THE PRIVATEERS

A professor of education policy examines how a small group of wealthy conservatives developed a rationale to privatize schools and support school vouchers.

Cowen, “an expert on school choice who spent formative professional years working with and around leading voucher advocates,” makes a solid argument that vouchers do more harm than good. To demonstrate his point, he examines the individuals and organizations that have promoted—and continue to promote—voucher programs. He begins by showing how the voucher concept originated as a reaction to Brown v. Board of Education. At the beginning, Milton Friedman suggested that parents, rather than government, should have the right to determine where their children went to school. The emergence of a powerful conservative movement (and figures like Charles Koch and Betsy DeVos) a few decades later brought the issue to the cultural fore. Cowen examines the development of the first voucher program in Milwaukee in the early 1990s and how the wealthy, right-wing Bradley Foundation used its money and political influence to “legitimate vouchers as a school reform strategy.” A federally funded program in Washington, D.C., which was itself shepherded into existence by conservative “foot soldiers,” followed. Turning to his own experiences, Cowen suggests that research advocating voucher programs is itself the product of the same wealthy, Christian nationalist networks. At the same time, that research has not been enough to counter the “utter, empirical disaster” that the school voucher system became in the 2010s. Donald Trump reignited the voucher controversy, transforming it into an ideological debate that would have repercussions in later Supreme Court rulings that allowed parents to use voucher money on private religious schools. While this book will likely not interest general readers, educators and education-policy specialists will no doubt appreciate Cowen’s attention to detail and thoroughness.

A well-researched book for the public policy crowd.