where Brown v. Board is ruled, and that means schools need to be desegregated.
As a result, there are many Christian schools that are whites only across the South from Mississippi to Virginia.
And that leads to a kind of a movement among some of those those types those religious right conservative Christian types for vouchers.
Hey government give me money so that I can apply some of my tax dollars to the private school that just happens to be a segregation academy.
I think that it helps explain to why the DeVos family ends up in the mix.
I think a lot of folks listening will be familiar with them.
Something that I think vexes people quite often is the Koch family has long been in bed with the religious right and fighting the culture wars with them, despite the fact that the Kochs They are almost absolutely void of religious commitment.
They describe themselves as libertarian.
So my guess is they get in here because of the libertarian underpinnings of Friedman's theory, but would you help us understand how they become part of our whole scenario?
Friedman and the Kochs have a long history that I touch on a little bit in the book, but again, other writers have done much more extensive work on it.
Here I had named Jane Mayer's book, Dark Money, for example, as well as Nancy Maclean's, who was kind enough to give a jacket quote for mine.
And Dr. Maclean's book is called Democracy in Change.
But both of those writers talk about the Kochs and Friedman and the libertarian piece to all of this.
You know, libertarian If I'm honest, when you sort of look at how these things have played out in certain issue areas, like vouchers in my issue area, it's difficult to take it seriously as a coherent and consistent set of principles.
The bottom line is that they want government out of their business, their economic use of the word business.
I'm perfectly happy, especially when you bring in DeVos-type orientations to this and the religious right, to have government, of course, in other people's business when it comes to their personal lives and homes.
But if we're sort of taking this seriously again for the moment, where the Kochs come into this, think about the Kochs came out of the oil and gas industry, want government out of the way, want absolutely no regulatory authority when it comes to issues pertaining to things like climate change and the environment.
That's the fuel behind the Koch organizations.
Freedman was part of all those conversations too, especially in the 1970s.
He knew the Cokes very well.
Charles Coke's son said we actually literally had to read Freedman around the dinner table.
So it's not an accident that the godfather of school vouchers and all of these interactions started with the Coke industry folks.
Well, you know, while we're talking about deregulation, while we're talking about government, let's talk about school, right?
And so today, though, in practical terms, and that's origin story stuff, when we're talking today in practical terms, Koch is very old, is not as engaged in politics as Betsy DeVos herself is.
What are the through lines?
The Christian nationalism of Betsy DeVos meets the education industry of Charles Koch through this deep disdain of government, deep disdain of what they call regulation, and in a very practical sense, also deep antipathy toward labor unions.
And those pieces create a very natural space for them to make common cause around the issue of vouchers.
Let's talk about some of the voucher programs that did get off the ground and do provide some evidence on the effectiveness or lack of effectiveness of vouchers.
So, you discuss at length a couple of different voucher programs and schemes, one of them in Milwaukee and eventually in other locales across the Midwest, and then another in DC.
Would you take us through one of those or both?
And, you know, what did we learn from those ventures?
From bird's eye view, Milwaukee, 1990, first modern voucher system.
Push, push forward on, on, on.
You know, at the surface level, a bipartisan way, a Democratic legislator named Polly Williams, Republican Governor Tommy Thompson.
But with deep lobbying and backing from an organization called the Lindy and Harry Bradley Foundation, which is a big right-wing player in today's politics, particularly in Christian nationals and circles, Bradley has always been a big backer of vouchers.
But Milwaukee trial program didn't see a whole lot of Big results, one or the other, seemed to help.
Some kids seemed to not help some others, but didn't cause any particular academic harm.
It was 300 kids in the first year.
It wasn't huge.
It was not extended to religious schools in Milwaukee, and that was a key piece of that.
That fact was targeted for blame by voucher advocates who thought that once you allow religious schools in, the results will improve.
At the same time, they were having that debate A similar program, some of the same actors involved, got a voucher system in Cleveland, expanded, and that did involve religious schools from the beginning.
Both of these programs immediately went to court, and Cleveland became the site for the 2002 Supreme Court ruling Zelman v. Sinateros, which first said vouchers passed constitutional muster, even when used at religious schools, as long as there was not a compulsory religious, you know, attendance and things like that.
So those two programs kind of started the story and then as soon as Zellman was ruled advocates in D.C.
where the federal government has the most direct authority over school public schools, created a voucher system signed by George W. Bush early January of 2004 and the D.C.
voucher program was the first federally funded effort into the space.
2002 was not just the first Supreme Court ruling blessing vouchers.
It was also the last time directly unambiguously positive academic results were ever found from a voucher program.
It has been that long since we've seen, at least in the professional research community, positive results on academic outcomes measured by test score.
Few years of further evaluation in those spaces, including evaluations I was a part of, research I was part of in Milwaukee, expanded programs.
Didn't find any negative or positive effects, it just seemed like a wash.
Some parents seemed happy they were using this, some not.
Maybe some impacts positively on graduation rates, but nothing to write home about.
And then in a decade ago, 2014 or so, as these programs started expanding to Louisiana, to Indiana, to D.C.
again, expanded version of this, to Ohio, out from Cleveland into the state, we started to see that the bigger, the more recent the voucher system, particularly as targeted toward lower income families, the worse the results for kids on academics.
We started to see kids actually being academically harmed by these programs.
There's some reasons we can get into for that, but suffice to say, These results are almost unprecedented in education research history.
You just have to go to something, to a natural disaster, as I write about in the book, to Hurricane Katrina, or to COVID more recently, to sort of get a scale of magnitude for negative declines in these programs.
So this is where the story, I mean, for me, all of this is really compelling, but to me, the timing of this part of the story is really key.
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And please just jump in, correct me where I'm wrong, tell me what I'm missing, but it's 2014.
This is overwhelmingly bad news for the pro-voucher American nexus.
If you are the DeVosses, if you're the Kochs, if you're any of the folks who are foot soldiers on the ground pushing this stuff, We now have, like, a whole data set that just says, this doesn't work.
It's actually hurting children, whether it's in Louisiana or Ohio or other places.
On any of the metrics that they had been pointing to, and it's important to know, you know, not everyone, I think, realizes that the really modern era of standardized testing and academic accountability began also with the Bush administration, at least at the federal level.
And so all of this stuff was happening at the same time, conservatives and many Democrats were saying, we have to hold public schools accountable for their test scores.
And so then what happened is over the last decade on those metrics, academic outcomes, vouchers, not only failed to deliver, but absolutely hurt kids.
I mean, it was, it was in my view, and I was very much sort of part of some of these circles to some extent, never a voucher advocate, but you were working in, Evidence-based reform organizations, and these were conversations folks are having, like, well, I guess we're going back to charter schools, because charter schools were not showing this kind of negative result.
Part of the reason here, part of what's going on is that these schools, as they scaled up, you know, these are not schools that are elite providers of academic opportunity.
These are largely what I call subprime providers.
They're often, as we said earlier, attached to churches, or they're just not Being attached to a church as a church school does not definitionally make the school poor academic quality, but these are not schools that are stressing academic outcomes.
In Milwaukee, when we sort of dug into some of the data, many of the schools that were performing below the fifth percentile, so 95% of other schools in the state were performing better than these voucher schools on math and science exams.
Well, what were those schools teaching?
They were teaching creationism.
As an example.
Well, it's not a surprise that a school teaching creationism to fourth graders isn't going to go do well on a science exam or a math exam for that matter.
And that's why you see these results so poorly.
And so up until 2014 or so, even the DeBosses, these religious nationalists, were not really talking in flavors related to culture.
They were talking in parents' rights and some broad strokes.
But you weren't talking about woke.
You weren't talking about where kids go to the bathroom or any of the stuff that you hear about all the time now.
You're talking about academics still.
And that, in my view, the shift came in part because of these negative voucher results right around the air.
2014 when they first started to appear, 15 or so, But it really wasn't until the Trump years that the results really started, and you had like the New York Times covering this stuff.
At that level of visibility, that's when the conversation shifted during the Trump years to, you know, the more kind of book Banny type stuff.
Well, and it seems worth pointing out at this point in the conversation that, look, as an American, you have the freedom to send your kid to a school that's teaching Croatianism.
The difference with the voucher set is that it's asking taxpayers to subsidize that school or that education in some way.
And so now we're talking about a whole different conversation where it's not just you're choosing to send your child to a school that's attached to your Baptist church or your wherever and that's your choice.
This is a matter of taxpayer funds either going there or in many cases being diverted there and not going into the taxpayer kind of pots or the tax collection pots.
The timing, though, I think you just touched upon is really something I want to impress upon everyone listening, which is 2014, you get the disastrous data set that basically says vouchers are not working and they're actually hurting so many kids across the country.
So then there's a turn and the turn is not, well, that didn't work.
I guess we'll have to do something else.
Like I'm imagining you in some of these briefings and some of these like eval sessions, sort of delivering data and looking at folks who are kind of invested in these things and having to be the bearer of bad news.
And it, at that point in my research agenda, we were unpacking sort of what we call secondary issues, like who's using these programs or what are they doing?
But some of these results were coming in.
Even from voucher advocacy organizations, this was not unknown stuff.
This was not, you know, some liberal think tank coming in.
These were, in some cases, coming from voucher advocacy organizations that, to their credit, were at least putting the data out there.
It was a shock.
And you've seen, it's really difficult to stress how bad these results were.
And I think you have to go to The reason that I stress the disaster level impacts of these things isn't just as a reference point, but also to try to kind of underscore the seriousness of what we're finding here.
And I would just say, just as a follow up to your first point about using private funds to go to these creationism schools.
It isn't just that vouchers are costing taxpayers money that could be spent elsewhere.
I mean, that's, I think, some of the big danger here is that the dollars get soaked up when you're spending money on voucher schools, especially today's version, where 70% of voucher users are already in private school first anyway.
These are just new subsidies for old choices.
The big problem from my perspective, as someone who really is still committed to social justice and to trying to kind of use evidence to inform public policy, vouchers are the education equivalent of predatory lending.
So it's not just that, you know, somebody else is using some tax dollars to go to some Christian school that's going to teach creationism, you know, that's their business.
It's more than that.
It's that these schools are going out recruiting lower income families, kids who have been perhaps underserved by the public school system and say, come to us, you'll do better here.
And the plain reality is they're not.
They're being underserved.
There's a status, isn't there, to be in a private school?
dollars follow those children into those schools with no care for the academic outcomes for those children, or at least not in any way parents are going to can assess how well those kids are actually doing relative to the, to the kids.
There's a status, isn't there to be in a private school?
You know, you can imagine somebody in one of those neighborhoods thinking, oh, I can, I can put my kid in a private school.
That's something that, that I aspire to.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it's a marker of having achieved something in the American dream in some way.
But as you're saying, it oftentimes is predatory.
It oftentimes is actually really harmful.
I just want to zero in on the timeline.
So it's 2014.
Disastrous results everywhere.
This is uniformly bad.
Professional researchers like you are like, well, I guess that's the, you know, maybe not you, but one might have concluded, well, this is the end of vouchers.
That does it, folks.
Wrap it up.
This is not going to happen.
Our team played 60 games.
We won one and lost 59.
Probably get rid of the coach and most of the players.
And yet, that's not what happens.
That's the end of the Obama years.
Shockingly, Trump enters the White House, and with Trump, here comes Betsy DeVos as Education Secretary.
Here comes all of this favorability for vouchers.
But as you say in the book, and it is so poignant, This is when it went from evidence to values.
Would you help us understand that?
Evidence to ideology.
And, and, you know, I firmly believe, so Donald Trump didn't pass a voucher program.
Betsy DeVos, for all of the efforts she sort of, as Department of Ed Secretary, she did a lot on like rolling back protections for certain kids and things like that.
But she didn't get a voucher program passed.
What the Trump administration did, in addition to appointing judges, we can talk about if you like, but is in some sense stabilize a foundering voucher movement.
I felt and still looking back on this time period, you know, I feel sort of naive looking back on things today, given what we all know about the last eight or nine years of thinking, well, you know, these, these, these results should have ended this voucher idea once and for all.
Many, many other education interventions have died, essentially, for far less worse results.
I mean, you just don't get very many.
You talk to academics out there, they're always, will say, we're an on the one hand, on the other hand profession.
You'll sort of say, well, there's some good things and bad things.
You just don't get something that's clear very often.
And so it took.
Like, I do not believe that vouchers would be here today without the absolute resurgence of Christian nationalism that came during the Trump years, that came with the end of the Obama years, into the Trump administration, and all the stuff that came with it, like Charlottesville, new attacks on LGBTQ Americans, and now we came out of the Trump years, we're in book vans.
These things gave fuel and energy, aid and comfort to the voucher movement at a very perilous time for it, and that's why we are here.
Help us understand that.
So it seems as if you go from a place where if you're wanting to advocate for vouchers, And if what's behind that is wanting to weaken the public school system, if it is wanting to send as many kids possible to Christian education, whatever's behind this push for vouchers going all the way back to Friedman and fights about desegregation in the middle 20th century, You can no longer in 2014 argue on the basis of evidence, on the basis of performance.
So you've got to shift.
And I think this is really what brings us into the period that people are feeling today, which is the shift is the rhetoric is going to be about a culture war issue, ideology driven kind of message rather than these are good for kids and their performance in schools.
There's no data for it.
So now it's just Where do kids go?
Who can use what bathroom?
CRT panic.
But that all starts right there at the beginning of the Trump years.
And I'm wondering if you can help us understand how they repackaged all of this around ideology rather than evidence.
Well, the idea of parents' rights has been a long-standing sort of phrase in the right-wing movement.
Betsy DeVos in the 90s, when she was really active in the voucher space, was part of organizations trying to get a parents' bill of rights into state constitutions.
Milton Friedman, in his Voucher Idea essay after Brown, simply said, and actually in the essay itself, talks about how parents could theoretically use a voucher to attend an all-white school or an all-black school if they wanted to, and it was the parent's right.
So that phrase, parent's rights, that we hear all about right now, has historical origins.
And it was around, even in Cleveland, after the Supreme Court case, Ken Starr, famous Clinton prosecutor, actually was the voucher defense attorney in 2002 at the Supreme Court.
And they asked him, well, you know, these results don't look so good for voucher users.
They weren't negative, but they didn't look great.
Why are we doing this?
And he said, parents are happy.
Parents have the right to do this.
Let's just leave it at that.
The idea that parents' rights is the answer is the outcome we should be all focused on.
Listen, nobody here, and we'll be careful about this because every time we talk about parents' rights somebody comes and says Cowan doesn't care about parents' rights.
The idea though that as long as parents are happy with the school they're in is not a standard that's applied to public education.
It is only a standard that sort of came as an outcome policymakers should care about with voucher programs.
It came in behind the negative results on the academic front.
And that's where we start having these conversations, as long as parents are happy.
But parents' rights dating back to Brown has always been used to cover up far more insidious belief systems and permission structures than just simply the ability of a parent to go in and view the material of what their child's reading in school, which we all have the right to do, by the way.
We all do.
Every time you're parents at your conferences, many of them booked out for this upcoming fall, right?
Part of it, you talk about what the kids are reading and learning.
So we're talking about a lot more than that.
And in the fifties, it was, it was specifically, there's some legislation, Texas, for example, where parents had to sign an affidavit under one proposal.
They had to sign an affidavit to get a voucher, that affidavit attesting to the fact that they were asking for the voucher specifically because they did not want their child attending a mixed-race school.
Today, racial discrimination is illegal even with private schools.
At least formally.
But there's other things.
So we've got examples of places like Arkansas.
State Department of Education in Arkansas a few months ago put out these videos promoting private schools that were receiving voucher funding.
A reporter down in Arkansas went through and found all kinds of anti-LGBTQ requirements in those schools.
So you cannot be an LGBTQ parent and send your kid to those schools.
We've got reporting from Florida showing LGBTQ teachers, for example, were thrown out of voucher schools, fired from voucher schools there.
You know, and that's just one issue, but I'm mentioning the LGBTQ discrimination specifically because it does coincide with the same period of time, this rise of, re-rise of Christian nationalism, all under the name of this sort of blanket parents' rights idea.
I just really appreciate you giving us the history of the parents' rights, you know, decrees and ideals, because I think those are things people are living every day.
I get emails all the time from parents asking about their school boards, asking about the school curriculum that their students are enduring.
And they don't understand how people talk about these things in terms of parents' rights, a right to throw out books, a right to exclude certain topics.
And I think the history you're giving us gives us insight into that.
Is this where, and I think the answer I already know, but is this where we get the emergence of a CRT panic or a Moms for Liberty, a figure like Christopher Rufo?
Does it come out of this whole nexus?
Thanks for listening today, y'all.
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We're going to start a newsletter next week that I'll be putting the information on those platforms.
I'll do a little advertising and say, we will both be speaking at the Freedom from Religion Foundation National Gathering, September 26, 27 out in Denver.
So if you're in Denver, if you're in Kansas, if you're in, you know, anywhere around that region, come hang out and, and Catherine Stewart will be there too.
So there'll be a bunch of other wonderful people and it should be a really good time.
