Linda Blackford writes commentary for the Lexington Herald-Leader. In this recent op-ed, she points out the many problems with school vouchers.
Advocates of “school choice,” or using public funds to pay for private school, often call it the civil rights issue of our time.
That’s a special kind of gaslighting, not only because numerous studies have shown how little academic progress students make with school vouchers, but also because the school choice movement was actually born out of the horror that parents and politicians had toward the 1954 Brown v. Board decision that would end legal segregation in schools.
That resistance was bolstered by Nobel prize-winning economist Milton Friedman’s book “The Role of Government in Education,” which objected to any government oversight of any kind, and first suggested some kind of tax code changes to subsidize private education.
“It was this idea — what became school vouchers — that allowed segregationists to frame a racist response to the Court’s desegregation orders as an issue of markets and what we would call today parental choice,” writes Josh Cowen in his timely new book, “The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers.”
The book is a fascinating history of how the school choice movement began in segregation, then caught steam as a way to help poor and minority students in failing systems.
All seemed lost when a series of studies showed voucher programs were actually hurting students. But then, amid the culture wars of the Trump administration, a, yes, vast right-wing conspiracy of conservative think tanks and “soldier scholars” began to entwine school choice with “parental rights,” leading to an explosion of states offering “universal vouchers,” which diverts state funding to families regardless of family income.
It’s uncanny, Cowen says, that in nearly every state, studies show that 70% of voucher dollars go to families that already send their children to private school.
Cowen’s book is instructive for Kentucky because in just a couple of months we will be voting on Amendment 2, which would rewrite our state constitution to erase language that explicitly forbids public school dollars from going to private schools. Cowen is a former Kentuckian — he spent five years as a public policy professor at the University of Kentucky’s Martin School — and understands how harmful the amendment is to the state’s public schools.
