How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers

Episode 218 Refuse Fascism

Sun, Sep 22, 2024 4:57PM • 51:48

Josh Cowen  00:00

The vouchers began as an idea right before the civil rights movement in an era of mandatory racial integration and have expanded over the last few years despite horrific academic impacts on kids. Trump [Agenda] 47 of the Trump campaign platform is basically just a Cliff’s Notes version of Project 2025. Same idea, eliminate the key anti discrimination watchdog in the U.S., U.S. Department of Ed[ucation], and then universal school vouchers, and then attacks on what they call “gender ideology,” “woke” public schools and so on and so forth. It’s nestled next to these awful attacks on gender, on race. It’s nestled next to whole sections of writing and screed about rolling back reproductive freedom, about contraception — some really, truly radical, and fringe things, driven by a very specific Christian nationalist vision.

Sam Goldman  01:05

Welcome to episode 218 of the Refuse Fascism podcast, a podcast brought to you by volunteers with Refuse Fascism. I’m Sam Goldman, one of those volunteers and host of the show. Refuse Fascism exposes, analyzes and stands against the very real danger and threat of fascism coming to power in the United States. In today’s episode, we’re sharing an interview with Dr. Josh Cowen, author of The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers. Thanks to our patrons who make this show possible.

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This week, the Guardian reported on a study that Trump supporters on X (Twitter) are more likely to believe Trump’s lies when they have been marked as disputed. According to the authors of the study, they simply wanted to find out if the disputed function, a box that pops up on untruths after multiple users flagged the item, had a positive impact at all on Trump’s supporters, but did not expect that it would have a negative impact, seemingly bolstering the idea that Trump’s lies are courageous truths that people don’t want you to hear. This gives some real insight into the way that the fascist “alternate facts” and whole alternative reality are used and received.

This week, we’ve seen J.D. Vance doubling down on his demonization of Haitian migrants. In the course of admitting that the pet eating claims had no valid source, he has attacked members of the media for pointing out that the continuing wave of bomb threats and mass shooting threats is a clear result of the fear-mongering statements from Trump and himself. We’ve seen patriarchal and anti-semitic commentary that North Carolina Lieutenant Governor and the Republican nominee for governor Mark “some folks need killin'” Robinson posted on online forums, including porn sites over the course of years. 

CNN wielded damning evidence exposing his accounts where, amongst other things, he claimed he was, in all caps, a Black Nazi, and we’ve seen these allegations flatly denied without even a mention of the evidence. While some in the Republican orbit will act shocked and distance themselves, let’s be clear: This is who Mark Robinson has always been, and he is not an outlier. He is the MAGA mascot. This is the Republican Party. Time to dispense with our surprise, not our revulsion. 

As John Ganz put it well: “Wow, this guy’s really nuts. Yes. And these are the Republicans today. This is it. For the billionth time: This is who they are. They are the lunatics who post racist stuff on porn sites. This is not fringe. These are not lone wackos. This is the essence of the party. They are the porn site Nazi guys.” The GOP, deranged and dangerous. The time we spend gawking and laughing that this is their end is time that the fascist movement spreads and normalizes. An example of this is that it is no longer news when, in an all cap screeds,

Trump calls for remigration, which is fascist speak for ethnic cleansing. And we’ve seen Trump at a supposed event to pledge to fight anti-semitism, up the ante, from saying that if he loses in November, it will be because of fraud, to saying out loud that Jews will be to blame. His words make clear that Zionism is not about Jewish safety, but primarily about the interests of American Empire. And this statement is just one more endorsement of the great replacement theory, asserting that Jews are trafficking migrants of color into the U.S. to vote Democrat and commit white genocide. It was a threat none of us should take lightly.

So let’s talk about the election that is about six weeks away in the United States’ convoluted electoral system, state legislatures are given the prerogative to decide how elections work in their state, even in regard to federal elections. Over the course of this country’s history, state governments have found every which way to limit, overrule, suppress and manipulate the will of the people. Now, for the last four years, since Trump refused to accept the results of the 2020 election, fascists have been strategizing to undermine the elections themselves through legal challenges, outright lies, and the very real threat of mass violence. 

These efforts took a leap this past Friday at a meeting of the unelected Georgia State election board. In Georgia, the legislature commissioned a board to administer elections according to the laws passed by that legislature. The Georgia Supreme Court has additionally made clear that this board’s role is logistical. Going far beyond their prescribed role, the three member majority, with the explicit support of Donald Trump, has taken it upon themselves to gum up the works and supersede state election laws. At this past meeting, the Board approved a motion that the Republican state Attorney General made clear was illegal, that was preemptively challenged by Georgia’s Secretary of State, and which election professionals from across the state vehemently opposed. 

They voted to require each county to count ballots by hand in an effort to overwhelm the election infrastructure, delay results, sow doubt, potentially throw out whole counties worth of votes, or even throw the whole election to the Republican controlled House of Representatives. This comes on top of the same board’s decision to preemptively investigate every County’s returns before certifying results. In addition to sowing confusion, these moves all seem aimed at delaying certification past mandatory deadlines set by the state and the federal government, which would result in throwing out the election results altogether. 

At the meeting, state Congresswoman Draper called out the fascist board and called out her fellow critics for limiting their comments to logistics and maintaining the veneer that these changes were being proposed in good faith, stating: “I think what is happening is we are setting up our counties to fail,” going on to say: “and when these counties fail, when there are inaccuracies, if there is a result of the election that some of the members of this board do not like, they will be able to point to those inaccuracies, and they will say that this is — that the election is — inaccurate; that there is a lack of integrity in the election.” 

These accusations are no longer speculative, as the Guardian has obtained emails from a confederacy of election deniers calling themselves the Georgia Election Integrity Coalition. This group includes Georgia state lawmakers and Election Officials, alongside other MAGA die hards strategizing together to throw the election to Donald Trump. Janice Johnston, one of the fascists dominating the election board, spoke to a meeting of the coalition. Media Matters published a collection of the widespread criticism of the moves by the board, as well as the ecstatic response from leading election deniers across the country, so check out the show notes for those mentioned resources. 

On the same day as the meeting of the Georgia state Board of Elections, the Ninth Circuit Federal Court of Appeals signed off on Arizona’s attempt to disenfranchise voters and suppress voter outreach and registration efforts. Simultaneously, Oklahoma purged almost 200,000 eligible voters from their voter rolls due to alleged “inactivity.” That’s more than 8% of the total voters in the state. And weeks away from the election, the GOP is working tirelessly to change Nebraska’s electoral vote process to benefit Trump. 

All of this is given support by the Supreme Court, which over the last few decades has effectively ruled that changing the rules in the last weeks before an election is often unconstitutional, unless those rule changes help elect fascists, in which case, it would be unconstitutional NOT to change the rules. These fascists know that they are in the minority. They know that even with the advantage they receive from the reactionary Electoral College, Trump may lose the election, but in their mind, this is the last chance to salvage the promise of a white Christian America dominating the globe. They’re not going to let a silly little thing like an election get in the way of that. 

This situation exposes the strength of the fascists, their missionary zeal, their ruling class support, their million strong base of support, steeped in the deluded and hateful mythology of their movement — but it also exposes their extraordinary weakness, where even they recognize that they don’t have a hope of winning a majority of this country to their worldview and program. The question is: Will enough of that non-fascist majority simply roll over, limit their resistance to pushing a button every four years, or will we collectively find the paths to defeating the fascist threat?

Amber Nicole Thurman was a 28 year old Black woman, a medical assistant, the mother of a six year old son. Because she lived in Georgia, a state where abortion is banned, she was left to die by those fully equipped to save her. Like many who seek an abortion, she wanted one in order to provide the best she could for the child she already had. Her last words to her own mother before she died were: “Promise me you’ll take care of my son.” 

Due to abortion being banned in Georgia and the steep obstacles of getting care out of state, Nicole self administered an abortion via medication. As safe as these medications are, we know that when complications arise, timely medical intervention is absolutely necessary,. But the doctors at Piedmont Henry Hospital in Atlanta waited 20 excruciating hours watching her vital signs falling, observing her organs failing, before providing care that was too little and too late.As Jessica Pieklo wrote: “She should not have been forced to travel to North Carolina for care, and she shouldn’t have died in a Georgia hospital waiting for a life saving dilation and curettage (D&C), while administrators, lawyers and doctors weighed their own professional interests against Thurman’s deteriorating medical condition.” 

Candy Miller, a Black woman, age 41, was a mother like Amber. Candy had three children. She was a lover of stray cats. She, however, had a high risk pregnancy, and instead of dealing with doctors who could not legally help her, she ordered abortion pills from overseas. She did not expel all the fetal tissue and needed a D&C procedure to fully complete the abortion and prevent sepsis. She writhed in pain for days, fearing prosecution if she went to the hospital, fearing that they wouldn’t, couldn’t help her. She died at home with her three year old daughter at her side. 

Both women were killed by abortion restrictions in the months immediately following the Dobbs decision in 2022. The doctors who privileged their own career and fear of prosecution over Amber’s life have blood on their hands. The doctors who made women feel unsafe to go seek care, have blood on their hands. The Georgia legislature that banned abortion has their blood on their hands. Supreme Court “Justices” Alito, Thomas, Roberts, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Coney Barrett have Amber and Candy’s blood on their hands. Donald “women won’t even think about abortion if I win” Trump, who stacked the Supreme Court with Christian fascists, with the direct aim of overturning Roe, most certainly has the blood of these women on his hands. 

So do the Democrats who may run on abortion rights, but drop it once they have power, and so do those reproductive rights organizations and activists who kept people from flooding the streets, bringing society to a halt, acting when we could have stopped this overturn of Roe and protected the legal right to abortion federally — these forces who told fairy tales that it wouldn’t be that bad because it wasn’t like before — abortion pills forever — am I right? To be clear, I love abortion pills, they are safe and a game changer, but to think we can DIY [do it yourself] our way out of a situation where our humanity is diminished, where we have lost control of our destiny, where we have had this basic right be stolen, where we have no additional protection should we need or want medical care, is ludicrous. 

We’ve been saying, I’ve been saying and mourning for years, that: Yes, when abortion is illegal, women’s bodies are hijacked by the state and their dreams and freedom stolen, that banning abortion is state violence. And when people didn’t want to hear it, we showed it — I showed it by participating in dramatic die-ins and displaying pictures of those who died from illegal or inaccessible abortions, to put clearly starkly, that women die without this basic right. We were told — I was told — that that was in the olden days, that today, with the abortion pill, that wouldn’t happen. Well, Amber and Candy are dead, and there is no workaround for the state declaring you a second class citizen. We are only hearing their stories two years later. They are likely not the first, and unless and until we get legal abortion on demand, they won’t be the last. 

In an interview with PBS, Kavitha Surana, who broke this story, and did so with such tremendous care (she broke the story for ProPublica), explained: “Every state does have a committee that reviews maternal deaths, and they look at the root causes and make some findings about them, but those committees are about two years behind and just now starting to look at cases that happened after Roe was overturned and these abortion bans came into effect. So we have a lot of reason to believe that there are more women whose stories have been impacted by the inability to get a legal abortion in their state, and we’re continuing to work on bringing them to light.” 

These deaths are heartbreaking and enraging. They were predictable and preventable. They are not an unfortunate byproduct of good faith efforts to save fetuses. They are the desired outcomes of the Christian fascists for whom women only exist to serve men and produce children — men, and women too, overflowing with disdain for any woman of childbearing age who fails to churn out one baby aft,er another, let alone those who choose not to. This is the 21st century American fascist movement with their hands on the levers of power, in the Supreme Court, in the House of Representatives, in state governments clawing their way back into the White House. 

If we leave our fates, our lives, our futures, solely stuck in the framework of elections alone, I need to ask — we need to ask: How many deaths will we accept? How many mothers, sisters, daughters stolen? How many women snuffed out, dying, painful and preventable deaths? How many maimings? How many horrors will we tolerate? Because their blood will be on our hands too if we don’t rise up for Abortion on Demand and Without Apology. With that, here’s my conversation with Josh.

It’s become the new normal that school board members, teachers and librarians are hounded, sometimes having their very lives threatened by MAGA  mobs opposing any teaching about the reality of oppression of Black people and other oppressed people, and any attempts for schools to recognize the humanity of LGBTQ people. Book bans continue to rise in one county after another, and one state after another. The students and faculty at colleges and universities face unprecedented levels of suppression of pro-Palestinian speech, and violent repression for daring to speak out and stand up against the U.S. role in the genocide in Gaza that has killed at least 17,000 children and destroyed every university in Gaza — all while the separation of church and state gets eviscerated, as the Republi-fascists work to lock down public schools as centers of indoctrination for the next generation of Christian nationalist soldiers. 

Looking at Project 2025, and Agenda 47, we see a detailed and disturbing blueprint for the dismantling of the Department of Education. At the heart of their plan is the total elimination of protections for students and religious freedom, including freedom from religion. We get a preview of this Christian fascist vision for American education with Louisiana Public Schools forced to post the Ten Commandments, with Oklahoma’s implementation of the Bible in every subject of its curriculum, efforts in Texas to mandate a new English language arts curriculum that incorporates Bible teachings for elementary school students. 

We get a preview of it in the chaplain bills that seek to replace school counselors with chaplains, and “don’t say period” laws in Florida that restrict teaching about menstruation in grades where many girls will get their first period, and we see it in voucher efforts advancing across the country. To discuss this topic, I am so thrilled to welcome Josh Cowen, author of the just released book ‘The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers.’ It unveils the deeply troubling history of education privatization, showing how voucher programs championed by wealthy conservatives and driven by Christian nationalist agendas going far beyond educational reform, have not only failed to deliver on their promises, but have reinforced so much of what education seeks to overcome. 

Cowen’s investigation, in my opinion, really highlights how these programs are originally rooted in resistance to school desegregation, but are now backed by powerful networks of billionaires and special interests and have deeply exacerbated inequality and undermined the very fabric and possibility of public education in this country. Josh, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for coming on to Refuse Fascism.

Josh Cowen  20:16

Thanks Sam. Thanks for having me.

Sam Goldman  20:18

For a person who’s just learning about this, what are vouchers?

Josh Cowen  20:22

Vouchers are a collection of different policy schemes that send taxpayer funding to private K-12 tuition. There’s some technical ways they do this, but for our purposes today, there’s five or six different ways of doing this. Vouchers are taxpayer subsidies for private school tuition.

Sam Goldman  20:41

Out of the litany of assaults on public education that I know that you follow and track, what brought you to focusing on vouchers in this moment, and helping people understand what’s going on here.

Josh Cowen  20:59

I started studying vouchers as a young researcher, more than 20 years ago, at this point, in my 20s, and just as part of the research assistant/graduate student on a number of different teams that were looking at vouchers, studying vouchers, talk about a little bit about them the book. I’ve always been looking at this, at least as an adult, as a professional in this space. I’m a policy analyst by training. What that means is I look at public programs, particularly in education, usually with lots of other folks on my team, and we ask questions like: Does this program work? If so, for whom? If not, why not? 

Vouchers were subjected, when I first was beginning my career, to those same questions. Over the last decade, vouchers caused some of the worst academic declines we’ve ever seen on any research question in the policy analysis community. So while I was working on lots of other studies and evaluations of public programs, this voucher push kept growing, despite this horrific set of results for kids. The question the book starts out answering, or tries to answer, seeks to answer, really is: Why are these programs persisting despite these horrific impacts for kids? 

The answer is that it’s really not about academic results for kids at all, despite the fact that these are absolutely sold by the right in American politics as solutions to so called failing public schools — it’s actually not about any of that at all, it’s about this larger moment that we’re in in American political history, Christian nationalism, culture wars and so on and so forth. That’s the conclusion that I come to in the book, and I explain sort of why I how I came to that conclusion myself and why it’s pretty straightforward today, unfortunately.

Sam Goldman  22:36

Thanks for that overview. I feel like part of understanding this story is understanding where the voucher movement first began and what compelled its rise. Because when people, I feel like hear it today, you hear something like universal school choice, and if that’s all you hear, you say: Well, choice… choice is good.

Josh Cowen  22:57

Yeah, it’s good question. The idea for vouchers began in 1955 with a conservative economist named Milton Friedman proposing this idea as public funding to individual parents and to sort of do what they wanted with their own education side. And that sounds great. It’s important to understand the moment Friedman was writing in was 1955. That essay he proposed vouchers in was coming just months after Brown versus Board of Education ordered public schools and other public spaces to be desegregated. So segregationists immediately latched onto the Friedman idea as a potential way to avoid racial integration. 

Now fast forward to 1990 where the first modern voucher system began in Milwaukee — also the result of conservative lobbying and activity, there was a couple of Democratic legislators involved in that original legislation — but for the most part,  this was a conservative push. This was the end of the Reagan years, the beginning of the first Bush years. This was not out of the mainstream of Republican Party politics, and really even, again, some conservative Democrats. Cleveland, Ohio came after Milwaukee, also a pilot size program. We’re talking about a few hundred kids, a handful of private schools involved, religious schools in those cases. 

In Cleveland, the Cleveland case ended up going to the Supreme Court in 2002 and the Supreme Court in a five, four decision, the same five justices that had recently given George W. Bush the presidency said, you know this Cleveland program passes constitutional muster; it does not violate separation of church and state as long as kids aren’t compelled to attend religious services or anything like that while using their voucher. So they actually did put a pretty firm wall around that at that time, but over the last few years, since 2017 onward, beginning of the Trump presidency, the Supreme Court has, in three subsequent decisions, eroded that separation even further, and now says, in a ruling that came three days, by the way, before Dobbs v. Jackson rolled back 50 years of reproductive freedom in this country, the Supreme Court, same six justices, expanded the rights of religious schools to take public funding for, explicitly, the use of religious education, and that’s the moment we’re in today.

Sam Goldman  25:04

I want to go back to one point that you made, and then hit a little bit more on what’s driving this when it’s obviously not academic success or embetterment, or even one thing that gets put out a lot is rural plight; lack of schooling in rural areas, for example. When originally the idea was for vouchers to subsidize keeping white kids in segregated schools. Since that time, it’s gone through so many permutations, including the time period where vouchers were overwhelmingly given to black families. Zet, every step of the way this concept has advanced white supremacy, and I was hoping you could tell us a little bit more about that.

Josh Cowen  25:46

I stop at trying to understand individual motivations. What’s not arguable, it is a matter of the historical record, is that the idea for vouchers began in the era of mandatory desegregation. It’s inarguable that today, despite the fact that the vast majority of voucher users in the early days of these programs in Milwaukee and in Cleveland and in Washington, D.C., where I got started working on this 20 years ago, were students of color. 

Today, overwhelmingly, most new users are white and higher income, and we can talk about how that’s changed, where that came from, specifically. But listen, Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, last year, about 15 months ago, signed a bill expanding Florida to the biggest voucher system we have in this country. Within weeks of that, it was also defending a curriculum for Florida public schools that said more or less that slavery in American history had some economic benefits for enslaved people. DeSantis not only backed that particular curriculum, but actually doubled down and defended that curriculum and said, Well, you know, there were economic benefits for enslaved people, like blacksmithing — they learned important skills. 

So those are just sort of matters of the public record. You don’t need to unpack the individual motivations of this to just sort of mark the fact that the vouchers began as an idea right before the civil rights movement in an era of mandatory racial integration in public spaces, and have thrived and expanded over the last few years — despite horrific academic impacts on kids — have thrived in an era where it’s apparently okay to muse publicly about the benefits that slavery had for enslaved people. So  these are part of the same larger cultural, political moments we’re in, for sure.

Sam Goldman  27:27

In this interview and in this book, you talk about how something that is devoid of any evidence basis for its use, let alone its proliferation and subsidies, that vouchers are being promoted — not, again, because of any evidence that would say this is what’s good for kids, but because of an agenda that’s driving it. I was hoping that you could walk us a little bit through where you see that change happening. At what point did you uncover in your research that it is not because people believe that this is working — that there is a Christian nationalist agenda driving it?

Josh Cowen  28:08

The first really horrible negative impacts on student learning started to become public in 2017. This was the first months of the Trump presidency. Betsy DeVos, the billionaire heiress in my state, who became Secretary of Education for Trump, famous voucher backer, a big character in this book — right around that same time, vouchers started to really roll out some of the most negative results we’ve ever seen. I really can’t overstate how negative these results were. 

Sometimes I think folks get bogged down in debates about standardized tests, or so we hold public schools accountable to certain academic outcomes, and I of course, and I of course have thoughts on those things. But the question for the voucher world really is: While we are measuring public schools by test scores, let’s see how private schools using vouchers are doing, too. We can have the more philosophical debate for a second, but the answer is horrifically. So, while conservative billionaires, including Betsy DeVos and right wing think tanks are beating up on public schools for their academic results as measured by standardized tests, with what they’ve been trying to do since those horrific results on those exact same measures, they’ve been trying to sort of move the goalposts to other outcomes. What are those other outcomes? 

My view, and I think this is just a matter of the historical record, is that increasingly, these are tied to these larger political moments we’re in. Again, what else was going on in 2017? That was the Charlottesville riots, came up in the presidential debate the other night, where Trump said there were both sides had good people on that Charlottesville rally — where, apparently, again, became sort of the norm on one side of the political spectrum to talk about potentially American slavery having positive enough benefits for enslaved people. J.D. Vance, vice presidential candidate, said in a recent interview that professors are the enemy. 

They identify Diversity Equity and Inclusion initiatives on college campuses as “too woke,” so to speak. So all these things are fitting together, as far as this moment we’re in, and becoming the new motivation for these voucher schemes, as the academic results have really nosedived into some pretty low standards. The last thing I just wanted to sort of add to this too, is: It’s really important to know that in state after state after state that’s passed voucher schemes the last few years, 70% of voucher users were already in private school, and 30% do transfer from public to private, and those are the kiddos that really do suffer those academic consequences, but that 70% that are already in those private schools… we can talk a lot about Christian nationalism — the book talks a lot about it. We can talk a lot about kind of these cultural war moments — my books about those things. But we also have to just remember that a lot of this is just good old fashioned garden variety using the tax subsidy to underwrite existing choices for increasingly wealthier families. That’s an inescapable part of today’s voucher moment as well.

Sam Goldman 30:49

In my opinion. And something that you get into the book is it’s not just about the individual effects or the individual impact on students, for instance, academic performance, but what this does to public education overall, when it happens in state after state, or if they were able to have universal vouchers. I don’t know if there was anything that you wanted to lift up there.

Josh Cowen  31:11

Right Wing influencers are very clear that to get universal vouchers, you have to undermine confidence in public schools. It’s a strategic, it’s not conspiracy oriented. This is just definitely very clear that they are trying to undermine public education with these attacks on woke or on DEI or whatever else. And then the other piece of this is that vouchers do, especially as they become larger, do really threaten public school funding. Particularly the state portion of public school funding is very important for equalizing access to resources among, particularly, low income communities. So that’s where vouchers threaten to defund public schools, really, is in individual states that cannot afford to pay for two education sectors, especially when a wealthier sector has been paying for it on its own until now. The impact on public school finances is pretty dreadful, particularly as these things expand.

Sam Goldman  31:55

Then there’s the billionaires who are aiding that expansion, and what that can tell us about the worlds that they want to create. People know about Betsy DeVos, although some people like to forget. Are there critical people that you think more people right now need to understand their role and influence, and what that has to do with the Christian nationalist assault on education?

Josh Cowen  32:23

Most of the folks I talk about in the book are pretty well public figures. Betsy DeVos being probably the most prominent, and Charles Koch being another. I don’t know that people really understand just how interconnected these organizations are — sharing funding — that was a big theme in the book — sharing funding, sharing objectives. They come from different places, and Betsy DeVos has famously said that she laments the role of public schools as centers of community in American life. She would rather churches re-become, in her view, the centers of American community. Charles Koch’s organizations — Koch is a famous oil and gas titan in his 80s now had a brother named David, who’s since passed. The Koch brothers, they’re not particularly interested in Christian nationalism or in making churches local centers of community, but what they are interested in restricting and dismantling the role of what they call government interference in the economy and in business life, especially when it comes to environment and oil and gas. 

Education, stands as an indicator of government presence for the Koch-type organizations. Where they meet is on this issue of whether or not what they call government money, what I would call public money or taxpayer dollars — it’s your dollars, it’s my dollars, it’s people’s listening to this dollars — but they would see this as some sort of nebulous state that’s creating a bureaucracy, and public schools are part of it. Then, let’s be honest, the through line between the Christian nationalism of Betsy DeVos and the industry of Charles Koch is also just deep antipathy to labor unions. There’s a lot of complicated stuff here, and the book touches on that. But sometimes some pieces of the story are more simple than others, and one of those is that they just hate unions, and public education remains one of the areas the American economy where unionization is still fairly strong in many states.

Sam Goldman  34:11

You’ve been studying this for decades. I’m sure at this point, there’s not too much that surprises you in this world, but I have to wonder, as you wrote this book, was there anything that that did surprise you — that maybe you didn’t pay attention to as much, that you were like: wow!

Josh Cowen  34:27

There were several moments in writing the book where I just stopped for a second for sort of like a gut check. I asked a fellow scholar, or… this is what you have editors and publishers for. It’s like: Is this too much? Am I going too far on this? What I mean by that is, if you say some of the stuff out loud sometimes — I’ve talked to a lot of journalists, for example, from progressive outlets to conservative outlets to mainstream journalists — sometimes, if you say the Koch network, just as an example of what I’m talking about, you know, I start to roll, it seems a little sort of tin foily, tin hatty. 

What surprised me was how entwined all these organizations were with a few key funders, a few key players that really do go back to one of those two organizations, DeVos or Koch, including research that I was part of. As an example, 20 years ago, when I first started in this stuff, there was an organization called the Lindy and Harry Bradley Foundation based in Milwaukee — big right wing donor associated with causes that purport that Trump won in 2020 today, sending millions of dollars to new organizations that are anti immigration, for example. 

I knew we had said in the reports when I was a young professor and a young graduate student: The Bradley Foundation is one of our funders. Okay, I don’t know anything about this. I’m 26 years old. Then when I became an assistant professor, a junior scholar at Kentucky, well, there’s the Bradley Foundation. Then, you dismiss it, you go on with your life, you work on other things. I raised a lot of money myself actually building research teams and projects, including from some conservative sources I might add. I say this in the book: The Walton Family Foundation, famously, well, half a million dollars of Walton family money went to some of my earlier projects. 

So some of these conservative sources I had some familiarity with, but not the level of some of these organizations and what else they were doing while funding this voucher work, and that included a lot of the voucher advocacy there. So just kind of unpacking how present some of these groups were from the beginning, was a real surprise to me, and the fact that they’re still active in today’s American politics and in particularly right wing politics really remains something of a pinch me or a gut check kind of thing that I still remain surprised of.

Sam Goldman  36:34

This is only becoming more in the spotlight, in a way, when you look at something like the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 and their blueprint for the thorough destruction of American public education, and for, what I would call, a Christian nationalist agenda for public education, or if you want to be like: Well, that’s not Trump’s plan, even though that’s bullshit, and look at Agenda 47 on its own, you’ll see that the Venn diagram is actually just a giant circle. But you’ll also see universal school choice is explicit. You’ll see that, “restoring parental rights” is up there. You’ll see attacks on any form of DEI or any form of acknowledging the identity of the children we teach, along with explicit dangerous levels of like patriotic education. The freedom to pray. It’s very in line with the overall aims of the voucher movement.

Josh Cowen  37:42

Lot to unpack there. Let me sort of just pick one of those things and start. Project 2025 is really an important place to start, because I think a lot of people are aware of it right now, and it’s in the conversation, and I’m really glad that you pointed out the Trump 47 piece. Vouchers are two of the first three paragraphs in the Project 2025 education chapter, written by the Heritage Foundation. The first paragraph calls for an end to the U.S. Department of Education, which, for folks not really familiar with what that means, that means dismantling the key anti-discrimination watchdog in American education. That’s what they’re really talking about there. Then they follow that up with universal vouchers in paragraphs two and three. 

Trump 47, the Trump campaign platform, is basically just a Cliff’s Notes version of Project 2025. I’ve seen some folks try to kind of compare and contrast, in reality, it’s just an abbreviated version. So education, for example, at least in my issue area, same idea: Eliminate the key anti-discrimination watchdog in the U.S., U.S. Department of Education, and then universal school vouchers, and then attacks on what they called gender ideology, woke public schools and so on and so forth. Parental rights has been used, at least since the 1950s as a catchphrase for a lot of pretty unseemly things. Nobody doubts, dismisses, or debates that parents have a right in American society and a right in American education. 

You mentioned you’re an educator. I don’t know how many parent teacher conferences I’ve been to in public schools, where my kiddos go and my teenagers and now college students went. So it’s just a matter of what these things actually mean in the public dialog. It’s really important to remember and to talk about the other things vouchers are adjacent to. We haven’t talked a lot about how these things work in practice, but it can sound okay: everybody gets a scholarship and a coupon — but what’s it nestled next to? It’s nestled next to these awful attacks on gender, on race, and things like that. It’s nestled next to whole sections of writing and screed about rolling back reproductive freedom, about contraception, about some really, truly radical, and fringe things driven by a very specific Christian nationalist vision of the way American society is supposed to work. So that should give folks guard. 

Even if you didn’t know — this is what I say to folks: Even if you didn’t know that vouchers caused horrific academic outcomes, what does it tell you that they lead the education chapter for Project 2025 nestled around these other things? What does it tell you that three days before rolling back 50 years of reproductive freedom in this country, the same six right when justices expanded the freedom of private schools to take public funds to religiously indoctrinate? I mean, these things do fit together, and you don’t need to be a social scientist to be worried and skeptical, even before understanding how these things actually roll out terribly in practice.

Sam Goldman  40:24

Thanks for that. I want to lean in a little bit more to that practice element. The wholesale destruction of public education is increasingly becoming an accepted tenet of the fascist movement — you might refer to as a MAGA movement. What would it look like to implement some of what they are describing in those plans as it regards to education? Maybe one way to look at it is: When vouchers do roll out, now, what does that look like?

Josh Cowen  40:53

Well, again, 70% of voucher users today were already in private school. The thing to remember about vouchers: All the legislation creating vouchers in recent years guarantees one simple fact, and that is: When it comes to vouchers, it’s not actually about school choice and parental choice at all. It’s the school’s choice. What I mean by that is: The schools do the picking. The schools do the choosing. What you’re talking about in the end game here is a system where everybody is given a certain amount of money to sort around and find a school. The other side, the DeVos, people in particular, will say: Find a school that best fits your child’s needs. That’s the sale. 

The reality of the product is the school decides who they’re going to accept. In the early days, when I first started working on this, for example, there were some real safeguards. Schools taking public dollars, if they were private or religious, couldn’t just willy nilly reject whoever they wanted to. Now, the legislation that authorizes these schemes — particularly in red states, but elsewhere too — says nothing about taking public money obligates the school to violate what they call its creed or its value system. 

That’s really important coded language for “the school can pick whoever they want,” and that’s what ends up happening. When these things roll out, what we’re talking about is a system where, in my view, the data say this, but certainly is true that the schools are picking the kids. What I think that means for American society is that we are building an education model where everyone’s on their own, where it’s all about who you can find to take you — you’re given a coupon, you go from door to door of each school, knocking to see if they will let you in, and there’s nothing to protect you or your child from being turned away, whether it’s for your religious belief, whether it’s because you are an LGBTQ American, whether potentially, it’s because you’re a migrant.

There are some protections legally private schools, even those that aren’t publicly funded can’t just discriminate on the basis of race, for example, not legally anyway, but they can say: You know, it’s not the right fit — you didn’t get quite on the entrance exam that we wanted. So those are really some downstream implications for all of these things, and what they all end up underpinning and investing in is a model of education that, in my view, leaves all children to fend for themselves and their parents to fend for themselves. It’s a model based on isolation, on separation, exclusion, in some cases, all in the name of everybody just kind of getting to choose what they want to do, which, again, isn’t even really how it works. In practice — the schools do the choosing.

Sam Goldman 41:28

That’s a really helpful way of putting it. One question that’s been asked of me multiple times, and I’m sure other people in education as well, is: Could they really do what they’re outlining, you know, could Agenda 47 really come to pass? Could Project 2025, really come to pass? And what do you say to those people? 

Josh Cowen  43:39

In a number of Southern states, a number of red states, Project 2025 is already happening, Trump 47 is already happening. Arizona, Florida and Ohio are spending more than a billion dollars each right now on universal voucher schemes, which increasingly are going to wealthier and to white families, to say nothing of these horrific rollbacks to reproductive freedom, for example. The new restrictions in Florida came up from the presidential debate too. Five states that have passed voucher systems in the last year and a half also rolled back child labor protections, as it turns out, also rolled back reproductive rights. 

So all these things are happening at the same time, and I think it’s really important to understand that it’s not speculative. This is really where we are. All these things are key elements of Project 2025 and some pieces of the Trump 47 plan, so this is all happening. I remember when I was in my early twenties — can’t pretend that Roe versus Wade was necessarily salient every day of my life when I was 20 or 21 years old, but — what I heard a lot  –first election I voted in was 1996, second presidential election I voted was 2000 — people were saying: Reproductive rights are on the ballot, they could roll back Roe versus Wade. 

I do remember a lot of folks saying: They’re never going to do that. It’s not going to happen. You know, don’t be alarmist Democrats or progressives. In fact, two years ago, the Supreme Court did exactly that in a six three decisions. All this is on the table, and they’re very clear. None of this is a conspiracy here. They’re very clear about what they want to do. It’s written down in Project 2025. We need to take it seriously, because, certainly in my issue area, it’s happening. As soon as they have the votes to do it, they ram school vouchers, and we’ve already talked about how vouchers are adjacent to these other right wing policy priorities.

Sam Goldman  45:10

Thank you so much for that. I want, as we close out our conversation, I wanted to give you an opportunity to share either something that you feel that we didn’t touch on in our short chat, that you want to make sure that listeners come away with, or if there’s a remaining myth that you feel like you want to take a moment to bust, I wanted to give you the opportunity to do so.

Josh Cowen  45:36

The first thing I’ll sort of just reiterate, because I can’t say it enough, is that 70% of voucher users are already in private school to begin with, and that when it comes to vouchers, it’s not school choice for kids and families, it’s the school’s choice. Schools do the picking. Can’t say those two things enough. But here’s the myth that I want to dispel, and then I want to pivot to what we haven’t yet talked about, to just try to end on something of a positive note here. The myth that I’m gonna talk about is that while the right wing of American politics is selling vouchers as a policy solution. They’re also selling this idea — it almost has to be sold at the same time, this idea — that money does not make public schools more effective; that you’re just throwing money at a problem, is the way they describe it. 

Well, it turns out that over the last two decades, while vouchers started to show some of the worst results we’ve ever seen on any research question in academic outcomes study after study after study after study has shown, across the board, that investments in public schools actually have strong, meaningful outcomes for kids — on academics for one thing, as measured by standardized tests, as measured by graduation rates, but also later in life, outcomes like wage equality. Turns out that communities that got investments in public schools in the 90s have higher wealth advantages today on things like contact with the criminal justice system. 

While we’re talking about busting myths here, I want to end with busting the myth that investing in public schools as an alternative these free for all voucher schemes doesn’t work. As it turns out, you get what you pay for. When we do spend and invest in these communities, by the best scientific measures we have, the results really do show that investing in public schools is great for kids and families, and I happen to think it’s the right thing to do as well.

Sam Goldman  47:18

Josh, I want to thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me, to share your insights, your expertise, your perspectives on this issue, and most importantly, for your book: ‘For The Privateers,’ which is linked in the show notes — folks can get a copy. Besides reading your book, where else — if folks want to connect more with your work — where do you want to direct people to?

Josh Cowen  47:44

I do a lot of writing. Time Magazine, I’ve written some pieces on the threat of vouchers. For more technically oriented folks, the Brookings Institution have published some pieces, there — I’ll ship a lot of my writing out there. Then, also, one thing I’ll say — don’t roll your eyes — the book has 40 pages of endnotes, 562 notes, carefully documenting the claims made in the book. One of the reasons I did that was not just to because I’m a scientist.  — want to document that, but as a roadmap for folks. Maybe they hate my writing. I don’t know. It’s too long a book or something — though it’s only 224 pages. But the point is, you can go find those sources and links yourselves. Almost all of them are publicly available documents, and there’s a lot packed in there that you can do your own work if you want to and learn more.

Sam Goldman  47:44

Do you want to direct people to your social media?,

Josh Cowen  48:25

My name, [spells] Josh Cowen as my handle across all those different social media platforms, and that’s another good place to start.

Sam Goldman  48:34

Yeah, and definitely give Josh some support. He’s gotten the attention of the Heritage Foundation folks, who are scared. Rightly as they should. They should be scared by the ample evidence that Josh marshals. Go read the book, go share your thoughts with Josh. And Josh, thanks again, so much for coming on.

Josh Cowen  48:53

I really appreciate you having me, Sam. Thank you.

Sam Goldman  48:56

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