From Forward Kentucky: School vouchers have a racist history, as well as troubling impacts on public schools
The voucher system came out of racist parents’ rejection of integrated schools in the ‘50s. It’s still hurting students.
By ELEANOR BADER
Truthout
The push for “school vouchers” — the transfer of public funds into tuition subsidies for private secular and religious schools — has been a right-wing project from the start.
Josh Cowen, a professor of education policy at Michigan State University who has been studying the right-wing push for school vouchers for more than 20 years, says his conclusion on school vouchers is unequivocal: Despite the right’s billing of vouchers as a way to ensure that all students have an equal chance to attend their school of choice, in reality the so-called “education freedom agenda” promoted by vouchers devalues public schools and reorients education from a public good to a private enterprise.
Cowen’s first book, The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers, outlines this scheme in stark and chilling detail, zeroing in on a host of individual scholars networked with prominent right-wing foundations (Bradley, DeVos, Friedman, Koch, Scaife and Walton); think tanks (Stanford’s Hoover Institute and Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance); political organizations (the Alliance Defending Freedom, American Enterprise Institute, Cato Institute, Council for National Policy, Federalist Society, Heritage Foundation and Manhattan Institute); and astroturf “parents’ rights” groups (Moms for Liberty, Parents Defending Education and the American Federation for Children) that have worked in tandem to promote privatization.