Independent journalist and podcaster Jennifer Berkshire published a piece a Jacobin that focuses on the weakness of Donald Trump’s education policy.
While the specter of tech billionaires, worth an estimated $1.3 trillion in combined net worth, swarming Trump’s inauguration would seem to undercut the administration’s populist appeal, the issue of school vouchers is similarly nettlesome. After all, a passion for privatizing the nation’s schools unites the very wealthiest among us like few other causes besides not paying taxes. Betsy DeVos, Jeff Yass, Richard Uihlein, and the remaining brother Koch are all devoted to “funding students, not systems,” as the current sales pitch for vouchers puts it.
Increasingly, these oligarchs are devoting their fortunes to remaking state legislatures in order to till the land for voucher expansion. Yass, the richest man in Pennsylvania, was the single largest contributor to candidates in the last election cycle, with donations including $10 million to Texas governor Greg Abbott — the single largest donation ever to a Texas politician — and $5 million toward the failed voucher effort in Kentucky. The school choice organization founded and funded by DeVos has, according to one recent investigation, spent more than a quarter billion dollars to advance the cause of school privatization.
In recent years, that largesse has been devoted to knocking out the so-called RINOs, mostly rural Republicans representing areas where the argument for dismantling local schools falls flat. But that big-money push to buy up legislators is also hard to square with the sort of anti-billionaire rhetoric that is increasingly common in the MAGA sphere.
“Vouchers aren’t MAGA. Not even close,” says Brett Guillory. A welding teacher in Houston, Guillory was so convinced that the 2020 election was stolen that he contemplated a run for Congress. These days, he is a vocal opponent of the effort to bring vouchers to Texas. “To me, MAGA is building up the middle class. When you talk about a wealth transfer, it’s going from the hard-working class to the wealthy,” Guillory told me when I interviewed him for a podcast about rising resistance to school privatization on the Right.
Guillory is referring to a growing body of data showing that the “universal voucher programs” that have been enacted in red states mostly benefit parents who already sent their kids to private schools. “ If you look at all the numbers, all the statistics, they all say the same thing, that over three-quarters of people who use vouchers are the wealthy.” Concludes Guillory: “Vouchers are essentially welfare for the rich.”
The money gushing into states like Texas and Tennessee, the current targets of the school choice billionaires, is spurring a populist revolt on the Right. These days, the loudest voices opposing school vouchers are conservative, bemoaning that their elected officials have been bought and that vouchers are part of a “billionaire globalist agenda.”
