Please note: This transcript was automatically generated. We have reviewed it to ensure it reflects the original conversation, but we may not have caught every transcription error.

Christopher Saldaña: Hi everyone, I'm Chris Saldana and this is the National Education Policy Center's Talks Education Podcast. In this month's podcast, I interviewed Drs. Josh Cowen and Kevin Lawrence Henry, Jr. about privatization, school choice, and the culture wars. In the first part of this month's podcast, Professor Cowen, who is a professor of education policy in Michigan State University's College of Education and a senior fellow for the Ed Law Center, discusses his new book, The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers.

For listeners who may be unfamiliar with some of the terms that you use in your book what do concepts like privateers, culture wars, and school vouchers mean, and how have you found that they intersect?

Josh Cowen: Privateers, obviously, is a catch all phrase playing off the fact that at the end of the day What school vouchers are are a set of policy schemes that divert public funding to private school tuition.

If you look up privateers in the dictionary, what we're talking about are government funded pirates, essentially. So folks given especially from the 18th, 19th century, the charge or the right. To attack shipping lanes on the high seas and keep the money for themselves usually been used strategically hundreds of years ago to maintain control over over shipping lanes and things like that.

But, that's a bit of an analogy. What we're talking about today are a group of, just folks who are really intent on privatizing American education and doing so for very precise purposes. So that gets us to the culture war piece. Not everybody pushing for school vouchers is a cultural warrior, but the cultural wars attacks on race and gender in particular, the moment we're in book bans resurfacing lots of debates about where kids go to the bathroom in schools and play with sports, those things are very much part of this larger political moment that we're in and vouchers have resurged and found new political life after a decade.

And I read about this in the book in which really just in terms of sort of academic outcomes, we've seen some of the worst declines. In kids, academic results caused by vouchers. We ever seen on any research question in the history of education research. So the central question of books that it's up to ask is, okay I'm a policy analyst on any terms that would be familiar to policy analysts, how students are affected by a particular invention, which students are benefiting, which are not, what happens when you increase the size of these programs.

Doctors have performed horribly well. Horribly. And yet, they've, 24 states have passed or expanded them over the last couple of years. 13 states now have universal schemes. With no income cap. Why are we having this conversation still after this, a decade of horrific results? And the answer I come to in the book is we're in this culture war moment.

And it's not really about academics or school's choice, student choice at all. It's about culture wars, book bans, race, gender, and so on and so forth.

Christopher Saldaña: Why do you think these private tiers, as you call 'em have used vouchers as their policy of choice? Why not raising we've seen some examples of the Broad Academy, folks trying to train superintendents.

But why does it seem that vouchers have been the unifying policy scheme for which privateers have tried to push on public education?

Josh Cowen: I think it gets to the origin story. So in any kind of modern form vouchers, the godfather of the voucher idea is Milton Friedman wrote an essay in 1955 proposing something very similar to what vouchers became later.

And Friedman was writing what was going on in 1955, just a few months after Brown v. Board ordered. Schools and other public spaces to be desegregated on the basis of race. What you saw at the time is there's some debate about whether Milton Friedman himself was a segregationist, but in ways we would recognize today, certainly what's inarguable is that segregationists looking to avert or avoid Brown absolutely immediately latched on to the Friedman idea and saw it as a way to Listen, we're going to, we're going to just use public dollars to to, we're not going to go to public integrated schools.

We're going to, we're going to go to private schools that have segregation academies that have all white academies. And if need be, we're going to allow students of color and families of color to self segregate too, using vouchers to get out of any sort of authority as they would see a constitutional issues on that.

That was the plan. And Freeman said that actually in his voucher essay, creating the voucher idea, he said, listen, with vouchers, people can go to an all white school and all Use the term he used, but a school primarily of students of color. And everybody should be happy. And you see a lot of these same arguments today, especially on the issue of gender identity and LGBTQ representation.

You see the Cato Institute and others, just. Founded by Charles Polk, a libertarian think tank, saying let's not get into, let's just give everybody a voucher. If people don't want their kids to go to school around LGBTQ kids, they can separate out. If LGBTQ kids don't want to go to school around other children, they can separate out.

We don't have to mix anybody together. It's like the exact same argument as was used post Brown in the 50s. So I think that's why the policy vehicle is so salient for these folks. It really. Just is built on this theory of action for separating, isolating out and and moving forward with policy design that way.

Christopher Saldaña: I you're already going to where my next question is, which what does the arc look like? The strategy that these folks and it sounds like the concepts the theory of action is the same, right? It's like we're trying to separate kids and provide for some kind of mechanism for which parents to separate themselves or segregate themselves from other parts of society, but in terms of the structures How does the privateering, I guess we could call it, how does that look different from the work that Freedman was doing in 1955, and what the structures and infrastructure that we might see today that's supporting vouchers and the voucher movement?

Josh Cowen: The long term goal here is a Supreme Court ruling that makes vouchers mandatory in every state. On the argument that this is primarily today about religious education and that the government is discriminating against religious people who see education for children as a fundamental part of their religious practice if the government only funds secular public schools and does not also fund Voucher systems.

The court, Supreme Court has not yet gotten to that point, but in the last three rulings to come in succession in 2017, 2020, and 2022, three days in that case before Dobbs v. Jackson rolled back 50 years reproductive rights for half the people in this country, the court is increasingly expanding their recognition of religious education funded through vouchers as something resembling a right.

Basically, where we are right now, as far as the Supreme Court is concerned, six conservative justices ruling this, that States don't yet have to implement vouchers, but if they do, they must use them to fund religious education equally, not just what they call secular education. We really are getting close to this moment where it is not about sort of policy design or policy analysis in ways that you or I would understand those terms.

Evidence use, outcomes for kids spending limits, things like that. They're really pushing for something much more, in their view, fundamental, which is this kind of completely separated publicly funded religious experience for kids in K 12 educational environment.

Christopher Saldaña: How does that play out in our educational system in the U. S. when you have 50 states that are, in essence, designing their own K 12 educational system? So you mentioned that the ultimate goal is to have the Supreme Court. Lay down some sort of decision that would then make voucher programs mandated. How does that work, for example, in a place where a state may say, that's not what we want to do?

Josh Cowen: Yeah, it would depend eventually on how the court rules in terms of the states, right? This has been a conservative right wing jurisprudence over the last three decades that has been passed. It's deferred to states in some ways and then gotten in the way of states and others, right? So Bush versus Gore 22 years ago jumped in the middle of states, right?

And that way, it's really not, it's not clear to me what, what would happen in terms of how they made that ruling. But I think going back to the general objective here is, the. It's really important to see today's voucher push. If there's always been a libertarian element, anti government element, anti union element, that's where you get the Charles Koch aligned groups coming into the space, not really making arguments necessarily that would look like religious fundamentalism.

From the sort you would see about DeVos or but but just more in terms of get government out, they see schools as part of government, wanting to privatize everything, hence the book's title, no unions, things like that. We're really in a moment where those objectives are combining the religious and nationalism side and these kind of anti unions, no, no oversight types of the Koch world on very specific other related policy developments that we've seen over the last decade.

I think, for example this rollback to public sector unionization. Teachers unions are the thing that unites the Koch world to the DeVos world is hostility to unions. And vouchers just really are a vehicle in there if you check all these boxes. The last thing I'll say to that is this word, check all boxes is one way of putting it.

One analogy is a panacea, a cure all. That word panacea has been used by voucher supporters. I think it was first introduced by Terry Moe, the conservative. I'm a scholar at Stanford in the 90s. Just this idea that vouchers solve everything. They solve racial discord, they solve inequality, they solve structure of government questions, they solve religious rights, they solve everything.

And it's important to see vouchers not only just at what they do in policy terms, but as a tool. The other side of this issue intends them, which is the answer to every question you or I or other serious, or any other serious policy person might pose the answer is vouchers because vouchers are themselves the good, the public good and the outcome as these folks see it.

Christopher Saldaña: For listeners who may be interested in pushing back against voucher movements, against privateers, against these powerful groups what would you recommend they do?

Josh Cowen: I say this in the book and it starts with understanding and recognizing that there is actually evidence behind some alternative approaches and all of those alternative approaches start with new and sustained investments in public schools.

And so first we're talking about money. I think, sometimes when I talk to folks outside the policy community, but journalists and others, I'll say something like that. And there's a little bit of some eye roll from time to time. Of course, Congress is going to save money.

The union save money, whatever. But, the reality is, has the evidence against vouchers has accumulated over the last decade. The evidence for direct investment, what can be accomplished when you're funding public schools is actually wildly accumulated. One scholar, Kirabo Jackson, at Northwestern University called this sort of debate settled.

We know public money, we know money matters for education. And much of the pushback to that settled debate comes from Lingering pockets on the right, the boss type groups, coach type groups that say no, it's not that we don't know money matters at all for education, so it's just simply not true.

We know that investing in public schools has substantial generational payoffs, not just in terms of academics, but wages future, future earnings. Lower in contact with the criminal justice system and so on. So I would say for listeners listening to this, like it's starting with an understanding that, you get what you pay for and the evidence shows this and, any policy design has to begin with the best.

And then the question becomes, what are you going to invest in? And we can talk about some of those strategies. But I think where the evidence and where the conversation often is landing right now is You know tutoring programs after school programs universal school meals to use it topics in the political debate right now.

Our dialogue, a lot of evidence behind the fact that universal meals actually improve academics, not just make kids less hungry improving heating, including systems as well as ventilation systems, as well as we just saw, we just got out of the pandemic. There was a lot of stuff that we actually know seems to work and it has to start with that.

And then I would say, I'm not an election strategist or political strategist, but I would say I would note. Just given when we're having this conversation we're a few weeks, 30 something days away from an election and on that election day, everyone knows it's Trump versus Kamala Harris, but there are three other things happening on election day in three states, Colorado, Nebraska, and Kentucky.

Vouchers are up for a vote in two of those three to Crack open state constitution, make it easier to push vouchers through Kentucky and Colorado. In Nebraska, there's already a voucher bill, but the way Nebraska's lawmaking works, citizens have the ability to recall a vote or a piece of legislation.

And that's what they're doing. Vouchers have never, not once. Survived a statewide ballot initiative when put to direct vote by people. This is why you need a Betsy DeVos. This is why you need a Charles Koch to just ram these things through legislators. In particular, I'd say it's been rural Republicans who've been holding the line on these issues and they're the ones targeted for all this spending right now.

Because they don't like washes much more than progressives do for their own reasons. Most importantly, there aren't any private schools in these rural communities to spend vouchers on. There's stuff going on. We have an evidence base for a contrary, an alternative proposal that is funding public schools.

We also know, historically, that vouchers are really unpopular. And so we'll see what happens. This is why. They're going to the vote in these states as well to see what happens.

Christopher Saldaña: In the second part of this month's podcast, Dr. Kevin Lawrence Henry, Jr., who's an award-winning scholar of race, racism, and education policy and practice, and an associate professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis at the University of Wisconsin Madison, discusses the role that race and racism play in school choice and the culture wars.

When we think about culture wars and K 12 education in the U. S. Race often emerges as a central point of discussion. For example, we can think of this manifesting in two ways. One is folks who want to bring race into a discussion to understand how it impacts students, opportunities or educational policy, or alternatively, how racism impacts students, opportunities or educational policies.

And then you have the folks who are like, I don't want to talk about race. Why are we talking about race? The folks who are like, get CRT out of schools. For listeners who are trying to make sense of these kind of complex discussions when you think about race and racism in your work, what do those concepts mean?

Kevin Lawrence Henry, Jr.: Yeah, first off, Chris, I just want to say thank you so much for the invitation. I love your podcast. I love what you're doing. I love the fact that you bring on so many amazing scholars. So I feel not worthy to be here today, but it's a joy to actually be here and to share a little time and space with you.

I think this is a really great question because I think part of what we're discussing or thinking about is something that's bogus, right? The idea of race, is a bogus concept. And what I mean by that is that race is the way I define it or think about it is a system of human classification that is socially constructed, and it's often based off of skin color or physical attributes, right?

But what's important to also note that although race is something that is socially constructed, made up by humans, it's also something that we live within, right? I often tell my students, the building, this classroom that we're in, it's socially constructed, it's made by man, yet we don't want this roof to collapse on us, right?

We live within it. We need the foundation. One, race is something that's socially constructed. It's something that's made up, right? And what's important for me is the thinking about how race morphs and changes and shifts over time. And If we look about everything, if we think about like how race operates, it has often done those things, right?

So race is both kind of a thing that we use to talk about skin color and complexion and all of these kind of socially constructed things. But also race is something that I would say is it moves and shifts over time. And what becomes really important in our discussions of race is how race also, collapses and expands depending on time.

And but what's really central here is how race is often predicated on or in relation to whiteness. So we can think about these terms that existed, in the 1800s and early 1900s, mulattos, octoroons, quadroons, we don't use those forms of racial classification, but they're all in relation to this concept of whiteness, right?

But what's also important for me is to think about and I'll talk a little bit about this in terms of my work on school choice and charter schools, but also how race becomes something that's metaphorical or symbolic. So it's not only about people, but it also becomes about people, places, and things, right?

And policy can be racialized. The places in which we are living, our spaces, geography, can be racialized. Much so that we have places, for instance, that are, that we have coded language. We don't have to say anything. more than, the ghetto or we can say a certain part of town. Or for instance, when I first got to Wisconsin and we had an influx of students from Chicago, there were some students that would say the Chicago kids, which was coded for black, right?

So race has a kind of metaphorical and symbolic element, but also there is no race or notion of race without the idea of racism. And so for me, I can't disconnect race and racism, that classification system, because That is race, I should say, because we create race because of racism, not the other way around.

I'd like to say that. Oh, we just lived in this world where everyone was noticing other people's differences. But those differences weren't just merely I'm observing the difference between a parakeet and a cockatoo. No, it was a question of this parakeet is better than this other bird. So it's always a system of hierarchy.

It was always a system of the distribution of resources. And so race, though it's symbolic, it's constructed, it's all of those things. It is also something that's very material and I would say is linked to this project of racism or white supremacy.

Christopher Saldaña: So you've spent a lot of time in your research focusing on school choice.

Oftentimes, school choice is described as advocate, by advocates, as parents are going out into the world and just trying to find the best school for their kid. When you think about how you just described race and how it comes to mean something in the world and comes to shape everything that we do?

How have you found that race and racism intersect with school choice? And how does that differ from that kind of nice description of a, of just a marketplace where folks can just go out and pick and choose the best school for their kid?

Kevin Lawrence Henry, Jr.: So I often say we can't talk about educational markets without talking about the slave market, right?

I often use this image when I'm giving a lecture. About school choice or market based approaches. And I use this image of an enslaved African on the market or, in the slave market. And for me, this link between race and markets is, central to how we think about what happens in markets.

So much so that literally actual humans were commodified and seen as property to be, traded within a market as market goods. But more precisely, as I think about the history of school choice I can't divorce that history from the role of racism. And so I know that you may have had someone talk about the role of vouchers and segregation academies.

But it's really important, I think, to know when market based approaches to education springs up. And this is following the civil rights movement. And this is not just the civil rights movement in the United States, but this is globally right. So we have movements for freedom that exist in the United States, whether it's the civil rights movement, whether it's the LGBT or gay rights movement, whether it's feminist movement, whether And all of these movements at base are questioning these concepts that seem so central to the United States around choice, around liberalism, around the individual.

And what they offer is actually a pushback against ideas around competition, around the individual, around how we're supposed to care about each other and ourselves. And so when we're thinking about the civil rights movements of the sixties and seventies, these are all collectivist movements that are saying we have to actually deal with structural inequality.

We have to deal with and challenge institutional inequality and forms of racism or patriarchy or heteropatriarchy that exists. And so it's no coincidence that You know, following the Brown decision in 54 and with all these questions of all deliberate speed that you have the role of, for instance Prince Edward County, the role of segregation academies that spring up all throughout the south, right?

As a refusal to actually deal with and address segregation, right? A refusal to actually combat it. white supremacy. And so this is the entry point. But of course, it expands in the 1980s as we see the rise of people like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. So this market based approach actually is a response of retrenchment to movements towards racial and gender and economic equity and justice.

And so for me, as I think about this question of the market, as I think about these issues around race and racism they are intimately connected to how we have structured inequality in the United States from their inception. So voucher programs become an escape. From equity minded and justice minded education policy.

And what's interesting here for me as a person who studies school choice, particularly charter schools, the original charter schools that were started by teachers in Minnesota in 1991 which was actually a way to think creatively and innovatively about instruction and about how we organize our schools is totally different from some of the ways that we see charter schools currently Acting as exclusionary sites as these sites that are deeply rooted in punitive approaches to education, be it both in terms of discipline or even in terms of instruction.

So these very narrow ways of interacting with students and families and communities. And I think that there is, at base in the United States, a desire to choose to say that we get to make our choices, but I often say, what are those choices? And, if I'm walking down the street and someone tries to rob me and they say, give me your life or your wallet.

Now I do get to make a choice. I get to make a choice. However, that neither of those are the choices that I want to make. I don't want to give you my money, nor do I want to give you my life, but I get to make a choice. And I think that language, there's a discourse of choice without actually considering what are those choices that are readily available to us is a misnomer.

It's a misnomer. It actually hollows out. It's a misnomer. What choice might actually mean it actually hollows out what we might mean by innovation, right? We start to see that these kind of these kind of repetitive reproduced can curriculums that exist. We see that people are using only no excuse models versus the opportunity to use their culturally responsive or culturally sustaining any of those forms of expansive education get narrowed in such a way That it actually does not address the needs of those that have been made vulnerable by institutional realities of oppression and those that are currently made vulnerable by those those forms of oppression.

So for me, Chris, when I think about the market, when I think about what school choice looks like, it means for most people, I'm actually most interested in not just this. This broad idea of choice that's disconnected to justice. But also thinking about choice as something that is constrained by and perhaps even rooted in systems of inequality and whiteness.

Christopher Saldaña: So I want to switch gears just a little bit. And give you a chance to talk about your work in New Orleans, because I think we are now living in a world where it seems like there is a crisis, whether that be a climate crisis, a health crisis, a racial crisis, all kinds of crises that are happening. Simultaneously and in short succession of one another.

So I wonder how you might think about the lessons that you've learned focusing on New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, the charterization of the school district in New Orleans. What lessons do you think We should take away from that work as we think about, broadly about educational policy responses to crisis, but in particular, this push that often happens post crisis to, to push for choice, whether that be homeschooling or vouchers or charter schools.

Kevin Lawrence Henry, Jr.: When I think about New Orleans, I often think about the canary in the mineshaft and the purpose of the canary is to alert us of toxicity that might exist in the mine. So the canary will start to sing if there's a toxic environment that the miners are moving towards. And I think New Orleans is a really prime example of what that looks like.

As I think about the movement for school choice, I think you're absolutely right, Chris, It is, it's in fact predicated on the exploitation of crisis. And, we can use terms like market approaches or school choice, but what, what we're really talking about is a project of what I like to think of as neoliberalism.

And neoliberalism is, in fact, in many ways, reliant on crisis. And I think the question, in the midst of the crisis is, do we want to panic or do we want to think through this as best as possible? And I think, of course, there's a kind of flight or flight fight or flight response that comes from crisis.

But as I think about the New Orleans situation, one of the things that I often tell people is actually just slow down. Let's slow down and imagine it otherwise. And in imagining that otherwise, I think that offers for us some significantly more emancipatory options for education and what democratic options that we can enact than the use of school choices.

So what do I mean by that? In New Orleans, we saw some of the kind of hallmark issues around school choice that I think are coming to a district near you or if not have already come to a district near you. What do I mean by that? One in terms of teachers in New Orleans, nearly all of the teachers were fired Following Hurricane Katrina and replaced with alternatively certified teachers with programs for search, for instance, teach for America or teach Nola.

So essentially, it was a kind of gutting of teachers unions and protections and the narrowing of teacher label labor rights. That is something when we think about school choice that it becomes almost. integral to these projects of school choice expansion, whether it's vouchers or charters, because it's elimination of these kind of rights for teachers, right?

We see the working conditions for teachers in Florida, in Louisiana, we can say in Alabama, Alabama just recently passed the Choose Act, which is an expansion of their voucher program. Missouri, all of these schools, all of these states, what we're seeing is also connected to that. A type of siphoning of rights that exists for teachers.

So that's the first thing or first caution or concern. So how are we actually teaching? How are we actually working with and supporting the individuals that are charged with educating and supporting our students? Secondly, I would say what we also found in the work in New Orleans is actually that choice does not always improve students educational outcomes.

Again we can think here, about for instance, some work that was done in Massachusetts that we saw that students that were part of not students, not Massachusetts, excuse me Pennsylvania students that were part of online virtual charter schools, their actual student achievement actually plummeted.

In fact, Indiana, similarly, those that were part of their choice program in Indiana, their math scores plummeted. They were at, say, the 50 percent town. It went down to 26%. So like student achievement is not actually, you're not actually getting the student achievement that you think you may be getting.

In the case of Louisiana we see that still students in New Orleans cannot even, in terms of standardized testing cannot even get into the flagship university by and large based off of their standardized test scores. And a concern is that I think We have to be careful with the expansion of choice because some of the options that we're getting actually aren't meeting the needs of students academically.

And then I would say relatedly there is this kind of discipline disparity concern that we see as well that particularly impacts black and brown boys. And I talked about the New York case, but this happens as well in Arizona, New Orleans. You pick a state and we'll see that these discipline disparities are in fact exacerbated in some of these schools.

And for me as I think about the lessons learned, I would say that we should be cautious about the expansion of choice, particularly when the data does not actually pan out in terms of actually supporting or giving a strong push for choice, given the disparities that are pronounced or even, in fact, exacerbated.

But also what I think we have to think about in these moments of crises is an expansion, right? Not a restriction. And what I mean by that is how might we imagine part of my work? Part of my work thinks about like black educational actors and what they imagine for schools and what they desire for schools.

And for me the narrowness of how we understand school choice and the options that are presented to us actually does not get at the full democratic potential and possibilities that could exist in our educational system. So for me, I think we Can move towards what we actually desire. What is the desire based approach to education that is not predicated on moral panic or fear?

Or even a market approach that is so narrowly tailored that it doesn't serve anyone but those that open up the schools. But how might we imagine schools that are liberatory? How might we create conditions of possibility for student learning and student thriving? And I think The answer is we already know, right?

We have a very clear evidentiary base around asset based pedagogies and the success of those until we have a very clear evidentiary based around the role of teachers of color and the importance of maintaining teachers of color. We have a very clear evidentiary based around the importance of student funding and school funding that is justice centered and equity based.

So we don't actually have to, Imagine too far ahead. We actually have some of those things outlined for us. I think about Carter G. Woodson who wrote in 1933, The Miseducation of the Negro, and he talks very clearly about the constraints of public schools at that time, but also pushes us to imagine and otherwise.

And so for me, in the midst of crisis, I think this is a moment, an opportune moment for us to actually think about how we create different sets of schools, different kinds of forms of education. I think, we had a grand opportunity during the pandemic to use it as Arundhati Roy says is as a portal for something else.

Yet we never actually got there. We went really right back to schooling as is. And so I think the real innovation if we're gonna play with this idea of choice is for us to choose something. else to choose schools that are freeing, that are humanizing, that actually do the things that they say they will do and to create policies that actually allow for teachers and administrators and students to thrive in these spaces.

And so for me as I think about the New Orleans context in New Orleans case it comes into being Because of manmade crises the hurricane certainly did destroy or decimate much of the city, but we made a choice actually to do school choice. We didn't have to do that. We could have actually funded our schools.

We could have actually supported our teachers. We made an active choice to not do that and to create in some ways further segregation in the city to say nothing of efforts that really constrain teacher instruction and as well as student learning. So for me, Chris, as I think about the lessons from New Orleans, the largest and biggest one that I would say is to pause, stop and think and imagine what we want that is beyond the market.

Because again, as I joked earlier, when has the market really been? And this is not an indictment, I think, in part against capitalism, but I think it is a question around how market mechanisms actually might reinforce and sustain inequity as opposed to challenging it.

Christopher Saldaña: Thank you, Professors Cowen and Henry for being on this month's podcast. As always, we hope you're safe and healthy. And remember for the latest analysis on education policy, you should subscribe to the NEPC newsletter at NEPC.Colorado.Edu.