With Amendment 2, KY faces existential choice over public schools. | Opinion

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, amidst 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 percent of voucher dollars go to families who 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.

“Kentucky is particularly ill-suited to this kind of reform,” Cowen, now at Michigan State University, told me recently in a phone interview, because most of its school districts are rural without many or any private schools in them.

“But you’re also talking about a constitutional amendment to do all this damage.”

If Amendment 2 passes, it would be the first time school choice was successful on a statewide ballot. It’s not clear what form of school choice the GOP supermajority in the General Assembly would choose; they tried to start a kind of educational savings account program before a constitutional challenge quickly shut it down in 2022.

TJ Roberts, a particularly extreme right winger from Northern Kentucky who will probably win the 66th House District in November recently tweeted he would introduce universal vouchers on “Day One” of the 2025 session, and there are no doubt many of his colleagues in favor of just that.

Vast right-wing conspiracy

But reading Cowen’s book might change minds.

He documents the many conservative think tanks — the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the Bradley Foundation, ALEC, the Council for National Policy — funded by true believers like Charles Koch and Betsy DeVos, a billionaire who served as Trump’s Secretary of Education, who followed Friedman’s theories that all public education was too much government oversight.

As Cowen writes: “For some it was economic self-interest combined with libertarian market ideology; for others it was religious fundamentalism that animated their priorities.”

Around 2017, a series of studies on vouchers programs in Washington, D.C., Indiana, Ohio and Louisiana repeatedly showed that vouchers were not helping student academics, and were doing the opposite.

“The failure of school vouchers to improve outcomes for children who transferred to private schools once the voucher idea was scaled up to a statewide level in Louisiana or Indiana represented an existential threat to the voucher movement,” Cowen writes.

Luckily for advocates, though, a series of culture wars ignited around the same time. Moms for Liberty and other group reinvigorated the “parents rights” movement with manufactured panic around critical race theory, LGBTQ issues, particularly trans students.

“That the creation of an evidence base to support an ideological push for school vouchers is directly and inextricably tied to the effort to end reproductive rights, to anti-LGTBQ policies and book bans, to efforts to mute a race-conscious telling of American history, and to a final goal of undermining public education is a warning sign that something truly radical is taking place,” Cowen writes.

Ohio, for example, recently expanded to universal vouchers and is now taking $2 billion out of the general fund to subsidize private schools, most of them religious. In Arizona, an early adopter of universal vouchers, the state is now facing a $1.4 billion shortfall thanks to vouchers, according to Propublica.

A Washington Post investigation found that 90 percent of private school vouchers across the country were going to religious schools. And ProPublica recently found that private schools in Ohio were urging parents to apply for vouchers to help their bottom line.

Cowen noted that any kind of voucher program would be concentrated in Jefferson and Fayette counties, where most private schools, particularly Catholic systems, are based. The rest of the state would simply feel the financial pinch and more and more public dollars leave public schools. Pop-up private schools, created to take advantage of vouchers, would soon disappear, as they have in other states.

To show how little vouchers would help regular folks, education advocate Andrew Brennen recently calculated that if Kentucky gave out the average voucher amount of Indiana and Ohio — around $5,000 — it wouldn’t make a dent in many private school tuitions, like Louisville’s St. Xavier, which charges $17,000 a year. Closer to home, Lexington’s Sayre School charges $28,500 a year for high school.

All eyes will be on Kentucky in November. Even Corey DeAngelis, a featured character in Cowen’s book, is now a known quantity here after he recently used Twitter or X to aggressively hassle the Pulaski County school system for posting information opposing Amendment 2.

DeAngelis has made clear, Cowen writes, that the voucher movement “started winning when it stopped making statistical arguments about performance metrics and started making moral arguments about parental rights and the content of the curriculum.”

What is Cowen’s policy prescription? Fund schools better. Kentucky went down its own radical path in 1990 when it decided to equitably and better fund its public schools through a unique formula that no longer depended on local property taxes.

But legislators from both parties didn’t keep up with funding, leading to more inequality, and now many rural districts — which are many counties’ largest employers — sit on a financial razor’s edge, despite some recent increased funding from the GOP legislature.

It could get even worse. The Kentucky Center on Economic Policy recently concluded public schools could lose as much as $1.2 billion in funding and hundreds of jobs if Amendment 2 passes and vouchers are adopted.

Are public schools a public good or should education become a private enterprise? Kentuckians will have to decide.