Great book review by Steve Hinnefeld’s School Matters blog on a book called “the Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers” written by Josh Cowen. It’s worth reading the whole thing, but generally, the origin story of vouchers generally starts with a paper by economist Milton Friedman seized upon by segregationists after Brown v. Board of Education. The idea was to defund public schools and divert the funds to all-white or nearly all-white “segregation academies.” This aligned with the sensibilities of a certain strand of libertarianism. Add funding and structural support from a handful of sympathetic billionaires and their foundations, and we were off to the races.

Vouchers don’t work.
No state’s voters have ever voted straight up for this kind of school privatization. What’s more, vouchers don’t work if, by “work” we’re talking about good educational outcomes. In Indiana, the original pretense was that vouchers were necessary to get children of poor families out of failing schools and into better ones. Now there is barely any income qualification, they’ve removed any requirement that a kid ever have attended a public school, and certainly there is no requirement that the private school receiving a voucher provide a superior education to the public school in question. Which is lucky for the private schools receiving vouchers – “larger studies since 2015 of statewide programs, including Indiana’s, have found large learning losses for students who moved from public to voucher schools.”
As the original pretense for vouchers wore thin, advocates simply shifted rationales. Now it’s all “about ‘choice,’ ‘education freedom,’ and ‘parent rights,’ the latter referring to a right to avoid ideas and information that might conflict with religious fundamentalism.”
Finally, I was particularly struck by this line:
“To get universal school choice, you really need to operate from the premise of universal public school distrust.”
And, to that end, we’ve seen a persistent sowing of distrust in our public schools from those who want to subsidize religious education, weaken teachers unions, and divert public funds to private interests. Definitely worth reading Hinnefeld’s full review and, likely, moving on to Cowen’s book.
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