Diane Ravitch’s closing remarks after her discussion with Josh Cowen about his new book, The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers, last Saturday contrasted what should be happening to what’s actually happening in North Carolina and across the nation.
“We should have smaller class sizes, we should have better paid teachers, schools should have the resources they need to provide the very best education regardless of their economic status. But instead of funding our public schools, large amounts of money are being diverted in NC, AZ, OH, FL, and many other states to subsidize the tuition of rich kids. This is not good public policy, it is vicious public policy.”
What’s more, pro-voucher policy has decades of evidence showing that it’s educationally harmful. Cowen described his early years as an education evaluation researcher when he was neutral and even somewhat optimistic about vouchers. When voucher programs were first introduced more than 20 years ago, proponents were confident in their success, so they agreed to rigorous evaluations and transparency.
“Many voucher programs were held to the same standards as public schools, with testing requirements and public reporting of data points such as high school graduation rates.”
The mantra in the early years (1990s – 2000s) was that vouchers were needed to save low-income students who were being harmed by public schools.
Then the data came out and was widely reported. For example, in 2017 the New York Times announced in, Dismal Voucher Results Surprise Researchers as DeVos Era Begins that “…even as school choice is poised to go national, a wave of new research has emerged suggesting that private school vouchers may harm students who receive them. The results are startling—the worst in the history of the field, researchers say.”
Cowen started speaking out about the problems with vouchers: “We’ve seen some of the worst results we’ve ever seen on any question in the history of education research coming out of voucher schemes. On top of that, we know, and we’ve known since 2007 that when vouchers scale up, they fund families that were already primarily in private schools.”
With data showing harmful effects of vouchers, proponents ended the brief life of voucher accountability and transparency. Instead of thinking “Maybe we got this wrong,” they said, “We’re not going to ask the question.” As a result, current voucher legislation such as North Carolina’s legislation, lacks meaningful evaluation metrics that would enable taxpayers to evaluate whether vouchers help students.
But across the nation, when asked to vote on vouchers through ballot initiatives, taxpayers overwhelmingly reject them (e.g., AZ, FL, MI, UT). Political scientists refer to ballot initiatives as direct democracy where people get an up or down vote on a particular piece of legislation or constitutional amendment.
(Currently, North Carolina has no process for allowing citizen-initiated ballot measures.)
As Cowen put it, “Vouchers have face-planted. It hasn’t even been close. It’s not just that vouchers have never survived a direct vote in states, although that’s true. They have been overwhelmingly defeated.”
And rejection of vouchers is bi-partisan. In some very conservative states (e.g., ID, TN, TX), rural Republicans have held the line on vouchers, recognizing the damage they will cause to rural communities. (Listen to a podcast about Idaho here.)
So why has voucher legislation passed in so many states if it’s not the will of the majority? Follow the money, says Cowen. Ravitch and Cowen point out that billionaire funders and their offshoot organizations have been targeting state legislatures to swing the vote toward vouchers. For example, in 2022, billionaire-funded pro-voucher organizations fueled campaigns to unseat anti-voucher Republicans in Iowa primaries—including the chair of the House Education Committee—and replace them with pro-voucher legislators. The following year, voucher legislation passed by a slim margin.
It’s no secret that the same thing is happening in other states. Billionaire Jeff Yass gave TX Governor Greg Abbot $6 million to help ensure that pro-voucher candidates unseat anti-voucher incumbents.
Learn more about the failure of vouchers and how billionaires are pushing the voucher agenda on the nation!
Did your legislators vote to expand vouchers? If they did, find out why!