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

The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers
by Josh Cowen
Harvard Education Press, 200 pages, $28.80

The Privateers is authored by Josh Cowen, a Michigan State University education policy professor who has been in the school choice world since the early 2000s. Cowen has been an investigator on private choice program assessments, and he writes that what he has seen from the choice movement has increasingly alarmed him. So much so that “there must … be a reckoning” (12).

One big part of Cowen’s narrative is that a few wealthy people with names you have likely heard—DeVos and Koch—and others you likely have not, like the Bradley Foundation, have for decades funded advocacy work by choice advocates that masquerades as objective research. My own think tank, the Cato Institute, is among those identified, but more of Cowen’s attention is devoted to university denizens, especially Paul Peterson at Harvard, and his one-time students Patrick Wolf and Jay Greene, who moved on to the Walton family-funded Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas, and in the case of Greene, eventually to the conservative Heritage Foundation.

The second major part of the narrative is that these billionaires have also funded activists to foment culture war to poison the population against public schooling, impose conservative values, or both. This might be because a handful of school choice studies found negative academic achievement results, necessitating a different sales pitch for choice, or that choice advocates just want to impose their values.

On the first thrust—academic achievement—Cowen largely sticks with evidence in laying out disappointing private school choice effects. Studies from the late 1990s to around 2015 of generally small, targeted programs typically found null or modest positive effects using standardized tests, while more recent studies of larger programs have found negative impacts, some large. While expressing alarm over testing outcomes, Cowen downplays positive attainment impacts such as better public-school test scores due to competition and higher high school graduation rates. He is nonetheless correct that much of the argument for school choice in recent decades has been about raising academic achievement as measured by standardized tests and private choice has not performed especially well.

That said, it is neither unusual nor conspiratorial that school choice supporters have tried to find positive evidence for their preferred reform, looked for flaws in, and explanations for, research with disappointing findings, and have not abandoned choice when negative results have come in. It is normal.

Choice advocates also do not hide what they are. Think tanks generally wear their ideologies on their sleeves. The Heritage Foundation publicizes its mission: “to formulate and promote public policies based on the principles of free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional American values, and a strong national defense.” The Cato Institute, where I work, posts its mission: “to keep the principles, ideas, and moral case for liberty alive for future generations while moving public policy in the direction of individual liberty, limited government, free markets, and peace.”

What about university-based researchers, whom Cowen finds especially problematic? While universities might claim objectivity, the predilections of professors, especially in the humanities and social sciences, are often clear. It should be no surprise that researchers such as Paul Peterson at Harvard, or Patrick Wolf at the University of Arkansas, favor choice. They say they do! On the flip side, in his book Cowen does not hide that he is a progressive, at least on many things, writing favorably of abortion rights, environmental protection, subsidized health care, and more. Indeed, he writes that he is “deeply skeptical of any policy initiative—especially one pushed by the American right—based on the pretense of liberating people” (xi–xii).

What about culture warrior groups such as Moms for Liberty, which the second thrust of Cowen’s book suggests are “extremist” Astroturf creations that, like pro-choice researchers, are able to have outsized power thanks to billionaire backers?

Again, there is no conspiracy. Moms for Liberty is not a secret organization, and evidence suggests that it and similar right-wing groups have not manufactured culture war but, instead, reflect widely held opinions. The evidence also suggests that the left is responsible for the current culture war as much as the right.

Cowen wrote Privateers before the 2024 election, which Donald Trump won at least in part as a rejection of progressive values that groups like Moms for Liberty oppose—indicating mainstream acceptance of their views. And sizeable opinion landing on the conservative side of culture war issues was detectable before Trump won.

A 2021 survey found the public leaned more conservative on whether history should “celebrate” or “question” the nation’s past. 53 percent chose celebrate versus 47 percent question (see Peter Burkholder and Dana Schaffer, 2021, “History, the Past, and Public Culture: Results from a National Survey,” American Historical Association). In 2022, Pew Research reported that 58 percent of adults favored requiring trans athletes to compete on teams consistent with their sex at birth (see “Americans’ Complex Views on Gender Identity and Transgender Issues,” June 28, 2022). Only 17 percent were opposed. 41 percent wanted teaching about gender identity in elementary schools to be illegal. 38 percent were opposed. 41 percent supported requiring transgender individuals to use public restrooms matching their sex at birth. Only 31 percent were opposed. A 2024 Knight Foundation survey—to be fair, published after Privateers went to print—found that 61 percent of adults thought it legitimate to restrict access to age-inappropriate volumes (see “Americans’ Views on Book Restrictions in U.S. Public Schools,” August 2024.) Looking the other way, only 26 percent supported having books that mentioned sexual intercourse in elementary libraries if selected by educators but someone in the community objected. Only 42 percent supported books that talked about sexual orientation under those circumstances. Even at the high school level, only 64 percent supported having books talking about non-traditional gender identities.

Meanwhile, “woke” advances preceded the 2021 founding of Moms for Liberty. Progressive cancel culture commenced around mid-2015 (see Google N‑gram, “cancel culture”). The 1619 Project, which called the arrival of the first enslaved Africans on American shores “the country’s true founding,” was published in 2019 (The New York Times Magazine, August 14, 2019). Many public-school officials declared war on “systemic racism” after the 2020 police murder of George Floyd (see Matt Barnum and Kalyn Belsha, “Protests, Donations, Lesson Plans: How the Education World is Responding to George Floyd’s Killing,” Chalkbeat, June 2, 2020). Finally, progressives tended to oppose reopening public schools following the COVID-19 outbreak, and to support masking and vaxxing mandates when they did, in 2020 and 2021 (see Emma Green, “The Liberals Who Can’t Quit Lockdown,” The Atlantic, May 4, 2021).

Far from conservatives creating a culture war, it looks like progressives did. But neither is at fault.

The Privateers ignores the fundamental reality that public schooling forces values- and identity-based conflict. Requiring people with diverse values, racial and ethnic backgrounds, and education desires to fund a single system of government schools forces them into political combat to decide whose values and desires the schools will incorporate and whose they will not. Public schooling itself makes culture war a perpetual back-and-forth; it is not the fault of one side or the other.

For those who know the full history of school choice, this is clear. Unfortunately, Cowen, like many anti-choice writers (for example, Nancy MacLean, “’School Choice’ Developed as a Way to Protect Segregation and Abolish Public Schools,” Washington Post, September 27, 2021; Chris Ford, Stephenie Johnson, and Lisette Partelow, “The Racist Origins of Private School Vouchers,” Center for American Progress, July 12, 2017) commences his history of choice with Southern resistance to public school desegregation, in part by giving families vouchers to go private, after Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 (15–22). Brown coincided with publication of Milton Friedman’s “The Role of Government in Education” in Robert Solo’s edited Economics and the Public Interest, in which Friedman called for money to follow students rather than go to public schools (Rutgers University Press, 1955). Cowen intimates that given the precariousness of desegregation, voicing concern about forced integration at best callously abetted desegregation resistance.

It is useful, if you oppose choice, to say it began with massive resistance. But the choice movement started long before Friedman or desegregation. And it was not focused on test scores, or efficiency and competition, but on the same thing that was the focus of public schooling’s founders: values. Horace Mann himself, the “father of the common schools,” emphasized that education was about inculcating virtue (1868, “Report for 1848,” in Life and Works of Horace Mann, Mary Mann, ed., Horace B. Fuller). This made the earliest conflicts heavily about religion, with battles primarily about which Chirstian denominations’ dogmas the “common” schools would include. At the same time, denominations including Presbyterians (Lewis Joseph Sherrill, 1932, Presbyterian Parochial Schools: 1846–1870, Yale University Press), Quakers (Thomas Woody, 1923, Quaker Education in the Colony and State of New Jersey, University of Pennsylvania), and, most famously, Roman Catholics, pursued public funding for their own schools.

Culture war is neither new nor conservative. It has been a part of public schooling, as have efforts to be able to choose something different, since public schooling Day One.

Finally, there is nothing unusual about the funding of choice supporters. Some rich people contribute to pro-choice activity, some to anti-choice. The pro-choice side has the Kochs, the DeVos family, and the Bradley Foundation. Choice opposition has the Ford Foundation, Hewlett Foundation, and Tides Foundation. But choice opponents also have a built-in political advantage: concentrated benefits and diffuse costs. Those employed by public schooling, represented by teacher unions and other employee organizations, have the most at stake in education politics—their livelihoods—making them highly motivated and well situated to fight. Parents, in contrast, only have school-aged children for a limited time and typically jobs unrelated to education, rendering them much less able to form a permanent, well-organized, political force for choice. And private schooling itself is tiny compared to public schooling—it is very hard to compete against “free”—making the sector no political match for the public schooling establishment.

The school choice movement is not a conspiracy. It is a pretty ordinary political effort about a straightforward, basic question: Is it better to have uniform government schools for everyone or let money follow children to diverse educational options? There’s nothing nefarious about it.