Seven Lessons About School Vouchers From The Privateers

From Forbes.com

Josh Cowen spent years working as a researcher studying the world of school vouchers; what he learned turned him into one of the foremost critics of the school voucher movement.

His book The Privateers traces the history of the modern voucher movement from its roots in the work of Milton Friedman and backlash against the Supreme Court rulings, up through the modern voucher movement.

Cowen sees that modern movement as a coordinated effort by actors like the DeVos-funded American Federation for Students and the Bradley Foundation, many connected through the secretive conservative group the Council for National Policy. In Cowen’s telling, wealthy patrons working through such groups financed the policies that launched vouchers, the politicians who supported the vouchers, the think tanks that created the arguments for vouchers, the scholars who provided the evidence for vouchers, and in some cases even the privates schools accepting the vouchers.

Cowen has spent eighteen years studying vouchers, and that career has led him to question the validity of vouchers as a solution to problems of “income, gender, or especially racial inequality.” Cowen considers what we see if we “strip away advocacy research on either side: no conservative advocacy groups disguised as think tanks, no research shops set up by teachers’ unions, no freelancing bloggers or social media stars with a hundred thousand followers and a hot take.” He concludes”

Expert analysis, independent and investigative journalism and a handful of transparent state and federal accountability audits show that policies diverting public funds for private school tuition have some of the worst outcomes in the education research record to date.

Early in the book, Cowen breaks down seven results of the research.

1. Today’s voucher programs primarily support students who were never in public school.

The original pitch of modern taxpayer-funded vouchers was that they would help students escape “failing public schools,” but in practice vouchers (particularly in states with “universal” vouchers) are used mostly by students who aren’t escaping anything.

2. The larger and more recent the voucher program, the worse the academic results.

Early studies of small programs (including one study for which Cowen was lead author) found some modest gains. But the trend has been downward ever since.

Read the full piece here.