Students from low income families actually suffer when they get state money to transfer from public to private schools. They do not do better on standardized tests than their peers who remain in public schools, and in many cases do worse. The gap is even greater than the gap in scores caused by covid shutdowns.
The argument that they would do better is based on mythology, not evidence. It is a myth promulgated by a few billionaires whose libertarian goal is to get rid of government social welfare programs. To them, public schools are an enemy because they are government social welfare programs.
That is the startling conclusion of a new book by Michigan State professor Josh Cowen, “The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers,” published by the Harvard Education Press in 2024.
Cowen traces the history. It begins with Chicago economist Milton Friedman’s response to the 1954 Supreme Court desegregation decision. Friedman said vouchers should be used as a “race neutral” way to maintain racially segregated schools.
Since then, a handful of billionaires who did not themselves attend public schools have undertaken the cause. In Wisconsin, the right-wing Bradley Foundation lobbied for a voucher program in Milwaukee. Then the idea spread, primarily through the efforts of Michigan’s Betsy Devos, a billionaire married to an inheritor of an Amway fortune. She founded an American Federation for Children and contributed $250 million to promote vouchers in Florida and elsewhere.
They have pitched vouchers as a way to help students from low-income families. They funded studies by evidence-based education scholars which they hoped would show improvement. The principal studies were done in Louisiana, Indiana, Ohio, and Washington, D.C.
But the studies found that voucher programs either had no effect at all on student test scores or actually hurt them, especially in math. From this Cowen concludes the past decade has produced “some of the worst evidence to accumulate against any public policy plan in the public record.”
In Louisiana, for example, the state used a lottery to distribute voucher money. That enabled a comparison between students who successfully applied and those whose applications were not accepted. In other words, the lottery created random samples that could be compared. A team of scholars from Duke, MIT and Berkeley examined the students’ scores on a state standardized test. They found 16% lower scores in math, and significant differences in reading and social studies. The probability that a child would fail to be promoted doubled.
A study in Indiana using individual student data compared the scores of low-income students using vouchers to scores of students not using vouchers but who were similar in income, race, sex, and prior achievement levels. Over a four year period, it found significant losses in math, and no gains in English or language arts.
The studies give several reasons for the achievement gap. One is the poor quality of the private schools the students attend. Some of those schools were created to take advantage of the voucher program. Another is that many of them are religious schools who devote less time to basic subjects.
Cowen reports that, because of these results in studies, those advocates have said they have decided to stop “making arguments based on performance metrics” and instead start “making arguments about “parents’ rights.” In other words, they have become advocates for allowing parents to short-change their children’s education.
That is precisely the current cry of the Mississippi Public Policy Institute, an arm of the national State Policy Network financed by Charles Koch, a billionaire many times over, the Devos family, and a right-wing fundamentalist club known as the Council for National Policy.
Cowen laments that this fight has been one-sided. There are no billionaires financing political races to preserve public education.
Cowen’s book is not without its problems. He describes the studies in only the most general terms and reports their outcomes in terms of “standard deviations,” an academic concept that means little to people who are not education professors. If he had used some of the more accessible language found in articles he footnotes, the book would be easier to read. Also, when he turns to discussion of the culture wars, he seldom misses an opportunity to offer a disparaging description of one of the warriors even if it is irrelevant.
But the next time that someone in the Mississippi legislature claims that a state voucher program would benefit poor people, the legislature should pay attention to the actual evidence that it would not. Mississippi has in recent years embraced what are called “evidence-based” methods to improve public education, thanks in large measure to the work of the Barksdale Reading Institute. Those methods have worked. Mississippi should continue to rely on evidence, not myth, to improve educational opportunity.
Luther Munford is a Northsider.
