“The case against school vouchers is not one sided, but it is as one sided as social science gets… And the case for vouchers, whether by scholars, writers, lawyers, lobbyists, or billionaire heirs has always been a deliberate construction. It is an assault on public education as a defining American institution. This is no movement, it is rather more a coup, and it has been a right-wing political operation from the start.”
— Josh Cowen, The Privateers
NEW RELEASE:
HARVARD EDUCATION PRESS, SEPT 10 2024
A deep-dive investigation of education privatization that reveals voucher programs as the faulty products of decades of work by wealthy patrons and influential conservatives.
In The Privateers, Josh Cowen lays bare the surprising history of tax-funded school choice programs in the United States and warns of the dangers of education privatization. A former evaluator of state and local school voucher programs, Cowen demonstrates how, as such programs have expanded in the United States, so too has the evidence-informed case against them.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Josh Cowen is a professor of education policy at Michigan State University and an author on topics related to education politics, school choice, and culture wars in the United States. In addition to all of the major academic outlets in his research field, his popular writing has appeared in outlets such as the Dallas Morning News, the Detroit Free Press, the Hechinger Report, the Houston Chronicle, the New Republic, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Slate, Time Magazine, The Tennessean, the Washington Spectator, and more. He lives in mid-Michigan with his family.
education policy author
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