The school voucher movement has been resurrected in recent years among many Christian conservative communities to move from public school to private school to return faith to education. Vouchers are a publicly funded way of allowing taxpayers to access private school enrollment for their children. It has now become a cornerstone for the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 to reject their narrative that the liberal agenda is infiltrating and brainwashing America’s public school children. But is it also an effort to return to segregated schooling?
Milton Friedman pioneered the school voucher idea from a Libertarian viewpoint. Simultaneously, the monumental Brown v. Board of Education case, solidifying the end of segregation in public schools across the country, was decided. The collision of both the court decision and Friedman’s idea was an intentional way to enable White conservatives against integration to justify moving to private schools that remain White and widely Christian. The voucher system has increased in interest from conservatives and groups such as Moms for Liberty with the rise of MAGA and the appointment of far-right education advocates such as Betsy Devos.
Former Secretary of Education Devos pursued implementing government-funded school vouchers, but her efforts fell short. However, her drive for these programs to be federally enacted led way for leaders such as Heritage Foundation’s Kevin Roberts to mobilize conservatives to fight for school vouchers. Project 2025 addresses the voucher system as a solution to give parents a faith-based choice in schooling for those who may not be able to afford the high price of private schools. Roberts himself was the founder and executive director of a voucher-based private school in Louisiana. He’s used his prior school leadership to prove that this system works and is the best solution to take education back.
The education system is now deeply intertwined in politics and the 2024 election. School board meetings, parent groups protesting LGBTQIA+ literature, and non-gendered bathrooms, are at the center of the Republican Party’s platform for America’s education to change. With Project 2025’s proposal to end the Department of Education, what comes with it is the attempt to deregulate protections for students and religious freedom in the classroom. The first of this has been seen in Louisiana public schools and the posting of the Ten Commandments as well as Oklahoma’s implementation of the Bible in every subject of its curriculum. The Republican Party and its private funders are gaining momentum in hopes of solidifying their ultimate win in November.
In an interview with Dr. Josh Cowen, author of The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers, he outlines the history of the school voucher movement and how it has come to be a central issue in today’s politics. Dr. Cowen is a professor of education policy at Michigan State University. He is a leading expert in school vouchers and charter schools and has been published in Slate and Time. Cowen is the founder of Education Policy Innovative Collaborative (EPIC), a research collaborative between Michigan State University and the state of Michigan.
The start of the school voucher movement starts with Milton Friedman, but it also coincides with Brown v Board of Education. Can you help us understand how those two go together?
Friedman was well aware of the Brown decision and was having a back and forth with his editors at this time. It became immediately understood that this idea of using taxpayer funding to attend private school and get out of the public school system altogether would be and could be seized upon by folks looking to avoid the ruling for mandatory racial integration that Brown put forward.
Sure enough, in the months after and in the years after, most of the southern states were primarily affected by these rulings, even though it was a national ruling, in one way or another, seized on the voucher idea. Some successfully and some not so successfully in the legislatures. But all the folks immediately understood, as did Friedman himself that a voucher-type system could be used by parents to separate and isolate themselves according to their own preferences. At that time, they were racial preferences. The idea certainly was using vouchers to separate and isolate folks based on parental preferences. That was intended from day one.
That brings us into the realm of religion and a conservative Christian cosmos in the middle 20th century and late 20th century and their reaction to Brown. Can you help us understand that in a little more detail? And is this how we get the DeVos family as a Titan of this whole movement?
Not only race, but busing was incredibly important fuel to the rise of Reagan in the late seventies, the Reagan presidency in the eighties and into the nineties. So you have to talk about vouchers in this framework of the start of the far-right takeover of the Republican party.
That really goes all the way back to the Nixon years and the Reagan years. They really didn't succeed at any sort of level of scale on the voucher side until 1990 when the DeVos folks come into this story. You know, this was the same period of time that the Christian Coalition Ralph Reed and people like him all started becoming prominent on the national scale. It's not an accident that the first voucher program wasn't really in modern form passed until 1990, despite those origins. All this stuff became politically pliable at roughly the same time.
Then, shockingly Trump enters the White House. And with Trump comes Betsy Devos and all of this favorability for vouchers. This is when it went from evidence to values. Would you help us understand that?
Donald Trump didn't pass a voucher program. Betsy DeVos for all of her efforts, did a lot like rolling back protections for certain kids and things like that, but she didn't get a voucher program passed. But what the Trump administration did in addition to appointing judges was stabilize a voucher movement.
I do not believe that vouchers would be here today without the absolute resurgence of Christian nationalism that came during the Trump years, the end of the Obama years, and all the stuff that came with it, like Charlottesville and new attacks on LGBTQ Americans. You know, we came out of the Trump years and we're in book bans. These things gave fuel and energy, aid and comfort to the voucher movement at a very perilous time. And that's why we are here.
Is this where we get the emergence of a Critical Race Theory panic, Moms for Liberty, and figures like Christopher Rufo? Does it come out of this whole nexus?
There's a reason the Heritage Foundation is spending as much time running around yelling about diversity, equity, and inclusion at universities as they are vouchers. This is about race when it comes down to some of this stuff. There's a reason that Rufo's chief political benefactor, Governor Ron DeSantis in Florida, who has signed the largest universal voucher system in the country, made comments of defending a mandatory curriculum in Florida public schools that suggested that slavery had economic benefits for African Americans and should be taught as such. Vouchers fit into this as the policy piece for what they're trying to do. It's hard to put something concrete and tangible necessarily around the issue of race in schools. This is why these folks fixate on specific policy items for school vouchers, like bathrooms, like locker room policies, or specific tangible things that come out of and follow this bigger fervor around these culture wars.
You need fertile ground to sow some of this distrust for sure. But at the end of the day, a lot of this is absolutely a political push. This is not just grassroots. Heritage Foundation has written Project 2025 for President Trump. Moms for Liberty targeted school board elections at first. And then they had two national conventions, the first of which Betsy DeVos was the keynote at, the second of which was big for all the presidential candidates back when there were multiple Republicans: not only Trump, but Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley and all these people last year. So this has always been deeply entrenched in Republican party politics. It's not just conservative. It's not just education. It's not just religion. This has been all tied into Republican party politics.
At this point in the conversation that as an American you have the freedom to send your kid to a school that's teaching Creationism. The difference with the voucher set is that it's asking taxpayers to subsidize that school or that education in some way.
At that point in my research agenda, we were unpacking sort of what we call secondary issues like who's using these programs and what they are doing. Some of these results were coming in from voucher advocacy organizations. I stress the disaster-level impacts of these things aren’t just a reference point, but I also try to kind of underscore the seriousness of what we're finding here. As a follow-up to your first point about using private funds to go to these creationist schools, it isn't just that vouchers are costing taxpayers money that could be spent elsewhere. These are just new subsidies for old, old choices. The big problem from my perspective is someone who really is still committed to social justice and to trying to kind of use evidence to inform public policy. Vouchers are the education equivalent of predatory lending. So, it's not just that somebody else is using some tax dollars to go to some Christian school that's going to teach Creationism. It's more than that. It's that these schools are going out recruiting lower-income families, kids who have been perhaps underserved by the public school system, and saying, come to us, you'll do better here. The plain reality is they're not being underserved. They're being targeted mostly because the dollars follow those children into those schools with no care for the academic outcomes of those children. At least not in any way parents can assess how well those kids are actually doing relative to the kids.
Are there signs of hope? Are there ways that people can get involved? Are there things that they can get behind in terms of shifting the tide?
One of the things that I've talked about in social media and other places is that one of the things I think this election is doing is clarifying some of these choices in this culture war and this political kind of back and forth, at least in education. So, you've got Governor Walz, who is one of the first governors to pass a universal school meals bill. So, regardless of your income level, you had access to food every day for kiddos. The other campaign, two of the first three paragraphs of Project 25’s education agenda is school vouchers. So, you've got universal school vouchers on the right and universal school meals on the left.
And I think universal school vouchers versus universal school meals stands in for a lot of the different kinds of policy priorities and things that we should be talking about as people who care about public policy. These are the value systems that I think are important, helping using policy, using civil service, using democracy to make life better for everyone. There's actually good social science evidence behind them. It's not just universal meals. They don't just keep kids hungry or keep hungry kids from being hungry. They also have academic impacts. They have positive effects. And it turns out hungry kids don't learn as well. You know, I believe that these programs, these meals, better heating and cooling systems, safer schools, they're the right thing to do. But as it turns out, at least if we believed in social science, they have a strong evidence base behind them too. So, I think these are the kinds of things that we should get behind.
As a Canadian who begrudingly moved to Florida two years ago with a kid who will be a kindergartener next year, I’m so invested in this topic. There is no close-by public school where I live. But every church peppering the landscape seems to have a school associated with it. We will have to either drive our child to a private school of our choice, using DeSantis’ voucher program, or to a public school in a different part of our county that is slowly losing funding because it’s all being redirected towards private institutions. Even other parents I talk to seem to have resigned themselves to the current situation. I swear the learned helplessness is almost part for the course of the GOP agenda. As a former educator myself, I lament the state of education here and worry what the future will look like with an abandoned undereducated citizenry.
"Money follows the student" = bad. "Universal curriculum" = bad. "Parental education" = bad.
"Collect school taxes at the State level rather than at the School District level"= bad?