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The Privateers: How Billionaires Creates a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers w/ Josh Cowen
4 Plays4 months ago
There are any number of narratives that emerged from the 2024 election and that will be hotly debated over the next four years. However, one of those is not up for debate: that vouchers and school choice lost everywhere they were on the ballot in 2024. In Colorado, voters rejected a constitutional amendment that would’ve added “a right to school choice.” And in red-state Kentucky and Nebraska, voucher programs failed by nearly the same proportion that Donald Trump won.
On this show we've focused a lot on culture war issues as they directly impact what and how classroom teachers can teach, and I suspect the culture war will come up in this conversation. But we've never actually dug into the specific issue of voucher programs, which also impact educators, parents, schools, and kids in over a dozen states, with even more to come in an explicit push for a national universal voucher program as a long-term federal policy goal.
My guest today is Josh Cowen, a professor of education policy at Michigan State University. He’s written extensively about education politics, school choice, and culture wars in the United States, and you should definitely give him a follow on BlueSky @joshcowenmsu as he is very persistent in addressing the topic of his latest book, titled The Privateers: How BIllionaires Created A Culture War and Sold School Vouchers. I wanted to have Josh Cowen on to better understand, as we head into a new year and the next administration, how, like unsinkable rubber ducks, vouchers continue to fail to deliver on their promises and continue to be rejected by voters, and yet, we find ourselves on the verge of a nationwide voucher and school choice program.
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Transcript
Resource Redistribution Debate
00:00:00
Speaker
For the most part, the way to understand this, right, it's not about the size of government or the government spending or efficiency.
00:00:05
Speaker
It really is just about redistribution of resources from one sector to another, from public schools to church schools.
00:00:13
Speaker
And that's really what this is about.
00:00:14
Speaker
And in that sense, it's just like any other garden variety subsidy coming out of the state capital or the federal capital,
Podcast Introduction
00:00:21
Speaker
as the case will be.
00:00:21
Speaker
Music
00:00:26
Speaker
Hello and welcome to episode 160 of the Human Restoration Project Podcast.
00:00:31
Speaker
My name is Nick Covington.
00:00:32
Speaker
Before we get started, I wanted to let you know that this episode is brought to you by our supporters, three of whom are Kevin Gannon, Brandon Peters, and Leah Kelly.
00:00:40
Speaker
Thank you so much for your ongoing support.
00:00:43
Speaker
We're proud to have hosted hundreds of hours of incredible ad-free conversations over the years.
00:00:48
Speaker
If you haven't yet, consider rating our podcast in your app to help us reach more listeners.
00:00:53
Speaker
And of course, you can learn more about Human Restoration Project on our website, humanrestorationproject.org, and connect with us everywhere on social media.
Election Rejection of Vouchers
00:01:04
Speaker
There are any number of narratives that emerged from the 2024 election, and that will be hotly debated over the next four years.
00:01:11
Speaker
However, one of those is not up for debate, that vouchers and school choice lost everywhere they were on the ballot in 2024.
00:01:20
Speaker
In Colorado, voters rejected a constitutional amendment that would have added a right to school choice, and in red state Kentucky and Nebraska, voucher programs failed by nearly the same proportion that Donald Trump won.
00:01:34
Speaker
On this show, we focused a lot on culture war issues as they directly impact what and how classroom teachers can teach.
00:01:40
Speaker
And I suspect the culture war will come up in this conversation as well.
00:01:44
Speaker
But we've never actually dug into the specific issue of voucher programs, which also impact educators, parents, schools, and kids in over a dozen states, and with even more to come in the explicit push for a national universal voucher program as a long-term federal policy goal.
Guest Introduction: Josh Cowan
00:02:01
Speaker
My guest today is Josh Cowan, a professor of education policy at Michigan State University.
00:02:06
Speaker
He's written extensively about education politics, school choice, and culture wars in the United States, and you should definitely give him a follow on BlueSky at JoshCowanMSU, as he is very persistent in addressing the topic of his latest book titled The Privateers, How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers.
00:02:27
Speaker
I wanted to have Josh on to better understand as we head into a new year in the next administration, how like unsinkable rubber ducks, vouchers continue to fail to deliver on their promises and continue to be rejected by voters.
Josh Cowan's Background
00:02:41
Speaker
And yet we find ourselves on the verge of a nationwide voucher and school choice program.
00:02:46
Speaker
As you'll hear in this episode, even after reading the book, I came into this conversation with a set of assumptions and questions about the voucher movement that Josh quickly and kindly set right.
00:02:56
Speaker
Thanks so much for joining me today to help make sense of this, Josh.
00:03:00
Speaker
Thanks for having me.
00:03:01
Speaker
Well, you bring a unique perspective to the voucher issue as something of an insider at one time, having worked directly on projects and with folks evaluating those early voucher programs in the mid-2000s.
00:03:13
Speaker
Could you just describe your background and the experiences that brought you to the issue of vouchers in the first place?
00:03:19
Speaker
Yeah, well, so I'm a policy analyst by training.
00:03:24
Speaker
And what that means is that sort of
00:03:26
Speaker
get through and there are folks in the academic world as I was originally part of.
00:03:30
Speaker
There are folks in think tanks across the country.
00:03:33
Speaker
There are folks who do this work as consultants for for-profit firms that
00:03:37
Speaker
At the end of the day, sort of what policy analysts do is they look at public programs and they perform something of an audit on them.
00:03:43
Speaker
Like, are these things working the way policymakers intended?
00:03:47
Speaker
If they're working, for whom are they working?
00:03:49
Speaker
If they're not working, who are they letting down?
00:03:51
Speaker
How much are they costing?
00:03:52
Speaker
You know, things like that.
00:03:53
Speaker
Just what works for whom and why?
00:03:56
Speaker
And I got to start doing those things, actually, because
00:04:00
Speaker
as a young graduate student, 20 plus years ago at this point, on a series of demonstration trials.
00:04:07
Speaker
So this is across industries, demonstration trials.
00:04:10
Speaker
We see this with drug companies, with other kind of inventions and things.
00:04:14
Speaker
But these were demonstration trials, excuse me, of voucher schemes, privately funded, but at that time, proof of concept ideas that...
Early Voucher Programs Evaluation
00:04:24
Speaker
We'll see how these things work and then try to use them to advocate for vouchers across the country.
00:04:28
Speaker
And that's ended up, that ended up being what happened.
00:04:31
Speaker
So, so I got my start doing those things and I was moved on as I write the book and it was,
00:04:36
Speaker
to many other research questions in addition to vouchers and other school choice initiatives.
00:04:40
Speaker
But at the end of the day, the unifying sort of theme that got me started in this work was actually asking whether or not voucher schemes worked for kids and families.
00:04:50
Speaker
Could you speak more to that in terms of what you found when you were looking at those?
00:04:55
Speaker
I guess, what was the question that was being posed to you in those evaluations?
00:04:58
Speaker
And what did you find in those early days?
00:05:00
Speaker
Well, so...
00:05:01
Speaker
From the early 1990s onward, and I came into this story as a young professional about 10 years after the first kind of voucher evaluations started.
00:05:12
Speaker
So 20 plus years ago, these things have been around for about 30 years.
00:05:15
Speaker
And from the beginning, these things came out of both Democratic and Republican, but slightly Republican kind of version of education reform, which prioritized standards, accountability, and above all, measuring performance using test scores.
00:05:31
Speaker
So from the beginning, voucher systems, voucher evaluations
Expansion and Decline of Voucher Programs
00:05:36
Speaker
of those systems, demonstration projects, like I mentioned, all were focused on the same questions that reformers were asking public schools.
00:05:44
Speaker
Show us your test scores.
00:05:46
Speaker
See how you're doing.
00:05:48
Speaker
Are we getting the money that we promised?
00:05:50
Speaker
In the early days, voucher programs were subject to those same kinds of questions, right up through kind of the first term of George W. Bush, who famously pushed No Child Left Behind, which asked all those things of public schools to do.
00:06:03
Speaker
And you can really describe all of the voucher evidence as far as academic performance in the following way.
00:06:10
Speaker
After small, early pilot-sized programs showed mixed results, somewhat promising results even, in terms of academic accountability for vouchers, the bigger and the more recent the voucher system over the last few years, the worse the results have been for kids.
00:06:25
Speaker
It's that simple.
00:06:26
Speaker
The bigger the program, the more recent the program, the worse the results have been.
00:06:30
Speaker
And I guess before we get into any more specifics of those, either the new voucher programs or the ones that you had studied 20 plus years ago, maybe we can just help listeners, help myself just really understand what is that case?
Theoretical vs. Practical: Vouchers' Roots in Segregation
00:06:44
Speaker
What is the promise?
00:06:45
Speaker
What do they represent?
00:06:46
Speaker
Maybe we can steel man them with their best version of themselves.
00:06:50
Speaker
For example, in Iowa, I hear that language of,
00:06:53
Speaker
like school vouchers or school choice is the civil rights issue of our time.
00:06:57
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Kim Reynolds pitched vouchers as an opportunity for parents of kids trapped in so-called failing schools, giving them a shot at access to private education that was only available to the wealthy.
00:07:08
Speaker
So what are some other promises of those programs as they've been sold to voters across the country?
00:07:13
Speaker
Well, there's a lot packed into your question.
00:07:15
Speaker
So let's just sort of say that the idea is
00:07:19
Speaker
If we take at face value, and a lot of the book is about not taking at face value some of these schemes, but if we take at face value what they're supposed to do, the idea, and it dates back to this conservative economist Milton Friedman, writing in 1955, kind of came up with this idea for, they later were called vouchers, but basically publicly funded private education.
00:07:41
Speaker
And important to know, Friedman was writing this thing just in a few months after Brown versus Board of Education Order Mandatory Desegregation of Public Schools.
00:07:49
Speaker
So very quickly,
00:07:52
Speaker
opponents of desegregation latched onto various schemes to avoid Brown, ranging from massive resistance, which is famous across the history in American history, protests, refusal to obey and things like that, to schemes like vouchers.
00:08:08
Speaker
So publicly funding parents to go do the segregating themselves, not creating segregated institutions.
00:08:15
Speaker
But from the beginning,
00:08:17
Speaker
including in Friedman's essay, was this notion of, quote, parents' rights.
00:08:23
Speaker
And what parents' rights means in the kind of context of the voucher push is parents shouldn't have to send their kids to school with children they don't want to send their kids to school to.
00:08:33
Speaker
There's a lot of things we want parents to be able to do in this country as policymakers and as citizens and as parents ourselves.
00:08:40
Speaker
But that phrase, specifically parents' rights, has very dark origins in the resistance to Brown versus Board of Education.
00:08:46
Speaker
It comes out of this idea that parents shouldn't have to put their kids in school with children, in that case, black children.
00:08:52
Speaker
But in other cases, more recently, children, they don't want their kids to go to school around.
Critique of Vouchers as Religious Segregation
00:08:56
Speaker
So that's the kind of, that's both kind of the origin story of what they say.
00:09:00
Speaker
You hear parents' rights all over the country today, but it's also kind of the truth in the sense that that's really what's going on here.
00:09:07
Speaker
Now, it's packaged both in terms of PR and communication strategy, but also from a litigation standpoint.
00:09:13
Speaker
It's packaged as saving children from failing schools.
00:09:17
Speaker
Those parents' rights, like deep down in places they don't sort of say quite as overtly as they did in the Friedman era,
00:09:25
Speaker
Those parents' rights include the ability to self-segregate and do other things.
00:09:29
Speaker
But what they also mean is parents' rights with respect to taking their child out of a so-called failing public school.
00:09:34
Speaker
And that's kind of the rhetoric you hear today.
00:09:36
Speaker
I would say sort of during the brightest period of time from the standpoint of like opportunity, I think it probably came from roughly around 1999 until about 2002-ish, early 2003.
00:09:46
Speaker
The theory of the case put before the United States Supreme Court
00:09:53
Speaker
in a case called Zellman versus Simmons Harris, uh, write about a lot in the book, but this was the first time the federal court said, oh, vouchers are okay.
00:10:00
Speaker
As long as you're not forcing religion on children using vouchers.
00:10:04
Speaker
But the whole theory of the case was the idea that Cleveland, the city of Cleveland had failed children with its public school system and that vouchers were necessary or at least optional, uh, should be optional to rectify that wrong.
00:10:16
Speaker
And that was actually what they took to the Supreme court.
00:10:18
Speaker
Now, uh,
00:10:19
Speaker
The same litigation groups today are arguing something much different.
00:10:23
Speaker
They're arguing that children need vouchers to go to religious schools so they can have religious education because it's parents' religious right to do so.
00:10:31
Speaker
My point here in all this is that there certainly is this failing public school narrative and this academic packaging around this stuff.
00:10:39
Speaker
But at the end of the day, it's inescapable that what we're really talking about, I would argue, something a little bit darker, a little bit deeper, a little bit more historical in terms of sort of where this country's been.
00:10:49
Speaker
the origin for stories for vouchers.
00:10:51
Speaker
I've called it more recently a new American religious separatism movement.
00:10:56
Speaker
The idea is really to take children, separate and isolate them from each other to do so on the public dime.
00:11:02
Speaker
So there really is, you know, what's at the heart of that package, like what it actually is in terms of the vehicle, the vessel, the shape that that voucher takes.
00:11:10
Speaker
And then, as you had mentioned, that shiny wrapper that we put on the outside and use it to try and sell to voters around the country.
00:11:18
Speaker
At the most extreme level, how have those programs been implemented?
00:11:23
Speaker
Like what is what is the most extreme example that you can think of?
Hurricane Katrina: Voucher System Test Case
00:11:27
Speaker
Implementation how?
00:11:28
Speaker
In the sense that like, what would be like the ideal place where we could say, okay, vouchers implemented in this form is like, here's the most ideal state that voucher, the conditions for vouchers could be in.
00:11:40
Speaker
Let's take Louisiana, just because Milton Friedman did so.
00:11:44
Speaker
So after Hurricane Katrina, it's devastated –
00:11:47
Speaker
almost nine out of every 10 public school buildings in the city of New Orleans and parts of Louisiana.
00:11:53
Speaker
The city famously had to be rebuilt.
00:11:56
Speaker
The school system famously had to be rebuilt.
00:11:58
Speaker
And a lot of out-of-state players, I touch on this in the book, but there's others.
00:12:03
Speaker
Doug Harris has written a whole book about this from Tulane University.
00:12:07
Speaker
A lot of reformers came in and said, oh, well, now that there's no public school system, let's kind of create our own model and
00:12:12
Speaker
And one of the things they did was just decide to create kind of a free-for-all with respect to school choice, not just vouchers, which came pretty quickly after, but also charter schools and inter-district choice, which, by the way, I actually have some support for charter schools and for...
00:12:29
Speaker
inter-district choices the evidence is very different in those schemes we can talk about that if we need to but the point being vouchers were introduced in louisiana is kind of a shopping us like the old sears catalog from when we were kids you get the catalog in the mail right you kind of look through the pages and you see what star wars legos you want or whatever um
00:12:45
Speaker
That's kind of how the schools are supposed to work in this kind of Friedman-esque market world where parents are just sorting.
00:12:50
Speaker
Literally, they had a catalog in New Orleans.
00:12:52
Speaker
You would open the book and you could see everything about each school, public, private.
00:12:56
Speaker
You could put your name on a list, public, private, up to eight schools, and you could just get randomly assigned to each of those schools.
00:13:04
Speaker
Friedman wrote an essay in the New York, excuse me, the Wall Street Journal soon before his death, but after Katrina, saying this, he didn't say this is great, the hurricane, but he said, basically, this is going to offer a test case for my idea.
00:13:17
Speaker
And what we saw come out of Louisiana as a result of that, just with respect to vouchers, some of the worst academic performance we've ever seen on any research question in the history of education research, something on par with what twice Katrina actually did to test scores in that city.
00:13:33
Speaker
And more recently, roughly twice what the COVID-19 pandemic did to test scores there for just looking at test scores.
00:13:42
Speaker
So in that kind of ideal condition, catastrophic results.
00:13:45
Speaker
Now, the other side would say, well, that's because we overregulated those private schools.
00:13:50
Speaker
And what they mean by that is the state required those private schools receiving public money to have open admissions.
00:13:56
Speaker
You had to admit everyone.
00:13:57
Speaker
And you had to take the state exam, which is how we know the results were so terrible.
00:14:01
Speaker
And they would argue, well, the elite providers didn't opt into taking public dollars.
00:14:06
Speaker
They stayed out of the program because of, they would say it's because they were required to take the state test instead of their own.
00:14:12
Speaker
I think there's a little bit of evidence for that, but mostly what the evidence is, is that they didn't want to be subject to open admissions requirements.
00:14:19
Speaker
So, you know, we have to sort of, the question about implementation is an important one because, you
00:14:26
Speaker
If the other side is going to constantly move the goalposts on this, it's like for that story to be true, the Louisiana awful results driven by overregulation, what you have to believe is that given the opportunity to discriminate, elite private schools won't discriminate.
00:14:46
Speaker
And only when they're told they can't discriminate do they sort of take their football and go run away and not get into the game.
00:14:55
Speaker
It doesn't really make any sense.
00:14:57
Speaker
What's really going on is that there are a lot of subprime private schools.
00:15:00
Speaker
There's a lot of private schools that just aren't any good.
00:15:02
Speaker
There are some elite private schools out there, but vouchers don't provide access to those schools.
00:15:07
Speaker
The schools that want the bailout, that want the public subsidy through the voucher system really aren't particularly good.
00:15:13
Speaker
They're particularly bad at serving at-risk children who are mostly the kids in Louisiana system.
00:15:18
Speaker
So be very skeptical today when you hear that these things are anything about academic hope or opportunity or that nonsense.
00:15:25
Speaker
What's really going on is these are bailouts for private schools that have ulterior motives, that have nothing to do with academics.
00:15:31
Speaker
I've called vouchers the education equivalent of predatory lending as a result.
00:15:35
Speaker
And this is what we're seeing across the country.
Wealthy Support for Voucher Systems
00:15:38
Speaker
And we've also seen, again, here in Iowa, where I'm at, we've seen this was a warning ahead of our own voucher scheme being implemented.
00:15:46
Speaker
But I think it was Jen Jennings who found that the private school tuition rates went up about 25% across the board after the implementation of the voucher program.
00:15:56
Speaker
Yeah.
00:15:56
Speaker
So what's clever about that study from Professor Jennings is, and there was some, it's not just Iowa, there was some reporting in other states that this happened, but it was mostly investigative reporting and just general journalism.
00:16:08
Speaker
What was clever about the Jennings study is to sort of use the cutting edge of research, which I happen to believe in.
00:16:15
Speaker
But what she did was she compared, she and her co-author compared Iowa private schools taking those voucher payments to
00:16:25
Speaker
to similar private schools in Nebraska, which had at that time passed a voucher system but hadn't implemented it yet.
00:16:31
Speaker
Turns out they never got a chance because voters pulled it away just a few weeks ago.
00:16:36
Speaker
So she sort of held constant in some sense the desire to implement a voucher system, but only one state actually did implement the voucher system, and that's Iowa.
00:16:47
Speaker
And what she also did was only looked at the schools with tuition where they had eligible grades in areas.
00:16:56
Speaker
And so she sort of had, you know, I heard a lot of times some of the Reynolds and other lawmakers in the state say,
00:17:03
Speaker
said, this is just inflation.
00:17:05
Speaker
Well, precisely, it's not just inflation, actually.
00:17:10
Speaker
You would have to believe that inflation only selectively affected Iowa private schools, not Nebraska private schools next door.
00:17:16
Speaker
And you'd also have to believe that inflation mysteriously only affected
00:17:21
Speaker
tuition in schools eligible for the voucher within Iowa.
00:17:25
Speaker
And to be fair to these private schools, they're only doing what Reynolds and Iowa lawmakers incentivized them to do.
00:17:32
Speaker
This is entirely predictable.
00:17:35
Speaker
And this is one of the things I say in the book.
00:17:36
Speaker
It's one of the things I say in social media.
00:17:38
Speaker
None of the stuff about vouchers
00:17:41
Speaker
the catastrophic results, the subprime school bailouts, the tuition increases, none of it is actually unpredicted in economic theory, even going back to some people who were freedmen disciples.
00:17:52
Speaker
All of this is well known.
00:17:54
Speaker
And it's only a problem if you sort of, or it's only a surprise if you've really kind of drank the Kool-Aid and you believe these things are just mysteriously a panacea for all that cures, all that ills education policy.
00:18:06
Speaker
Most of us aren't that simplistic in our thinking.
00:18:09
Speaker
And again, none of this stuff is a particular surprise unless you're really a true believer.
00:18:15
Speaker
So I think that's where I'm so frustrated is that I can see here in Iowa, we're running that same experiment that states like Arizona, Louisiana, Ohio, Indiana, all over Wisconsin, right?
00:18:28
Speaker
we continue to run that same experiment, kind of like Kansas did, I don't know, back in the early 2000s with their tax rates and everything else.
00:18:36
Speaker
Eventually, we saw the collapse of that, and yet states kept implementing it.
00:18:40
Speaker
Vouchers, as I mentioned in the intro, are this unsinkable rubber duck that just seem to have some kind of momentum of their own in spite of stepping on rakes every step of the way.
00:18:50
Speaker
If vouchers can't succeed in Louisiana in Milton Friedman's ideal way, how do they keep going?
00:18:57
Speaker
I would take the position that, yeah, it's not any sort of movement.
00:19:01
Speaker
In the book, I say this is no movement.
00:19:03
Speaker
It's more like a coup, and it's been a right-wing political operation from the start.
00:19:07
Speaker
This is just what happens when you have a handful of very wealthy people, some of the wealthiest people on the planet, starting with Betsy DeVos, of course.
00:19:14
Speaker
We're talking about vouchers.
00:19:15
Speaker
We have to talk about Betsy DeVos, but also Charles Koch, Koch Industries, and then more recent players like Jeff Yass, the TikTok billionaire, who
00:19:22
Speaker
You know, you don't have to be a conspiracy theorist.
00:19:24
Speaker
You just have to look at who's spending the money in places like Iowa.
00:19:29
Speaker
Betsy DeVos' organization has spent seven figures to primary out seven Republicans in the Iowa legislature in August of 2022, including the
00:19:40
Speaker
voucher opposing chair of the House Education Committee to handpick a legislature to let this thing go through.
00:19:49
Speaker
And even there, after doing all of that, they still had to create this special education reform committee to push this budget, this voucher scheme through the legislature and couldn't subject it to typical
Betsy DeVos and Billionaire Influence
00:19:59
Speaker
process in your legislature through the normal budget process.
00:20:03
Speaker
They had to kind of create, kind of rig the game to do it.
00:20:06
Speaker
And I know it's just a figure of speech, but this is a very important point.
00:20:10
Speaker
There's no movement here.
00:20:11
Speaker
And this is why you see these things faceplant when they go to actual voters, like in Kentucky, like in Nebraska, including red state voters.
00:20:19
Speaker
This is a handful of billionaires who see the world.
00:20:22
Speaker
Vouchers sort of represent one piece of the world they think that should exist.
00:20:27
Speaker
And they're very wealthy people, and they are used to getting their way.
00:20:31
Speaker
Betsy DeVos, we could talk about her if you want.
00:20:32
Speaker
She has some very specific reasons she likes vouchers.
00:20:35
Speaker
The Koch people have a lot of priorities.
00:20:37
Speaker
Jeff Yass has a lot of priorities.
00:20:38
Speaker
Elon Musk, who's getting into the game by starting private schools in Texas, of course, has a lot of other priorities.
00:20:44
Speaker
What they all have in common is that they see the world vouchers appeal in an education sense anyway.
00:20:50
Speaker
They're the education version of the way they think the world ought to work, and they have enough money to try to impose their will on it.
00:20:56
Speaker
That's the thing keeping the rubber duck up.
00:20:58
Speaker
But I put something last night on social media that's getting a little bit of attention that said,
00:21:03
Speaker
Basically, listen, vouchers are subject to the same gravity of politics and policy as any other scheme.
00:21:09
Speaker
And one of the things we're already talking about in this conversation is there's still such a thing as data.
00:21:13
Speaker
You can ignore it.
00:21:14
Speaker
There's still such a thing as data.
00:21:15
Speaker
There's still such a thing as evidence.
00:21:17
Speaker
There's still such a thing as voters of both parties looking at a scheme, a proposal, whatever it is, in this case, vouchers, and saying, how does this help me and my family?
00:21:27
Speaker
I'm not going to support it if it doesn't help me and my family.
00:21:31
Speaker
And that's just sort of the natural law and rhythm of American politics and policy.
00:21:34
Speaker
And so, you know, there's only so much that these folks can do to sort of impose their will on states.
00:21:41
Speaker
And we're going to sort of unfortunately see a lot more, I think, failure of these things come forward as these things grow.
00:21:50
Speaker
Yeah, I appreciate that clarification because, yeah, movement does seem to imply that there is like mass populist momentum.
00:21:55
Speaker
You know, it's like a grassroots movement.
00:21:57
Speaker
That's what they want us to think.
00:22:00
Speaker
And yeah, you're right.
00:22:00
Speaker
It does sound conspiratorial if you start to, you know, have the little yarn drawing from Betsy DeVos to the Koch brothers to the gases to everything else.
00:22:09
Speaker
But as you mentioned in the book, that's very much the reality is it is a...
Christian Nationalist Agenda in Education
00:22:13
Speaker
idea, vouchers as an idea and as a legislative tool, right, that has been developed and disseminated from these groups.
00:22:21
Speaker
Could we talk about Betsy DeVos?
00:22:24
Speaker
You're there in Michigan.
00:22:25
Speaker
And I've been to Grand Rapids a lot.
00:22:27
Speaker
You know, we work up a lot in Michigan.
00:22:29
Speaker
Can't help but see the DeVos Center and all of her names and all the campuses and
00:22:34
Speaker
in Grand Rapids.
00:22:34
Speaker
But yeah, what is her role in this story?
00:22:37
Speaker
You kind of mentioned how she is really a bridge builder between these two paradigms of school vouchers and school choice movements, but she really is a key figure.
00:22:47
Speaker
So journalist Catherine Stewart wrote in her book, The Power Worshippers, that you can't understand, I'm paraphrasing, I'm not directly quoting, but she's basically saying
00:22:57
Speaker
You can't understand the last 30 or 40 years of right-wing politics or the role of the religious right without understanding the role of the DeVos family in Western Michigan.
00:23:07
Speaker
And the reason for that is simple.
00:23:09
Speaker
They have a very firm idea of what they want the world to look like.
00:23:13
Speaker
They want it to look like what we would call Christian nationalism today.
00:23:17
Speaker
And they have billions of dollars.
00:23:19
Speaker
I mean, those two things together mean they get to dictate a lot.
00:23:22
Speaker
And that in the case specifically of Betsy DeVos, one of the DeVos family, this comes down to school vouchers.
00:23:31
Speaker
So
00:23:31
Speaker
Betsy Voss has famously said she sees vouchers as a way to, quote, advance God's kingdom on earth.
00:23:36
Speaker
It's her words, not mine.
00:23:38
Speaker
She has lamented in her own words, not mine, what she sees as the displacement by public schools of churches and American communities.
00:23:46
Speaker
And she sees vouchers as a way to
00:23:49
Speaker
replace public schools, giving churches their due, essentially, as centers of communities.
00:23:56
Speaker
Once again, I would dispute from the outset that churches have moved out of American communities, but nevertheless, that's the plan and that's the idea.
00:24:04
Speaker
What's interesting is that, and I write about this in the book, so the other big player in the space is the Koch family and Charles Koch in particular, is
00:24:13
Speaker
Very close to Milton Friedman, sort of a disciple of Friedman's in a strange way.
00:24:18
Speaker
He was the benefactor of Friedman, too.
00:24:20
Speaker
Charles Koch created a think tank called the Cato Institute today, but it was called originally the Koch Institute.
00:24:27
Speaker
The Koch folks aren't culture warriors.
00:24:29
Speaker
for the most part.
00:24:30
Speaker
I mean, there's so many different groups that receive these dollars.
00:24:33
Speaker
Of course, they're all different strands and nuances, and they do fund a bunch of fake parents groups like the Parents Defending Education.
00:24:39
Speaker
They all have a name like that, but that's one actual group that do do a little culture warrior.
00:24:44
Speaker
But this kind of obsession with book banning and where kids go to the bathroom in public schools and who plays which sport and
00:24:52
Speaker
You know, all this weird masculine stuff that these guys run around, you know, trying to kind of out-dude the other dude.
00:24:58
Speaker
That doesn't, that's not a Koch thing.
00:25:00
Speaker
What they see, if Betsy DeVos is worried that churches have been kicked out of communities and replaced by public schools, the Koch folks just see public schools as governments.
00:25:09
Speaker
They don't like government because government has regulated the oil and gas industry that they came out of.
00:25:14
Speaker
It's in some sense, they both see something evil about public schools and the Koch folks see something secularly evil in terms of government in our communities.
Vouchers and Labor Unions
00:25:25
Speaker
And the Betsy DeVos types of the world see public schools as representing something non-Christian in the community.
00:25:31
Speaker
And together, they sort of latch from those different perspectives on
00:25:35
Speaker
onto vouchers as a way to push their plan forward.
00:25:37
Speaker
And there's one other thing in a real practical sense.
00:25:39
Speaker
And one of the things I really stress both in conversation about the book, but also just in public is just to remember
00:25:45
Speaker
There's always the kind of philosophy stuff that we just talked about, all this high-minded business.
00:25:50
Speaker
Then there's some really practical things too.
00:25:53
Speaker
Remember, these things are always subject to that same gravity of politics and policy that I mentioned.
00:25:58
Speaker
One of the things that really unites the Christian nationalism of Betsy DeVos with kind of the anti-government rhetoric and orientation of the co-people, it really comes down to something very specific, and that is a deep hostility to labor unions.
00:26:14
Speaker
And so at the end of the day, while you're paying attention to this big think stuff about Christians and public schools and bathrooms and all this business, at the end of the day, a lot of this comes down to deep hostility to labor unions.
00:26:26
Speaker
And in the education case, of course, we're talking about teachers unions.
00:26:30
Speaker
And that's more related to the libertarian Milton Friedman front of the whole school choice apparatus, keeping that afloat, that Betsy DeVos just happened to be, I guess, part of that, but then expanding it into that culture war space.
00:26:49
Speaker
really shaping then what that 2016, the post-2016 conversation about culture wars and schools has really looked like.
00:26:57
Speaker
You know, this episode is going to be coming out right before Inauguration Day here in 2025 when people will be listening to it.
Linda McMahon's Role in Voucher Advocacy
00:27:04
Speaker
And
00:27:05
Speaker
from where we sit here in December, it looks like Linda McMahon is going to take on the role as Secretary of Education.
00:27:13
Speaker
Now, how in the world does she, she is not a name that's mentioned at all.
00:27:17
Speaker
You know, in your book, she was a shock, I think, from at least from the people that I talked with.
00:27:22
Speaker
What role does she play in this?
00:27:23
Speaker
Which side does she take?
00:27:24
Speaker
Yeah, that's right.
00:27:24
Speaker
So she comes out of this, first of all, she's a billionaire.
00:27:28
Speaker
And there's been this unprecedented
00:27:30
Speaker
number of billionaires.
00:27:31
Speaker
So she has that in common with Betsy DeVos for one thing.
00:27:33
Speaker
But you're right.
00:27:35
Speaker
It was a surprise.
00:27:36
Speaker
It's not a surprise outside of the education space, but it is a surprise in the education space.
00:27:41
Speaker
But Linda McMahon, she was co-founder of a group called the America First Policy Institute, which basically is this kind of Trump think tank, if you put those words in quotation marks, Trump-oriented think tank to kind of give a place for a bunch of
00:27:56
Speaker
Trump expats, people from the first Trump administration to kind of hang out until they figure out what was, what the next thing was going to be, whether it was a Trump presidency again or something else.
00:28:06
Speaker
And she co-founded this with, uh,
00:28:09
Speaker
a Texas-based billionaire named Tim Dunn.
00:28:11
Speaker
And Dunn has been very influential in Texas trying to push vouchers through in that state.
00:28:17
Speaker
He's a pastor.
00:28:19
Speaker
He's also a billionaire.
00:28:20
Speaker
And he sees vouchers.
00:28:22
Speaker
He's been very explicit about his demand that more publicly funded money go to Christian education.
00:28:30
Speaker
And McMahon herself has not said a lot on this space, but it's sort of important to know that from an education perspective, this America First Policy Institute, this Trump thing in waiting, their education agenda is really not much more complicated than publicly funded Christian schools.
00:28:44
Speaker
So there is that piece that does kind of get to the top there on that space.
00:28:49
Speaker
And of course, they all make a lot of noise about ending the Department of Ed.
00:28:52
Speaker
We'll see what happens on that.
00:28:53
Speaker
There's some through lines there that connect this to the voucher stuff, but it's lower level.
00:28:58
Speaker
The last thing I'll say before we move on on that is just what McMahon brings to this is, of course, first and foremost, loyalty to Trump.
Christian Education Agenda
00:29:07
Speaker
She's also a billionaire, as I said.
00:29:09
Speaker
She also conceptually supports this idea that publicly funded Christian schools.
00:29:13
Speaker
As we're learning about different parts of the Trump team, the different incentive packages, I just cannot stress enough how important
00:29:20
Speaker
the role of public subsidies for religious education, particularly for a version of Christian education that these folks want, are central to the driving force of vouchers today in 2024.
00:29:31
Speaker
All that other stuff aside that we talked about, this is what's the driving force today.
00:29:35
Speaker
So in that sense, in retrospect, although it took people by surprise when it came up in retrospect, it really does make sense in kind of thinking about how these things all are part of the larger strategy here.
00:29:50
Speaker
Yeah, thinking about that apparatus, she essentially is a vessel or a vehicle for that existing apparatus.
00:29:57
Speaker
We've already got Alec.
00:29:58
Speaker
We already have all of these other foundations, institutions, think tanks.
00:30:03
Speaker
We just need somebody who can get those things done, I suppose, is the rationale there.
00:30:08
Speaker
Even if she's not bringing anything new, she's not a culture warrior like Ryan Walters or any of these other state superintendents who might have been on the short list.
00:30:16
Speaker
She's a vessel for exactly this idea is what you're saying.
00:30:19
Speaker
The top education priority, like the Department of Ed's getting, ending the Department of Ed's getting a lot of news, and rightfully so.
00:30:26
Speaker
I have written elsewhere that one of the sort of the things that they're, you know, whether they are able to actually fully dismantle the Department of Ed or not, they're going after programs in a culture war way, right?
00:30:36
Speaker
Like things that would be, could be
00:30:39
Speaker
called dei things that could be called critical race theory things that could be called um inclusion for for lgbtq families including transgender kids like those things they will try to do and mcmahon can be counted on to the but in terms of just like overall policy what are they for not just what are they against the priority is a federal uh voucher scheme
00:31:01
Speaker
run through the tax code based on tax credit schemes in other states that Iowa has one and had one before.
00:31:06
Speaker
You guys put one through general fund with your voucher plan.
00:31:10
Speaker
And there, the idea would basically be to allow individual donors to divert a portion of what they pay in federal income tax to something called a scholarship granting organization, which would distribute vouchers in all 50
Federal Voucher Scheme Plans
00:31:23
Speaker
states.
00:31:23
Speaker
McMahon hasn't said a whole lot about that other than sort of high-level things that she wants, school choice.
00:31:27
Speaker
They call this school choice, not just vouchers.
00:31:31
Speaker
But Betsy DeVos herself has been on the Hill pushing for this thing in the weeks since Trump won.
00:31:36
Speaker
So this isn't just, you know, just because they don't have the title anymore does not mean when you're a billionaire, you still get in the room.
00:31:41
Speaker
You still can get into the senator's office.
00:31:43
Speaker
You can still make contributions.
00:31:44
Speaker
So all these folks at the end of the day are either working together explicitly or implicitly for this goal.
00:31:49
Speaker
They've been pretty clear about that from the beginning.
00:31:52
Speaker
Yeah, it's tied into all those other ways that wealth distorts, corrupts, implements graft.
00:31:58
Speaker
I just read an article, again, locally here in Iowa, that of course a middleman has to be hired to implement these ESAs.
00:32:05
Speaker
And this group Odyssey is getting a million-dollar contract from the state for that.
00:32:10
Speaker
So surely at the federal level, someone with connections will be tasked with implementing a national program as well, right?
00:32:17
Speaker
It's really important.
00:32:18
Speaker
Right.
00:32:18
Speaker
It's really – well, in the way the legislation is written so far is there would be these lots of middlemen.
00:32:23
Speaker
And those middlemen couldn't be, at least in the current legislation, there could not be for-profit providers like Odyssey is.
00:32:31
Speaker
Odyssey, let's be clear, it is a on-the-make.
00:32:33
Speaker
It is like a loan service.
00:32:36
Speaker
These vendors like Odyssey are like the loan service agencies or companies from the –
00:32:42
Speaker
run out of like old Kmart's or closed down grocery stores, you know, in the mortgage
Middlemen in Voucher Systems
00:32:48
Speaker
industry.
00:32:48
Speaker
That's kind of what, what these vendors are in the case of Odyssey.
00:32:51
Speaker
But there are nonprofits that at least structured as a nonprofit by structured, I mean, you can still pay your CEO.
00:32:58
Speaker
Oh God knows what kind of money.
00:32:59
Speaker
But it technically would have to be these kind of, in some States.
00:33:04
Speaker
So this is different.
00:33:04
Speaker
There was a policy choice in Iowa to make the vendor a four eligible for for-profit status.
00:33:11
Speaker
All of the latest voucher schemes have used vendors.
00:33:14
Speaker
That's not something that was the case years and years ago.
00:33:17
Speaker
It was more like Ohio and Wisconsin to name two of the earlier voucher systems, just direct appropriation from the State Department of it.
00:33:24
Speaker
The reason that they've done it today, it's twofold.
00:33:26
Speaker
One, avoids transparency and accountability.
00:33:29
Speaker
They're always for that stuff, or not for that stuff.
00:33:32
Speaker
They're always for avoiding it.
00:33:33
Speaker
And the other thing is,
00:33:35
Speaker
And this is just, again, yet another example of just these voucher schemes, just part of the same rules of politics and policies, any other area outside of education, inside of education.
00:33:44
Speaker
Anytime you create a public cash flow, I don't care what industry it is.
00:33:48
Speaker
I live in a state capital.
00:33:49
Speaker
This happens all over the place.
00:33:51
Speaker
Of course, there are going to be sort of on the make-
00:33:56
Speaker
Little companies, groups that start themselves up to try to get some of that public dollars and make a buck off of it.
00:34:06
Speaker
And when they get a little bit successful, what they do is they hire lobbyists to convince legislators that they need those groups.
00:34:12
Speaker
to make the legislation work, to make the dollars work and flow.
00:34:16
Speaker
This happens, again, across the industry.
00:34:17
Speaker
So you see this pattern.
00:34:19
Speaker
I don't get a whole lot into the wealth motive for the Charles Cokes and the Betsy DeVos's and the Jeffy Asses.
00:34:24
Speaker
They're billionaires.
00:34:25
Speaker
They don't need any more money.
00:34:26
Speaker
And schools, like an individual school is not very profitable.
00:34:29
Speaker
A whole network of schools might be, but an individual, the profit margins are not any better than like, say, a mom and pop restaurant.
00:34:36
Speaker
It's a daily struggle to kind of make the dollars work.
00:34:39
Speaker
When you scale it up, it's a different story.
00:34:41
Speaker
But where the wealth motivation comes in isn't really at the billionaire level.
00:34:45
Speaker
It's kind of on that on-the-make level.
00:34:47
Speaker
It's these kind of, like I say, the mortgage service companies.
00:34:51
Speaker
It's kind of these groups that come in.
00:34:52
Speaker
They're kind of seedier.
00:34:54
Speaker
They're not private jet groups.
00:34:57
Speaker
These are the used car salesman kind of.
00:35:00
Speaker
Yeah.
00:35:00
Speaker
And in that, they're not really any different than any other group.
00:35:03
Speaker
So Odyssey is one of many of these things that do this.
00:35:05
Speaker
But but there are others as well.
00:35:07
Speaker
And again, the only thing I would say about that, too, is even if we're not talking about massive wealth, we are talking about dollars that are getting skimmed off the top that could be sent to public schools in your community.
00:35:16
Speaker
And that's why this is a problem.
00:35:19
Speaker
Yeah, the notion that vouchers are in any sense more efficient or streamline any processes, like it just flies in the face of it because you're inevitably going to end up with layers of middlemen and more management and more bureaucracy to manage parallel systems, both of public and private dollars.
00:35:37
Speaker
And that's why the serious, there are a handful of sort of serious intellectuals on that side that do worry and warn about these things.
00:35:46
Speaker
There are folks who have some consistency to their writing and their rhetoric, and they don't like these things.
00:35:50
Speaker
But for the most part, the way to understand this is not about the size of government or the government spending or efficiency.
00:35:57
Speaker
It really is just about redistribution of resources from
00:36:00
Speaker
one sector to another, from public schools to church
Voucher Programs as Subsidies
00:36:04
Speaker
schools.
00:36:04
Speaker
And that's really what this is about.
00:36:06
Speaker
And in that sense, it's just like any other garden variety subsidy coming out of the state capitol or the federal capitol, as the case will be.
00:36:14
Speaker
This is bumming me out a little bit as a former public school teacher, as someone who sends their kids to public schools.
Strategies to Oppose Vouchers?
00:36:20
Speaker
We're here in 2025 as listeners are hearing this.
00:36:24
Speaker
What is there to be done?
00:36:25
Speaker
The time to vote has certainly passed.
00:36:27
Speaker
What is there to, I don't know, help prevent the worst outcomes?
00:36:34
Speaker
Yeah.
00:36:35
Speaker
I mean, a couple of things.
00:36:36
Speaker
So, right, the time to vote has passed this election.
00:36:39
Speaker
But remember, when these vouchers have never survived statewide ballot initiatives.
00:36:43
Speaker
that never once.
00:36:44
Speaker
And as you mentioned at the top, this includes in Trump countries.
00:36:49
Speaker
Kentucky, for example, 65% of voters proposed vouchers that prevented them from becoming part of the state constitution, and 65% of voters voted for Trump.
00:36:57
Speaker
So it's not a red or a blue thing when it comes to voucher opposition.
00:37:00
Speaker
Nebraska, closer to your state, 57% of voters pulled a voucher law off the books before it could be implemented.
00:37:07
Speaker
Now, each state has its own
00:37:09
Speaker
way of dealing with that stuff.
00:37:11
Speaker
And I don't know the ins and outs of Iowa's sort of public balloting version of this.
00:37:16
Speaker
I do know, though, that it's possible to change governors.
00:37:19
Speaker
It's possible to change legislators.
00:37:21
Speaker
It does take time.
00:37:22
Speaker
And then at the federal level, I would just simply say, you know, this is because that's the upcoming push.
00:37:28
Speaker
And one thing that will be really interesting for folks listening to this in Iowa or elsewhere, if you are dealing with a legislature that is considering passing or expanding voucher schemes,
00:37:38
Speaker
While the feds are about to start turning on federal dollars for these things, I would be very skeptical.
00:37:42
Speaker
I'd call your legislators, your state legislators.
00:37:45
Speaker
I'd call your federal legislators too.
00:37:46
Speaker
But the question would be for Iowa folks, why are we going to be spending more money on this voucher scheme?
00:37:52
Speaker
We get that it exists for now.
00:37:54
Speaker
But why are we going to appropriate more dollars to it when Uncle Sam's about to send federal dollars to Iowa private schools too through a bailout that way?
00:38:01
Speaker
So there's ways.
00:38:02
Speaker
The thing isn't going to go away overnight.
00:38:05
Speaker
But there is a way to sit there and say, well, wait a minute.
00:38:08
Speaker
I don't know what the numbers.
00:38:09
Speaker
I'm just making some of that.
00:38:10
Speaker
But let's say the Reynolds budget says, let's add another 20 million to the cap of the voucher system here.
00:38:15
Speaker
Why are you doing that?
00:38:16
Speaker
When the feds are about to turn on, it's a $5 billion minimum right now or maximum right now under the current version of the bill that will be considered in January.
00:38:26
Speaker
If you just appropriated that equally across 50 states, we're talking about
00:38:32
Speaker
tens of millions of dollars to each state, including Iowa.
00:38:34
Speaker
So why has that even been up for discussion of state taxpayer dollars?
00:38:38
Speaker
So I think that there are on the margins things folks can do.
00:38:40
Speaker
And then the longer version of this is, of course, it's repeal.
00:38:44
Speaker
Just like that, repeal.
00:38:46
Speaker
That's the easy thing.
00:38:47
Speaker
The votes are there.
00:38:49
Speaker
I mean, people oppose this stuff, right?
00:38:54
Speaker
And that's why it takes, I mean, Iowa, it seems like all is lost today because there is this
00:39:01
Speaker
voucher system in place, but Iowa's one of the most recent states to pass a voucher system.
00:39:05
Speaker
It took a lot of time.
00:39:07
Speaker
It took primarying out seven Republican opponents from rural communities in Iowa with national Betsy DeVos dollars.
00:39:15
Speaker
The primary funder of those primary campaigns in August 2022 was a 501c4 called the American Federation for Children, which is Betsy DeVos's organization.
00:39:23
Speaker
It's not local Iowa families and voters pushing for these things.
00:39:27
Speaker
So Iowa held the line for a very long time.
00:39:30
Speaker
The reason they were able to do so is that there's no more voter support for these bills in Iowa than there is in Kentucky or than there is in Nebraska.
00:39:39
Speaker
It's just a matter of who can manipulate which legislature fastest.
00:39:42
Speaker
So it does take time, but we'll see these things continue to be a struggle as long as voters actually have a say.
00:39:50
Speaker
Yeah.
00:39:51
Speaker
And I think that'll be, you know, frankly, the line for any challenges that we're going to be facing in the near future is just you have to find a wedge, find a lane, find a direction and just chip away at it, right?
00:40:03
Speaker
Build capacity among people in your community, bring more voices to the table and yeah, lean on people who are amenable to be leaned on.
00:40:11
Speaker
My gosh, I so appreciate your time, Josh.
00:40:13
Speaker
The book, of course, is The Privateers, How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers.
00:40:19
Speaker
Thanks so much for joining me today.
00:40:20
Speaker
I really appreciate the time.
00:40:25
Speaker
Thank you again for listening to our podcast at Human Restoration Project.
00:40:28
Speaker
I hope this conversation leaves you inspired and ready to start making change.
00:40:32
Speaker
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00:40:36
Speaker
Plus, find a whole host of free resources, writings, and other podcasts all for free on our website, humanrestorationproject.org.
00:40:43
Speaker
Thank you.