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The Privateers: How Billionaires Created A Culture War and Sold School Vouchers
Josh Cowen
Harvard Education Press
ISBN: 9781682539101

Josh Cowen, a professor of education policy at Michigan State University, has written a profoundly unsettling horror story. But his creation does not involve the supernatural or creatures from the great beyond. Instead, The Privateers: How Billionaires Created A Culture War and Sold School Vouchers provides a meticulously detailed account of a 70-year-old plot to undermine public education. Cowen zeroes in on the rightwing billionaires and ideologues who want to end public education and transfer government funds, through school vouchers, to private — often evangelical Christian — educational institutions.

The evolution of this scheme involves a confluence of actors: Funding from donor networks spearheaded by Charles Koch and the Bradley, John M. Olin, DeVos Family and Walton Family foundations in conjunction with right-wing policy groups and a small cadre of well-placed conservative scholars and legal activists. Acting in tandem, these entities have painted public schools as bastions of ideological perversion, anti-white ideology and sexual permissiveness. 

The idea of public subsidies for private school students dates back right-wing efforts in the 1950s to undermine school integration.

It’s been effective: Under the aegis of “parental rights,” the last few years have seen books banned, teachers barred from discussing race and gender, and trans and queer kids left to fend for themselves.

Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of kids, most of them white Christians from politically conservative families, are either being homeschooled or attending private religious academies paid for with tax dollars.

How we got here is both fascinating and enraging. And even though vouchers have repeatedly failed to boost academic achievement, The Privateers stresses that this does not matter to the right wing. What’s more, the book documents the factual distortions aired by an echo chamber of media to dissuade religiously conservative parents from sending their kids to public schools. Christopher Rufo of the Manhattan Institute railing about the damage wrought by Critical Race Theory and Donald Trump’s imagined school-based conversion of Jimmy into Jane, are two recent examples, but Cowen notes that opposition to public education has deep roots and did not begin with Rufo, Koch, Trump or other contemporary right wingers. 

The Privateers situates the idea of vouchers with economist Milton Friedman, who in 1954 first posited “educational freedom” as a way for white parents to evade desegregation mandates. In the aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education, Cowen reports that a slew of private academies opened for the exclusive benefit of white children. The State of Virginia championed the idea of these separate schools. So did Texas, whose governor appointed an advisory committee to consider how best to proceed. That group set the stage, urging lawmakers to “give serious consideration to some sort of tuition grant plan, whereby a parent who does not wish to place his [sic] child in an integrated school may receive state funds to have the child educated in a segregated, non-sectarian private school.”

From there, the idea of academic subsidies took off. The Cato Institute, established by Charles Koch and his late brother David in 1977, further popularized the concept. Three years later in 1981, when the Council for National Policy brought conservative activists and donors together, vouchers were solidified as a key demand. As Cowen notes, vouchers went “from a political expedient against racial integration to a policy priority for some of the wealthiest and most influential actors on the religious right.” 

Surprisingly, however, it took until 1990 for Milwaukee to become the first municipality to create a publicly-funded voucher program. Ironically, advocates presented it as a way to give low-income children of color the same “choices” as kids from upscale families. Thanks to the leadership of Dr. Howard Fuller, who was Black, the role of racism in voucher history went unacknowledged. 

In the 34 years since, vouchers have expanded, providing funding to both secular and parochial schools in many places. This effort, Cowen writes, has been boosted by several well-placed (and well-financed) professors and university think tanks that give legitimacy to the effort. None have been more instrumental than Harvard’s Paul Peterson. He and colleagues Jay Greene and Patrick Wolf, Cowen writes, “are not an isolated group of conservative scholars shouting their views from the Ivory Tower;” conversely, they are part of a “tightly connected network of funders and right-wing activists” who’ve pushed tax support for private education for decades. Cowen calls them “soldier-scholars” and reports that their glowing research on voucher efficacy is riddled with flaws and fallacies.

It’s maddening. Nonetheless, the intricate web of deep-pocketed conservative funders, activists, lawyers and scholars that Cowen describes should be well understood by every supporter of public education. The fact that the right is successfully eroding church-state separation, using vouchers as a strategic entry point, is frustrating. By calling privatization “educational freedom,” their work has devalued public schools and, he writes, has “reoriented the notion of education from a public good to a private enterprise.”

The upshot, Cowen explains, is that “the school voucher movement is the parents’ rights movement and the parents’ rights movement is religious nationalism.” 

By which he means Christian nationalism.

Trump’s former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, a billionaire who spends lavishly on “school choice” has said that she wishes churches, not public schools, were community hubs. Cowen knows the danger this poses. “The fundamental threat to democracy by religious nationalism — whether in our schools or in our communities writ large — is not religious, per se,” Cowen wisely concludes. “It is what comes from that form of religious radicalism: In the case of U.S. education, a dangerous, domestic form of isolationism” that aims to sideline atheists, agnostics, and non-evangelical Christians.

We simply can’t allow this to happen.

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