A new book by Michigan State University professor of education, Josh Cowen, The Privateers: How Billionaires Created A Culture War and Sold School Vouchers, combines academic expertise with Dr.Cowen’s own story of years operating in the trenches of the school voucher wars. On a personal level, Cowen was a Ph.D. candidate in educational program evaluation at the University of Wisconsin when, in 2006, he joined and helped lead a formal evaluation of the nation’s first private school tuition vouchers, established in Milwaukee in 1990. Throughout his eighteen year career, Cowen has found himself surrounded by the promoters of school voucher programs and exposed to the ways they have distracted from and evaded the consequences of formal program evaluation. The formal evaluation Cowen and colleagues conducted of the Milwaukee Voucher Program concluded, “that no academic difference between voucher users and public school students were attributable to the voucher program over the years we studied it.” (p. 74)

After eighteen years as an investigator, here are Cowen’s overall conclusions from his own and others’ research on private school tuition vouchers:

• “Today’s voucher programs primarily support students who were never in public school…
• The larger and more recent the voucher program is, the worse the academic results…
• Financially distressed private schools explain negative student results…
• The most vulnerable kids suffer high voucher turnover—or are pushed out of voucher schools…
• Oversight improves voucher performance…
• Parents looking for academic quality struggle to find room in private schools…
• Voucher-induced competition raises public school outcomes somewhat—but the evidence for directly funding vulnerable (public) schools is stronger instead.” (pp. 5-9)

As a Ph.D-qualified program evaluator, Cowen expected that when particular policies and programs were demonstrated not to meet their goals, people would pay attention and politicians would seek more effective policies. What shocked Cowen and forced him to begin speaking out has been a series of evaluations of state voucher programs that showed vouchers to harm students academically. After his team discovered that vouchers had no discernible positive effect on students’ academic outcomes in the Milwaukee evaluation, a decade later, there followed four disastrous evaluations of students’ academic outcomes when they left public schools and accepted vouchers—in Louisiana, in 2013; in Washington, D.C. in 2017 and 2018; in Indiana in 2017; and in Ohio in 2016. These were larger programs, not the small experimental programs launched in the 1990s.

Those of us who opposed the Milwaukee and Cleveland voucher programs back in the 1990s were certainly aware of the primary funder of the effort in Milwaukee, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, and of the Institute for Justice, its preferred legal team to defend vouchers in the courts.  Cowen shows that these organizations haven’t gone away, and have been joined by myriad investors, think tanks and legal firms, including The Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation (today called EdChoice), the Cato Institute (formerly the Charles Koch Foundation), the American Federation for Children, and the Heritage Foundation and its Project 2025. While the original Milwaukee vouchers were being debated by the Wisconsin Legislature, the Bradley Foundation joined the Olin Foundation to underwrite the publication of one of the first big voucher-justification books, John Chubb and Terry Moe’s Politics, Markets and America’s Schools.

Cowen traces the history along with his own personal exposure to the voucher movement. He directs us to the far right Council for National Policy (CNP)  as among the most powerful funders and supporters of school privatization. CNP’s members emerge throughout the book beginning with Tm LaHaye, Wayne LaPierre, Leonard Leo, Justice Clarence Thomas, and Mike Pence: “(A)bove all, members of the Council for National Policy and its affiliate groups connect through an active, even aggressive, approach to the use of wealth to further their aims in the political arena, particularly in state legislatures and executive offices. It is at the state level, after all, where much of the mechanics of education policy form and function. (p. 24)

A key element of the far-right, pro-voucher infrastructure, underwritten by grants from the same group of private funders, has been the emergence of special departments and programs at major universities: Paul Peterson’s Program on Education Policy and Governance in the Harvard Kennedy School, Jay P. Greene’s Department of Education Reform (funded by the Waltons) at the University of Arkansas, and the Hoover Institution at Stanford University with which Harvard’s Paul Peterson is also affiliated: “Over the following two decades, the Bradley Foundation would appear alongside organizations created and maintained by Charles Koch and the DeVos family to underwrite much of the political advocacy around school vouchers and school choice more broadly… But none of these local think tanks have the pedigree or mainstream national prominence of a professor with appointments at both Harvard and Stanford Universities. Ensconced in Cambridge and Stanford’s Hoover Institute—itself still a major recipient of Bradley donations—Paul Peterson remains the most decorated of the Council for National Policy-adjacent researchers and the embodiment of the reciprocal relationship between voucher policymaking and voucher evidence” (pp. 47-48)

Cowen identifies a “Beachhead theory of conservative policymaking prioritized by the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Koch network, the DeVos family and the Council for National Policy… always based largely on dogma… (E)stablishing a ‘counter-intelligentsia’ to push its policy aims at American universities, through conservative think tanks, and into legislation and litigation required more than dogma and more, even than theory. The critical role that Paul Peterson and his acolytes served in early school voucher policymaking was to provide that apparent empirical validation of long-standing conservative principle.”

After Donald Trump was elected President, “Betsy DeVos’s four-year term in government… (joined) the culture war and white-grievance politics that propelled Donald Trump to the White House with the modern history of school vouchers and school privatization more broadly.  Doing so at a time that evidence for voucher impacts on student outcomes was beginning to show real academic harm, the DeVos-Trump link returned the notion of ‘parents rights’ to the forefront of voucher advocacy.” (pp. 99-100)

Cowen traces a direct line from early school vouchers, justified in the 1960s by Milton Friedman as a way to avoid school integration, to today’s parents’ rights movement and white nationalism as parents seek vouchers to insulate their children in private educational institutions that can protect their children from experiences and peers that threaten the parents’ own values: “Trump’s election also recentered that notion of ‘parents rights’ around its original conception of the right to avoid integrating students from different family backgrounds in one public school community… (H)is presidency refueled culture wars around issues of race and gender, while the events around his defeat in 2020 fueled new distrust and, in some circles, rejection of democratic institutional norms… With these events occurring at the precise moment that, in the more narrow matter of educational policymaking, negative school vouchers evidence was appearing to threaten new expansions of those programs, Trump’s embrace of school choice as ‘the civil right issue of our time’ defined vouchers as something of a protected status….” (p. 100)

Increasingly disillusioned with the reality that formal evaluations of specific programs have been disregarded and overwhelmed by ideological justifications, Cowen has emerged as among the strongest opponents of school vouchers and school privatization. The Privateers is very much worth reading as an important, if scathing and discouraging, assessment of our society’s ethos and current education politics in 2024. Cowen concludes: “There would and will be no more success for the so-called parents’ rights agenda—whether for school vouchers, for book bans in school libraries, for aggressively conservative school bathroom policies or restrictions on classroom curricula—without the intellectual aid and comfort provided by the soldier scholar experts in and around the Council for National Policy (CNP) and its vast, aligned network of libertarians and religious nationalists.” (pp. 136-137)