I have been following bilionaire-funded “ed reform” for the last 25 years. I was living in a very good place to do that - Ohio was ground zero for charters, vouchers, ed tech garbage - the whole shoddy rip off that is “ed reform” (or, as honest people who aren’t profiting off it call it, ‘public school privatization”). I also attended public schools (including college and law school) and I had 4 children go thru Ohio public schools. Coincidentally, during this same period, Ohio has gone from 15th in the country for public education to 40th. Ed reform never actually improves public schools. This is not an accident.
It became apparent to me early on that Arne Duncan and his merry band of edugrifters would all end up the same place - universal vouchers to replace public school systems. It couldn’t go anywhere else.
And they have. Jennifer Berkshire has the story:
I was in Florida recently to speak on the damage that vouchers have done to public schools when a local friend made a comment that I often get from my red state pals. You’re so lucky to live in a state that’s free from this crap. Acting on my 2026 resolution to be less of a downer (how’s that going??) I kept myself to myself, resisting the urge to deliver a semi-screed on the looming threat posed by the federal voucher program. And I reflected, once again, upon the irony that even as the GOP increasingly confronts the fallout from voucher programs, creating an opening for Democrats, the pro-voucher wingette of the Democratic Party is trying to muscle blue state governors into embracing Trump’s signature education policy.
First, a quick recap. Buried in the 1000 page behemoth known as the One Big Beautiful Bill was the nation’s first-ever federal voucher program. Long a conservative pipe dream, notwithstanding those on the right who staunchly opposed the idea as federal overreach, the new voucher program gives tax-payers a tax credit of unprecedented generosity if they donate to a so-called scholarship granting organization. I’ll get into more on how this will and won’t work below, but the key detail for the purposes of this post is that governors must opt into the bill in order for their states to participate. So far 27 have signed up, leaders of red states all, save for one Jared Polis, the outgoing governor of Colorado. And while the pressure on Democratic governors so far has come from Republican-controlled legislators in states including Kansas and Kentucky, the voucher express is now rolling into blue states.
Which brings us to a recent event that convened, among others, former Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, edupreneur Kevin Chavous, and a who’s who of Massachusetts education reform and philanthropy leaders, all rallying around a message for Governor Maura Healey: “sign up for vouchers—for the kids.”
A key part of the sales pitch for bringing vouchers to Massachusetts is that the cause is bipartisan. Which made it all the more awkward that on the very day of the coalition’s debut, 32 Democratic senators, including both Massachusetts senators, dropped a bill to repeal the federal voucher program on the grounds that it will 1) decimate public schools and 2) explode the federal deficit. In a hard-hitting op-ed, Arizona Senator Mark Kelly warned that universal vouchers had “broken” his state. And while the Wall Street Journal was quick to paint Kelly as a toady of the teachers unions, the bill’s co-sponsors include among them some famously choice-y Democrats: Cory Booker and Michael Bennett. Bennett, by the way, is running to replace out-going Colorado Governor Jared Polis, to date the program’s lone blue backer. (Contrary to claims on the coalition’s website, North Carolina Governor Josh Stein has not opted his state into the program.)
Another clue as to what’s really going on comes to us courtesy of a fascinating new profile of ED chief Linda McMahon in the New Yorker. That we now have a federal voucher program turns out to reflect the handiwork of Texas oil billionaire slash “theo-oligarch” Tim Dunn, who used McMahon’s think tank, the America First Policy Institute, to take Texas’ controversial voucher program, which he also spearheaded, national.
At the institute, McMahon ceded policy to others. Before launching the group, she and Rollins visited Texas to enlist the billionaire oilman Tim Dunn as a founder. Dunn isn’t well known nationally, but he is the most powerful man in Texas; in 2023, ProPublica reported, two-thirds of all campaign donations to the state Republican Party came from his political organizations. Dunn has expressed the view that Christians should dominate society. Texas’s first Jewish Speaker of the House has said that, in a private meeting, Dunn told him that only Christians should hold leadership positions. (Dunn has denied this.) For years, his main political project was legislation that siphoned public-education funds to private schools via vouchers. “I call him a theo-oligarch,” Glenn Rogers, a former Republican state representative, told me. Rogers is deeply conservative, but, like many rural Republicans, he was a public-education supporter. Dunn targeted him, and in 2024 he lost his seat. “He desires to eliminate public education and replace it with a private-education system that uses his version of the Christian religion,” Rogers said.
Ed reform’s end game is offering each US parent a cheap voucher (5k is the number most often landed on) to replace an actual education system. Obviously this allows multi millionaires and billionaires (like Arne Duncan and Reed Hastings) to pay lower taxes, especially regarding children with disabilities, who are the main drivers in the increase in education costs since the 1970s. It used to be cheaper because prior to the 1970s didn’t offer any public school programs to disabled kids. Excluding the most expensive to educate 10% of students saved a lot of money.
Since 5k per student isn’t enough to fund even the low quality for profit charters the Obama Administration promoted all over the country, the oligarchs will next roll out a parent loan program to fund education, thereby turning our free and universal public education system into our expensive and selective higher education system, and creating yet another class of education debtors.
Public school advocates like me predicted ed reform would end up at vouchers and we were right. We’ll be right about saddling students and parents with loans for K-12 education too. It’s the next ed reform innovation and we can all thank centrist and Right wing Democrats like Arne Duncan when they roll it out.
Incidentally, Duncan was a legacy admit to Harvard and has never darkened the door of a public school, which true of 99% of these people. Our nations most expensive schools have saddled us with the moronic sons and daughters of their donors for far too long.
