The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers

Speaker 1 For the most part, the way to understand this, right, is not about the size of government or the government spending or efficiency. It really is just about redistribution of resources from one sector to another, from public schools to church schools. And that that's really what this is about. And at that at that in that sense, it's just like any other garden variety subsidy coming out of the state capital or the federal capital as as the case will be.

Speaker 2 Hello, and welcome to episode 160 of the Human Restoration Project podcast. My name is Nick Covington. Before we get started, I wanted to let you know that this episode is brought to you by our supporters, three of whom are Kevin Gannon, Brandon Peters, and Leah Kelly. Thank you so much for your ongoing support. We're proud to have hosted hundreds of hours of incredible ad free conversations over the years. If you haven't yet, consider rating our podcast in your app to help us reach more listeners. And, of course, you can learn more about Human Restoration Project on our website, humanrestorationproject.org, and connect with us everywhere on social media. There are any number of narratives that emerged from the twenty twenty four election, and that will be hotly debated over the next four years. However, one of those is not up for debate, that vouchers and school choice lost everywhere they were on the ballot in 2024. In Colorado, voters rejected a constitutional amendment that would have added a right to school choice. And in red state Kentucky and Nebraska, voucher programs failed by nearly the same proportion that Donald Trump won. On this show, we focused a lot on culture war issues as they directly impact what and how classroom teachers can teach. And I suspect the culture war will come up in this conversation as well. But we've never actually dug into the specific issue of voucher programs, which also impact educators, parents, schools, and kids in over a dozen states, and with even more to come in the explicit push for a national universal voucher program as a long term federal policy goal. My guest today is Josh Cowan, a professor of education policy at Michigan State University. He's written extensively about education politics, school choice, and culture wars in The United States, and you should definitely give him a follow on blue sky at josh Cowan MSU, as he is very persistent in addressing the topic of his latest book titled The Privateers, How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers. I wanted to have Josh on to better understand as we head into a new year in the next administration how, like unsinkable rubber ducks, vouchers continue to fail to deliver on their promises and continue to be rejected by voters. And yet, we find ourselves on the verge of a nationwide voucher and school choice program. As you'll hear in this episode, even after reading the book, I came into this conversation with a set of assumptions and questions about the voucher movement that Josh quickly and kindly set right. Thanks so much for joining me today to help make sense of this, Josh. Yeah. Thanks for having me. Well, you bring a unique perspective to the voucher issue as something of an insider at one time, having worked directly on projects and with folks evaluating those early voucher programs in the mid two thousands. Could you just describe your background and the experiences that brought you to the issue of vouchers in the first place? Yeah. Well,

Speaker 1 so I'm a policy analyst by training. And what that means is that sort of get through and there are folks in in the academic world as I was originally part of. There are folks in think tanks across the country. There are folks who who do this work as consultants for for profit firms. At the end of the day, sort of what what policy analysts do is they take they look at public programs, and they they perform something of an audit on them. Like, what what are these things working the way policymakers intended? If they're working, for whom are they working? If they're not working, who are they letting down? How much are they costing? You know, things like that. Just what works for whom and why. And and I got to start doing those things, actually, as a young graduate student twenty plus years ago at this point on a series of demonstration trials. So this is across industries. Demonstration trials, we see this with drug companies, with with other kind of inventions and things. But these were demonstration prod trials, excuse me, of, voucher schemes, privately funded, but at that time, proof of concept ideas that, we'll see how these things work and then try to use them to advocate for vouchers across the country. And that's ended up that ended up being what what happened. So so I got my start doing those things. I was moved on as I write the book and on to many other research questions in addition to vouchers and other school choice initiatives. At the end of the day, the unifying sort of theme that got me started in this work was actually asking whether or not voucher schemes worked for kids and families.

Speaker 2 Could you speak more to that in terms of what you found when you were looking at those? I guess, what was the question that was being posed to you in those evaluations, and what did you find in those early days? Well, so

Speaker 1 from the early nineteen nineties onward, and I came into this story as a as a young professional about ten years after the first kind of voucher evaluations started. So twenty plus years ago, these things have been around for about thirty years. And from the beginning, these things came out of both, both the Democratic and Republican, but but slightly Republican kind of version of education reform, which prioritized standards, accountability, and above all, measuring performance using test scores. So from the beginning, voucher systems, voucher evaluations of those systems, demonstration projects, like I mentioned, all were focused on the same questions that reformers were asking public schools. Show us your test scores. See how you're doing. Are we getting the money that we promised? In the early days, voucher programs were subject to those same kinds of questions, right up through kind of the first term with George w Bush who famous pushed no child left behind, which asked all those things of public schools to do. And and you can really describe all of the voucher evidence as far as academic performance in the following way. After small early pilot sized programs showed mixed results, somewhat promising results even, in terms of academic accountability for for vouchers, the bigger and the more recent the voucher system over the last few years, the worse the results have been kids. It's that simple. The bigger the program, the more recent the program, the worse the results have been.

Speaker 2 And I guess before we get into any more specifics of those, either the the new voucher programs or the ones that you had, you know, studied twenty plus years ago, maybe we can just help listeners, help myself, just really understand what is that case? Like, what is the promise? What do they represent? Maybe we can, you know, steel man them with their best version of themselves. Like, for example, in Iowa, I hear that language of, like, school vouchers or school choice is the civil rights issue of our time. Kim Reynolds pitched vouchers as an opportunity for parents of kids trapped in so called failing schools, giving them a shot at access to private education that was only available to the wealthy. So what are some other promises of those programs that they're been sold to voters across the country? You know? Well, there's a lot packed into your question. So Yeah. Let let's just sort of say that the idea

Speaker 1 is if we take at face value and a lot of the book is about not taking at face value with some of these schemes. But if we take at face value what they're supposed to do, the idea and it dates back to this conservative economist Milton Friedman writing in 1955, kinda came up with this idea for for they later were called vouchers, but basically publicly funded private education. And important to know, Friedman was writing this thing just in a few months after Brown versus Board of Education ordered mandatory desegregation of public schools. So very quickly, opponents of desegregation latched onto various schemes to avoid Brown, ranging from massive resistance, which is famous across the history in American history, protests, refusal to obey, and things like that, to schemes like vouchers. So publicly funding parents to go do the segregating themselves, not creating segregated institutions. But from the beginning, including in Friedman's essay, was this notion of, quote, parents' rights. And what parents' rights means in the in the kind of context of the voucher push is parents shouldn't have to send their kids to school with children they don't want to send their kids to school to. There's a lot of things we we want parents to be able to do in this country as policymakers and as citizens and as parents ourselves, but that phrase, specifically parents' rights, has very dark origins in in resistance to Brown versus Board of Education. It comes out of this idea that parents shouldn't have to put their kids in school with children, in that case, black children, but in other cases, more recently, children, don't want their kids to go to school around. So that's the kind of that's both kind of the origin story of what they say. You hear parents rights all over the country today, but but it's also kind of the truth in the sense that that's that's really what's going on here. Now it's packaged both in terms of PR and communication strategy, but also from a litigation standpoint. It's packaged as saving children from failing schools. Those parents' rights, like like deep down in places they don't they don't sort of say quite quite as overtly as they did in the freedmen era, those parents' rights include the ability to self segregate and do other things. But what they also mean is parents' rights with respect to taking their child out of a so called failing public school, and that's kind of the rhetoric you hear today. I would say sort of during the brightest period of time from the standpoint of, like, opportunity. I think it probably came from roughly around 1999 till about two thousand two ish, two early two thousand three. The theory of the case put before the United States Supreme Court in a case called Zelman versus Simmons Harris, right about a lot in the book. But this is the first time the federal court said, oh, vouchers are okay as long as you're forcing religion on children using vouchers. But the whole theory of the case was the idea that Cleveland, the the city of Cleveland had failed children with its public school system and that vouchers were necessary or at least optional, should be optional to rectify that wrong. And that was actually what they took to the Supreme Court. Now the same litigation groups today are arguing something much different. They're arguing that children need vouchers to go to religious schools. They can have religious education because it's parents' religious right to do so. My point here in all of this is that there certainly is this failing public school narrative and this academic packaging around this stuff. But at the end of the day, it's inescapable that what we're really talking about, or I would argue, something a little bit darker, a little bit deeper, a little bit more historical in terms of sort of where this country's been. The origin for story stories for vouchers. I've called it more recently a new American religious separatism movement. The idea is really to take children, separate and isolate them from each other to do so on the public dime.

Speaker 2 So there really is, you know, what's at the heart of that package, like, what it actually is in terms of the the vehicle, the vessel, the the shape that that voucher takes. And then as you had mentioned, that shiny wrapper that we put on the outside and use it to try and sell to voters around the country. At the most extreme level, how have those programs been implemented? Like, what is what is the most extreme example that you can think of? Implementation how? In the sense that, like, what is what what would be, like, the ideal place where we could say, okay. Vouchers implemented in this form is, like, here's the most ideal state that voucher the conditions for vouchers could be in. Let's take Louisiana just because Milton Friedman did so. So after Hurricane Katrina, it's devastated

Speaker 1 almost nine out of every 10 public school buildings in the in the in the city of New Orleans and parts of Louisiana. City famously had to be rebuilt. The school system famously had to be rebuilt. And a lot of out of state players has I touch on this in the book, but there's others. Doug Doug Harris has written a whole book about this from Tulane University. A lot of reformers came in and said, oh, well, now that there's no public school system, let's kinda create our own model. And and one of the things they did was just decide to create kind of a a free for all with respect to school choice, not just vouchers, which came pretty quickly after, but but also charter schools and inter district choice, which, by the way, I actually have some support for charter schools and and and for inter district choice. So the evidence is very different in those schemes. We could talk about that if we need to. But the point being, vouchers were introduced in Louisiana as kind of a shopping. It's like the old Sears catalog from when we were kids. So you get the catalog in the mail. Right? You kinda look through the pages, and you see what Star Wars logos you on or whatever. That's kinda how the schools are supposed to work in this kind of Freedmen esque market world where parents are just sorting. Literally, they had a catalog in New Orleans that you would open the book and you could see everything about each school, public, private, and you could put your name on a list, public, private, up to eight schools, and you could sort of just get randomly assigned to each of those schools. Friedman wrote an essay in the New York in the excuse me, the Wall Street Journal soon before his death, but after Katrina saying this he didn't say this is great, the hurricane, but he said, basically, this is gonna offer a test case for my idea. And what we saw come out of Louisiana as a result of that, just with respect to vouchers, some of the worst academic performance we've ever seen on any research question in the history of education research, Something on par with what twice Katrina actually did to test scores in that city, and more recently, roughly twice what the COVID nineteen pact pandemic did to to to test scores there for just looking at test scores. So in that kinda ideal condition, catastrophic results. Now the other side would say, well, that's because we overregulated those private schools. And what they mean by that is the state required those private schools receiving public money to have open admissions. You had to admit everyone, and you had to take the test the state exam, which is how we know the results were so terrible. And they would argue, well, the elite providers didn't opt into taking public dollars. They stayed out of the program because of they would say it's because they were required to take the state test instead of their own. I think there's a little bit of evidence for that, but mostly what the evidence is is that they didn't wanna be subject to open admissions requirement. So, you know, we have to sort of your question about implementation is an important one because, you know, if the other side is gonna constantly move the goalpost on this, it's like for that for that story to be true, the Louisiana awful results driven by overregulation, what you have to believe is that given the opportunity to discriminate, elite private schools won't discriminate. And and only when they're told they can't discriminate do they sort of take their football and go run away and not get into the into the game. It doesn't really make any sense. What's really going on is that there are lot of subprime private schools, it's called. There's there's a lot of private schools which aren't any good. And there are some elite private schools out there, but vouchers don't provide access to those schools. The schools that want the bailout, that want the public subsidy through the voucher system really aren't particularly good. They're particularly bad at serving at risk children who are mostly the kids in Louisiana system. So be very skeptical today when you hear that these things are anything about academic hope or opportunity or that nonsense. What's got really going on is these are these are bailouts for private schools that have ulterior motives that have nothing to do with academics. I've called vouchers the education equivalent of predatory lending as a result, and this is what we're seeing across the country.

Speaker 2 And we've also seen again, here in Iowa, you know, where I'm at, we've seen this was a warning ahead of our own voucher scheme being implemented, but I think it was Jen Jennings who found that the private school tuition rates went up about 25%

Speaker 1 across the board after the implementation of the voucher program. Yeah. So what's clever about that study from from professor Jennings is is and there were some it's not just Iowa. There were some reporting in other states that hap this happened, but it was mostly investigative reporting and just general journalism. What was it what was clever about the Jennings study is to sort of use the cutting edge of research, which I happen to believe in. But what she did was was she compared she and her her coauthor compared Iowa private schools taking those voucher payments to similar private schools in Nebraska, which had at that time passed a voucher system but hadn't implemented it yet. Turns out they never got a chance because voters pulled it away just just a few weeks ago. But so she sort of held constant in some sense that desire to implement an a voucher system, but only one state actually did implement the voucher system, and that's Iowa. And what she also did was only looked at the schools and the grade the with the two with tuition where they had eligible grades in areas. And so she sort of had you know, I I heard a lot of times some of the Reynolds and other other lawmakers in the state said, this is just inflation. Well, precisely, it's not just inflation, actually. You would have to believe that inflation only selectively affected Iowa private schools, not Nebraska private schools next door, and you'd also have to believe that inflation mysteriously only affected tuition in schools eligible for the voucher within Iowa. And to be fair to these private schools, they're only doing what Reynolds and Iowa lawmakers incentivized them to do. This is entirely predictable, and this is one of the things I say in the book. It's one of the things I say in social media. Like, none of the stuff about vouchers, the catastrophic results, subprime school bailouts, the tuition increases, none of it is actually unpredicted in economic theory, even going back to some people who were Friedman disciples. Like, all of this is well known. And it's only a problem if you sort of or it's only a surprise if you've really kind of drank the Kool Aid, and you believe these things are just mysteriously a panacea for all that cure all that ills education policy. Most of us aren't that simplistic in our thinking. And, you know, again, none of this stuff is a particular surprise unless you're really a true believer.

Speaker 2 So I think that's where I'm so frustrated is that I can see here in Iowa, we're running that same experiment. That states like Arizona, Louisiana, Ohio, Indiana, all over Wisconsin, we continue to run that same experiment, kind of like Kansas did, I don't know, back in the early two thousands with their tax rates and everything else. Eventually, we saw the collapse of that, and yet states kept implementing it. Vouchers, as I'd mentioned in the intro, are this unsinkable rubber duck that just seem to have some kind of momentum of their own in spite of stepping on rakes every step of the way. If vouchers can't succeed in Louisiana in Milton Friedman's ideal way, why how do they keep going? I would take the position that Yeah.

Speaker 1 It's not any sort of movement. In the book, say this is no movement. It's more like a coup and it's been a right wing political operation from the start. This is just what happens when you have a handful of very wealthy people, some of the wealthiest people on the planet, starting with Betsy DeVos, of course. We're talking about vouchers. We have to talk about Betsy DeVos. But also Charles Koch, Koch Industries, and then more recent players like Jeff Yass, the TikTok billionaire. You know, you don't have to be a conspiracy theorist. You just have to look at who's spending the money in places like Iowa. Betsy DeVos' organization has spent, 7 figures in to primary out seven Republicans in the Iowa legislature in August 2022, including the voucher opposing chair of the house, education committee to handpick a legislature to let this thing go through. And even there, even in even there, after doing all of that, they still had to create the special education reform committee to to push this budget this voucher scheme through the legislature and couldn't subject it to typical, process in your legislature through the normal budget process. They had to kinda create kinda rig the game to do it. You know? And I know it's just a figure of speech, but I would this is a very important important point. There's no movement here. And this is why you see these things face plant when they go to actual voters like in Kentucky, like in Nebraska, including red state voters. This is a handful of billionaires who see the world vouchers sort of represent one piece of the world they think that should exist. They're very wealthy people, and they are used to getting their way. Betsy DeVos, could we talk about her if you want. She has some very specific reasons she likes vouchers. The Coke people have a lot of priorities. Jeff Yas has a lot of priorities. Elon Musk, who's getting into the game by starting private schools in Texas, of course, has a lot of other priorities. What they all have in common is that they see the world, vouchers appeal in in an education sense anyway. They're the education version of the way they think the world ought to work, they have enough money to try to to impose their will on it. That's the thing keeping the rubber duck up. But I post put something last night on on social media that's getting a little bit of attention that said, basically, listen, vouchers are subject to the same gravity of politics and policy as any other scheme. And one of the things we're already talking about in this conversation is there's still such a thing as data. You can ignore it. There's still such a thing as data. There's still such a thing as evidence. There's still such a thing as voters of both parties looking at a scheme, a poll a proposal, whatever it is, in this case, vouchers, and saying, how does this help me and my family? I'm not gonna support it if it doesn't help me and my family. And that's just sort of the natural law and rhythm of American politics and policy. And so, you know, there's only so much that these folks can do to sort of impose their will on on states, and we're gonna sorta, unfortunately, see a lot more, I think, failure of these things come forward as these things grow.

Speaker 2 Yeah. I appreciate that clarification because, yeah, movement does seem to imply that there is, like, mass populist momentum. You know, it's like a grassroots movement. That's what they want us to think. And, yeah, you're right. It does sound conspiratorial if you start to, you know, have the little yarn drawing from Betsy DeVos to the Koch brothers to the Yasses to everything else. But as you mentioned in the book, that's very much the reality is it is a idea, vouchers as an idea and a as a legislative tool, right, that has been developed and disseminated from these groups. Could we talk about Betsy DeVos? You're you're there in Michigan, and I I've been to Grand Rapids a lot. You know, we we work up a lot in in Michigan. Can't help but see the the DeVos Center and all of her names and all the campuses in in Grand Rapids. But, yeah, what is her role in this story? You kind of, you know, mentioned how she is really a bridge builder between these two paradigms of school vouchers and school choice movements, but she really is a key figure. So

Speaker 1 journalist Katherine Stewart wrote in her book, The Power of Worshippers, that you can't understand I'm I'm paraphrasing. I'm not directly quoting, but she's basically saying, you can't understand the last thirty or forty years of right wing politics or the role of the religious right without understanding the role of the DeVos family in Western Michigan. And and the reason for that is simple. They have a a very firm idea of what they want the world to look like. They want it to look like what we would call Christian nationalism today, and they have billions of dollars. I mean, those two things together mean they get to dictate a lot. And that in the case specifically of Betsy DeVos, one of the DeVos family, this this comes down to school vouchers. So Betsy DeVos has famously said she sees vouchers as a way to, quote, advance God's kingdom on earth. It's her words, not mine. She has lamented in her own words, not mine, what she sees as the displacement by public schools of churches in American communities. And she sees vouchers as a way to replace public schools, giving churches their sent their due, essentially, as centers of communities. Once again, I I would dispute from the from the outset that churches have moved out of American communities. But nevertheless, that's the plan, and that's the idea. What's interesting is that and I write about this in the book. So the other big player in the space is Koch family and Charles Koch in particular. Very close to Milton Friedman, a sort of a disciple of Friedman's in a strange way as a as he was the benefactor of Friedman too. Charles Coke created a think tank called the Cato Institute today, but it was called originally the the Coke Institute. The Coke folks aren't culture warriors for the most part. I mean, there's there's there's so many different groups that receive these dollars that, of course, they're all different strands and nuances, and they do fund a bunch of fake parents groups like the Parents Defending Education. They all have a name like that, but that's one actual group. They do do a little culture warrior. But this kind of obsession with, you know, book banning and where kids go to the bathroom in public schools and who plays which sport and, you know, all this weird masculine stuff that these guys run around, you know, trying to kind of out dude the other dude, that doesn't that's not a Coke thing. What they see if Betsy DeVos is worried that churches have been kicked out of communities and replaced by public schools, the Coke folks just see public schools as government. They don't like government because government has regulated the oil and gas industry that they came out of. You know, it's much it's it's in some sense, they both see something evil about public schools, and the Coke folks see something secularly evil in terms of government government in our communities. And the Betsy DeVos types of the world see public schools as representing something non Christian in the community. And and together, they sort of latch from those different perspectives onto vouchers as a as a way to push their plan forward. And there's one other thing in a real practical sense. And one of the things I really stress both in conversation about the book, but also just in public, is just to remember, there's always the kind of philosophy stuff that we just talked about, all this high minded business. Then there's some really practical things too. Remember, then these things are always subject to the that same gravity of politics and policy that I mentioned. And one of the things that really unites the Christian nationalism of Betsy DeVos with kind of the anti government rhetoric and and orientation of the coat people, it really comes down to something very specific, and that is a deep hostility to labor unions. And so at the end of the day, while you're paying attention to this big think stuff about Christians and public schools and bathrooms and all this business, at the end of the day, a lot of this comes down to deep hostility to labor unions. And in the education case, of course, we're talking about teachers' unions.

Speaker 2 And that's that's more related to the libertarian Milton Friedman front of the whole school choice apparatus keeping that afloat that, you know, Betsy DeVos just happened to be, I guess, part of that, but then expanding it into that culture war space, really shaping then what that 2016 the post 2016 conversation about culture wars and schools has really looked like. You know, this episode's gonna be coming out right before inauguration day here in in 2025 when people will be listening to it. And from where we sit here in December, it looks like Linda McMahon is gonna take on the role as secretary of education. Now how in the world does she she is not a name that's mentioned at all. You know, in your book, she was a shock, I think, from at least from the people that I talked with. Role does she play in this? Which side does she take? Yeah. That's right. So she comes out of this first of all, she's a billionaire, and there's been this unprecedented

Speaker 1 number of billionaires. So she has that in common with Betsy DeVos for one thing. But you're right. It was a surprise. It's not a surprise outside of the education space, but it is a surprise in the education space. But Linda McMahon, she was cofounder of a group called the America First Policy Institute, which basically is this kind of Trump think tank, if you put those words in quotation marks, Trump oriented think tank to kind of give a place to for a bunch of Trump expats, people from the first Trump administration to kinda hang out until they figure out what was what the next thing was gonna be, whether it was a Trump presidency again or something else. And she cofounded this with a Texas based billionaire named Tim Dunn. And Dunn has been very influential in Texas push trying to push vouchers through in that state. He's a pastor. He's also a billionaire, and he sees vouchers. He's been very explicit about his demand that more publicly funded money go to Christian education. You know, McMahon herself has not said a lot on this space, but sort of important to know that from an education perspective, this America First policies to this Trump thing in waiting, their education agenda is really not much more complicated than publicly funded Christian schools. So there is that piece that does kind of kinda get to the top there on that space. And, course, they all make a lot of noise about ending department of ed. We'll see what happens on that. There's some through lines there that connect this to the voucher stuff, but it's it's lower level. The last thing I'll say is sort of before we move on on that is just what McMahon brings to this is, of course, first and foremost, loyalty to Trump. She's also a billionaire, as I said. She also conceptually supports this idea that publicly funded Christian schools like, as we're sort of learning about different parts of the Trump team, the different incentive packages, I just cannot stress enough how important the role of public subsidies for religious education, particularly for a version of Christian education that these folks want, are central to the driving force of vouchers today in 2024. All that other stuff aside that we talked about, this is what's the driving force today. So in that sense, in retrospect, although it took people by surprise when it came up in retrospect, it really does make sense in kind of thinking about how these things all part of are part of the larger strategy here.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Thinking about that apparatus, she essentially is a vessel or a vehicle for that existing apparatus. We've already got Alec. We already have all of these other foundations, institutions, think tanks. We just need somebody who can get those things done, I suppose, the rationale there. Even if she's not bringing anything new, she's not a culture war warrior like Ryan Walters or any of these other state superintendents who might have been on the shortlist,

Speaker 1 she's a vessel for exactly this idea is what you're saying. The top education priority. Like, the the the Department of Ed's getting ending the Department of Ed's getting a lot of news, and rightfully so. I have written elsewhere that one of the sort of the things that they're you know, whether they are able to actually fully dismantle the department better or not, they're going after programs in a culture war way. Right? Like, things that that would be could be called DEI, things that could be called critical race theory, things that could be called inclusion for for LGBTQ families, including transgender kids. Like, the those things they will try to do, and McMahon can be counted down to that. But in terms of just, like, overall policy, what are they for, not just what are they against, The priority is a federal, voucher scheme run through the tax code based on tax credit schemes in other states that Iowa has one and had one before. You guys put one through general fund with your voucher plan. And there, the idea would basically to be to allow individual donors to divert a portion of what they pay in federal income tax to something called a scholarship granting organization, which would distribute vouchers in all 50 states. McMahon hasn't said a whole lot about that other than sort of high level things that she wants, school choice. They they call this school choice, not just vouchers. But Betsy DeVos herself has been on the hill pushing for this thing in the weeks since Trump won. So this isn't just you know, just because they don't have the title anymore does not mean when you're a billionaire, you can still get in the room. You still can get into the senator's office. You can still make contributions. So all these folks at the end of the day are either working together explicitly or implicitly for this goal. They've been pretty clear about that from the beginning.

Speaker 2 Yeah. It's tied into all those other ways that, you know, wealth distorts, corrupts, implements graft. You know? I I just read an article, again, locally here in Iowa that, of course, a middleman has to be hired to implement these ESAs. And this group, Odyssey, you know, is getting a million dollar contract from the from the state for that. So surely, at the federal level,

Speaker 1 someone will be tasked someone with connections will be tasked with implementing a national program as well. Right? Right. It's really well, in the way the legislation is written so far is there would be these lots of middlemen, and those middlemen wouldn't couldn't be, at least in the current legislation, there could not be for profit providers like Odyssey is. Odyssey, let's be clear. It is a on the make. It is like a loan service. It's it these these these vendors like Odyssey are, like, the loan service agencies or companies from the run out of, like, old Kmarts or closed down grocery stores, you know, in the mortgage industry. That's kinda what what these vendors are in the case of Odyssey. But there are nonprofits that are at least structured as a nonprofit. By structured, I mean, you can still pay your CEO. Oh god knows what kind of money. But it technically would have to be these kind of in some states so this is different. There was a policy choice in Iowa to make the vendor a for eligible for for profit status. All of the latest voucher schemes have used vendors. That's not something that was the case years and years ago. It was more like Ohio and and Wisconsin to name two of the earlier voucher systems, just direct appropriation from the state department of it. The reason that they've done it today is twofold. One, avoids transparency and accountability. They're always for that stuff or not for that stuff. They're always for avoiding it. And the other thing is and this is just, again, yet another example of just these voucher schemes just part of the same rules of politics and policies. Any other area outside of education, inside of education, anytime you create a public cash flow, and I don't care what industry it is. I live in a state capital. This happens all over the place. Of course, there are going to be sort of on the make little companies groups that that that start themselves up to, try to get some of that public dollars, and makes make a buck off of it. And when they get a little bit successful, what they do is they hire lobbyists to convince legislators that they need those groups to make the legislation work, to make the dollars work and flow. This happens, again, across the industry. So you see this pattern. I don't get a whole lot into the wealth motive for the Charles Cokes and the Betsy DeVosses and the Jeff Yassas They're billionaires. They don't need any more money. And schools like, an individual school is not very profitable. A whole network of schools might be, but an individual, it's if the profit margins are not any better than, like, say, a mom and pop restaurant, it's a daily struggle to kinda make the dollars work. When you scale it up, it's a different story. But where the wealth motivation comes in isn't really at the billionaire level. It's kind of on that on the make level. It's these kind of like I say, the mortgage service companies. It's kinda these groups that come in. They're kinda like seedier. They're not jet they're not private jet groups. They these are the groups that salesman class kind of of that. Yeah. And and in that, they're not really any different than any other group. So Odyssey is one of many of these things that do this, but but, there are others as well. And, again, the only thing I would say about that too is that even if we're not talking about massive wealth, we are talking about dollars that are getting skimmed off the top that could be sent to public schools in your community. And that's why this is a problem.

Speaker 2 Yeah. The the notion that vouchers are, in any sense, more efficient or streamline any processes, like, it just flies in the face of it because you're inevitably going to end up with layers of middlemen and more management and more bureaucracy

Speaker 1 to manage parallel systems, both of public and private dollars. And that's why the serious there are a handful of sort of serious intellectuals on that side that do worry and warn about these things. Like, some Right. There, you know, there are folks who have some consistency to their writing and their rhetoric, and they don't like these things. But for the most part, the way to understand this, right, is not about the size of government or the government spending or efficiency. It really is just about redistribution of resources from one sector to another, from public schools to church schools. And that that's really what this is about. And at that at that in that sense, it's just like any other garden variety subsidy coming out of the state capital or the federal capital as as the case will be.

Speaker 2 This is bumming me out a little bit as a as a former public school teacher, as someone who sends their kids to public schools. We're here in 2025 as as listeners were hearing this. What is there to be done? The time to to vote has certainly passed. What is there to, I don't know, help prevent the worst outcomes? Yeah.

Speaker 1 I I mean, couple of things. So, right, the time the voters passed this election but remember, when these vouchers have never survived statewide ballot initiative. It never once. And as you mentioned at the top, this this includes in in Trump countries. Kentucky, for example, 65% of voters proposed vouchers that prevented them from becoming part of the state constitution. 65% of voters voted for Trump. So it's not a red or blue thing when it comes to voucher opposition. Nebraska, closer to your state, 57% of vouchers poll of voters, poll the voucher law off the books before it could be implemented. Now each state has its own way of dealing with that stuff, and I don't know the ins and outs of Iowa's sort of public balloting version of this. I do know, though, that it's possible to change governors. It's possible to change legislators. It does take time. And then at the federal level, I would just simply say, you know, this is because that's the upcoming push. And one thing that will be really interesting for folks listening to this in Iowa or elsewhere, if you are dealing with a legislature that is considering passing or expanding voucher schemes, while the feds are about to start turning on federal dollars for these things, I would be very skeptical. I'd call your legislators, your state legislators. I'd call your federal legislators too. But, you know, the question would be for Iowa folks, why are we going to be spending more money on this voucher scheme? We get that it exists for now, but why are we gonna appropriate more dollars to it when Uncle Sam's about to send federal dollars to Iowa private schools too through a bailout that way? So there's ways, like, isn't gonna go away overnight, but there is a way to sit there and say, well, wait a minute. I don't know what the the numbers. I'm just making some of that. But let's say the Reynolds budget says let's add another 20,000,000 to to cap to the cap of the voucher system here. Why are you doing that? When the feds are about to turn on it's a $5,000,000,000 minimum right now or maximum right now under the current version of the bill that that will be considered in January. If you just appropriated that equally across 50 states, right, we're talking about tens of millions of dollars to each state, including Iowa. So why has that even been up for discussion of state taxpayer dollars? So I think that there are on the margins things folks can do. And then the longer version of this is, of course, it's repeal.

Speaker 2 Just like that. Repeal.

Speaker 1 That's the easy thing. Well, the votes are there. I I mean Yeah. People people oppose this stuff. Right? And and and and and that's why it takes I mean, Iowa, it seems like all is lost today because there is this voucher system in place, but Iowa's one of the most recent states to pass a voucher system. It took a lot of time. It took set primarying out seven Republican opponents from rural communities in Iowa with national Betsy DeVos dollars. The primary funder of those primary campaigns in August 2022 was a five zero one c four called the American Federation for Children, which is Betsy DeVos' organization. It's not local Iowa families and voters pushing for these things. So Iowa held the line of the line for a very long time. The reason they were able to do so is that just the pop the there's no vote there's no more voter support for these bills in Iowa than there is in Kentucky or than there is in Nebraska. It's just a matter of who can manipulate which legislature fastest. So it does take time, but, you know, we'll see these things continue to be a struggle as long as, as long as voters actually have a say.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And I think that'll be, you know, frankly, the line for any challenges that we're gonna be facing in the near future is just you have to find a wedge, find a lane, find find a direction, and just chip away at it. Right? Build capacity among people in your community, bring more voices to the table, and, yeah, lean on lean on people who are amenable to be leaned on. My gosh. I I so appreciate your time, Josh. The book, of course, is The Privateers How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers. Thanks so much for joining me today. I really appreciate the time.

Speaker 3 Thank you again for listening to our podcast at Human Restoration Project. I hope this conversation leaves you inspired and ready to start making change. If you enjoyed listening, please consider leaving us a review on your favorite podcast player. Plus, find a whole host of free resources, writings, and other podcasts all for free on our website, humanrestorationproject.org. Thank you.