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PORTSIDE CULTURE

THE FAR RIGHT’S 70-YEAR CRUSADE TO EXTINGUISH PUBLIC EDUCATION  
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Eleanor J. Bader
October 21, 2024
The Indypendent
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_ Heightened efforts in recent years to paint public schools as
bastions of ideological perversion, sexual permissiveness and
anti-white ideology are part of a long-running campaign that is
gaining momentum. _

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_The Privateers: How Billionaires Created A Culture War and Sold
School Vouchers_
Josh Cowen
Harvard Education Press
ISBN: 9781682539101

Josh Cowen, a professor of education policy at Michigan State
University, has written a profoundly unsettling horror story. But his
creation does not involve the supernatural or creatures from the great
beyond. Instead, _The Privateers: How Billionaires Created A Culture
War and Sold School Vouchers_ provides a meticulously detailed account
of a 70-year-old plot to undermine public education. Cowen zeroes in
on the rightwing billionaires and ideologues who want to end public
education and transfer government funds, through school vouchers, to
private — often evangelical Christian — educational institutions.

The evolution of this scheme involves a confluence of actors: Funding
from donor networks spearheaded by Charles Koch and the Bradley, John
M. Olin, DeVos Family and Walton Family foundations in conjunction
with right-wing policy groups and a small cadre of well-placed
conservative scholars and legal activists. Acting in tandem, these
entities have painted public schools as bastions of ideological
perversion, anti-white ideology and sexual permissiveness. 

The idea of public subsidies for private school students dates back
right-wing efforts in the 1950s to undermine school integration.

It’s been effective: Under the aegis of “parental rights
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the last few years have seen books banned, teachers barred from
discussing race and gender, and trans and queer kids left to fend for
themselves.

Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of kids, most of them white
Christians from politically conservative families, are either being
homeschooled or attending private religious academies paid for with
tax dollars.

How we got here is both fascinating and enraging. And even though
vouchers have repeatedly failed to boost academic achievement, _The
Privateers_ stresses that this does not matter to the right wing.
What’s more, the book documents the factual distortions aired by an
echo chamber of media to dissuade religiously conservative parents
from sending their kids to public schools. Christopher Rufo
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about the damage wrought by Critical Race Theory and Donald Trump’s
imagined school-based conversion of Jimmy into Jane, are two recent
examples, but Cowen notes that opposition to public education has deep
roots and did not begin with Rufo, Koch, Trump or other contemporary
right wingers. 

_The Privateers_ situates the idea of vouchers with economist Milton
Friedman, [[link removed]] who in 1954
first posited “educational freedom” as a way for white parents to
evade desegregation mandates. In the aftermath of _Brown v. Board of
Education_
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Cowen reports that a slew of private academies opened for the
exclusive benefit of white children. The State of Virginia championed
the idea of these separate schools. So did Texas, whose governor
appointed an advisory committee to consider how best to proceed. That
group set the stage, urging lawmakers to “give serious consideration
to some sort of tuition grant plan, whereby a parent who does not wish
to place his [sic] child in an integrated school may receive state
funds to have the child educated in a segregated, non-sectarian
private school.”

From there, the idea of academic subsidies took off. The Cato
Institute [[link removed]], established by Charles Koch and his
late brother David in 1977, further popularized the concept. Three
years later in 1981, when the Council for National Policy
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together, vouchers were solidified as a key demand. As Cowen notes,
vouchers went “from a political expedient against racial integration
to a policy priority for some of the wealthiest and most influential
actors on the religious right.” 

Surprisingly, however, it took until 1990 for Milwaukee to become the
first municipality to create a publicly-funded voucher program.
Ironically, advocates presented it as a way to give low-income
children of color the same “choices” as kids from upscale
families. Thanks to the leadership of Dr. Howard Fuller, who was
Black, the role of racism in voucher history went unacknowledged. 

In the 34 years since, vouchers have expanded, providing funding to
both secular and parochial schools in many places. This effort, Cowen
writes, has been boosted by several well-placed (and well-financed)
professors and university think tanks that give legitimacy to the
effort. None have been more instrumental than Harvard’s Paul
Peterson. He and colleagues Jay Greene and Patrick Wolf, Cowen writes,
“are not an isolated group of conservative scholars shouting their
views from the Ivory Tower;” conversely, they are part of a
“tightly connected network of funders and right-wing activists”
who’ve pushed tax support for private education for decades. Cowen
calls them “soldier-scholars” and reports that their glowing
research on voucher efficacy is riddled with flaws and fallacies.

It’s maddening. Nonetheless, the intricate web of deep-pocketed
conservative funders, activists, lawyers and scholars that Cowen
describes should be well understood by every supporter of public
education. The fact that the right is successfully eroding
church-state separation, using vouchers as a strategic entry point, is
frustrating. By calling privatization “educational freedom,” their
work has devalued public schools and, he writes, has “reoriented the
notion of education from a public good to a private enterprise.”

The upshot, Cowen explains, is that “the school voucher movement is
the parents’ rights movement and the parents’ rights movement is
religious nationalism.” 

By which he means Christian nationalism
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Trump’s former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos
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a billionaire who spends lavishly on “school choice” has said that
she wishes churches, not public schools, were community hubs. Cowen
knows the danger this poses. “The fundamental threat to democracy by
religious nationalism — whether in our schools or in our communities
writ large — is not religious, per se,” Cowen wisely concludes.
“It is what comes from that form of religious radicalism: In the
case of U.S. education, a dangerous, domestic form of isolationism”
that aims to sideline atheists, agnostics, and non-evangelical
Christians.

We simply can’t allow this to happen.

_The Indypendent is a New York City-based newspaper, website and
weekly radio show. All of our work is made possible by readers like
you. During this holiday season, please consider making a recurring or
one-time donation today or subscribe to our monthly print edition and
get every copy sent straight to your home._

* Education
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* Right Wing Politics
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* School privatization
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* The First Amendment
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