Last week, Texas Republicans advanced a measure that would create a massive new school voucher program. Should it become law, parents could use $1 billion in public funds to subsidize private-school tuition and the costs of homeschooling. It would not matter if the private school is religious or secular. (A homeschooling parent could be a Flat Earther and it wouldn’t matter, either.) As the New York Times put it, “The bill was championed by an ascendant wing of the Republican Party, closely allied with President Trump and important conservative donors, including Betsy DeVos, Mr. Trump’s wealthy former education secretary, and Jeff Yass, a billionaire financier from Pennsylvania and a Republican megadonor.” Money is winning the day — but what about kids?

They might not fare well, if research is any guide. In The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers, Josh Cowen traces the history of voucher programs in the U.S. and argues that the evidence doesn’t support their expansion. Cowen, a professor of education policy at Michigan State University, writes that he once supported school vouchers until the evidence began to show major declines in academic outcomes, especially among disadvantaged students. Louisiana’s program is a prime example. One paper showed that school vouchers “caused unprecedented large, negative impacts on student achievement,” Cowen writes, deficits that continued into the program’s second year. Another paper, produced by a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, showed “similarly large negative impacts.” Cowen says voucher advocates are pushing school choice in spite of poor results because it entrenches the culture war. Vouchers are no longer about education attainment, if indeed they ever were. They’re part of a much broader assault on the very notion of the public good.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

As I understood it, the pro-voucher argument was originally twofold: They would improve academic achievement and create better opportunities for disadvantaged kids. What does the research tell us about the veracity of those claims?
From the academic-achievement standpoint, the bigger and the more recent the voucher system is, the worse the results have gotten. And that was true right up until the eve of the pandemic. Since then, we haven’t really been able to collect any data because all of the new expansions don’t include any data-collection requirements that would allow us to ask that question in a rigorous way. I say this in the book, but the reason for that is that the results were so bad they just stopped collecting data.

The smaller targeted programs that really were means tested in the ’90s and the early aughts didn’t have the negative results on student academics that we saw over the last decade. They maybe weren’t the greatest thing ever, but they certainly weren’t causing student achievement to drop.

Now we’re rolling back social services, and health care, and retirement security — there are all these other things going on that really, in my view, gets vouchers back to historical origins and what they were meant to be, which is a disinvestment in the public sector.

As you note in your book, there is research that gets used to make a case for vouchers. Can you walk me through what that evidence says and what the flaws might be?
The way that this works with these guys — and this was true even before the data got really bad on test scores — is they asked, What were the legislative or evaluation outcomes? And then they would buffer those results with a series of non-required, non-mandated reports on other things.

They would say, “Well, parent satisfaction is higher.” Which seemed true in some surveys. There was one study that I singled out because I found it particularly distasteful, but they said vouchers improved character because there were fewer out-of-wedlock births. So they’ve started to move the goalposts to a whole lot of nonacademic outcomes. First there were no voucher impacts on achievement, nothing to write home about, and then increasingly, these horrific academic declines over the past decade.

You still kept seeing all these reports coming out. Basically, the argument being “Well, test scores just aren’t a good way to evaluate what private schools and vouchers can do.” Apparently they’re good enough to evaluate public schools in their view, but not private schools.

If we’re thinking about test scores as one measure of academic achievement, and using that to draw a conclusion about school vouchers, how conclusive is the evidence against school vouchers at this........

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