By Steve Hinnefeld
The Indiana Citizen
May 7, 2025
Michigan State University education policy professor Josh Cowen has spent two decades studying and writing about voucher programs, in which state tax dollars pay students’ private school tuition.
Early studies of small, targeted voucher programs found some positive effects, Cowen says. But as the programs grew larger, results turned negative. Studies of statewide programs in Indiana as well as Louisiana and Ohio, found what Cowen describes as “some of the largest academic declines on record in academic research,” comparable to the impact on learning of Hurricane Katrina and COVID-19, which dramatically lowered test scores by disrupting students’ lives and keeping them out of schools for extended periods of time.
A study by researchers at the universities of Notre Dame and Kentucky found Hoosier students who transferred to private schools with voucher funding saw their math test scores decline, on average, by 0.15 standard deviation, equivalent to falling from the 40th to the 34th percentile among their peers. Standard deviation measures how far individual scores differ from the mean score in a data set. There was no significant difference in the students’ reading scores. A study of Louisiana’s voucher program found an even bigger impact, a decline of 0.5 standard deviation in math performance.
As a result of these research findings, Cowen has become an outspoken critic of voucher policies. His 2024 book “The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers” describes how Christian nationalists and libertarians, funded by wealthy conservatives, joined forces to push vouchers from a fringe idea to the conservative mainstream. For Christian nationalists, Cowen said, vouchers amplify their ability to use K-12 schools to promote a version of Christianity marked by alignment with right-wing politics, a hostility toward reproductive freedom, LGBTQ+ rights and racial justice initiatives, and, in some cases, a literal interpretation of the Bible, including the biblical creation story.
He spoke with Steve Hinnefeld for The Indiana Citizen about vouchers and Christian nationalism and other matters. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Question: In “The Privateers,” you describe how religious and economic conservatives have promoted vouchers with support from wealthy philanthropists, such as the brothers Charles and (the late) David Koch and Betsy DeVos, secretary of education in the first Trump administration and former head of the pro-voucher American Federation for Children. Where does Christian nationalism fit in the picture?
Cowen: Private school vouchers are a huge part of the Christian nationalist long-term strategy, the idea that this kind of specific, right-wing interpretation of Christianity should dictate public policy and the law. These folks believe that education, from birth to adulthood, is absolutely key to the idea of, to quote Betsy DeVos, advancing God’s kingdom on earth. She laments that, in her words, public schools have displaced churches as centers of community. She sees vouchers as a cure for that.
No less than the current U.S. Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, co-authored an entire book about this, called “Battle for the American Mind.” The whole book is about the need to take over education. Having the majority of American children in classical Christian schools is what he says he wants. Now the guy is the defense secretary. What was he doing writing about education? It’s not because he’s an expert, it’s because this is how central education is to folks with this mindset.
There are folks who hate public education because they just hate public education. They don’t care about who goes to which bathroom and what pronouns people use. They hate labor unions, and they don’t like public schools because they have labor unions. But also, they see a public school as government, and they don’t like government. The Christian nationalists have a much more philosophical objection. They don’t like public schools because they want religious schools.
Q: You cite a 2017 investigation by Chalkbeat, the education news outlet, which found that at least 10% of Indiana voucher schools said they would reject LGBTQ+ students or families, while another 20% didn’t disclose their policies. But some voucher schools said they would welcome those students. What’s the difference between these schools and the ones that promote Christian nationalism?
COWEN: There are Christians who are not Christian nationalists who have always prioritized religious education: for example, Catholics, and other faith groups as well. The specific hostility to public schools, though, is unique to Christian nationalists. It really gets back to this idea that public schools reflect this diverse, multicultural, pluralistic society in the United States. To the extent that these people don’t want a diverse, multicultural, pluralistic society, they really don’t want children spending eight hours a day in an environment that educates them to value those things.
Now, they will use the word pluralistic themselves to mean we should have more taxpayer-funded religious opportunities. But they don’t mean pluralism as a set of diverse interests, stakeholders, communities, traditions and values. They mean, if we’re going to spend public money on secular institutions, we should spend public money on religious institutions, specifically their religious institutions.
Q: The voucher concept is credited to Milton Friedman, the economist and free-market advocate, in an essay he wrote in 1955. Southern states latched onto the idea in their resistance to school desegregation, establishing so-called segregation academies. How did vouchers go from being about race to being about religion?
COWEN: Well, I would counter that, for Christian nationalists, race is a part of it. We may refer to Christian nationalism, but what we really mean most of the time is white Christian nationalism. The other thing I would say, though, is that these folks are really good at putting aside any differing principles to get the thing they really want. The Koch people, for example, are not ideologically committed to the culture wars. But they are ideologically committed to the vision of the world that Milton Friedman laid out, just across the board, across the economy, not just in education.
I think where these two things – Christian nationalism and libertarian economic thinking inspired by Friedman – formally joined was in the late 1980s heading into the ‘90s, when the first voucher program in modern form was created in Milwaukee. The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, based in Milwaukee, is the mover and shaker and funder behind that kind of metaphorical and, in some cases, literal convening table between the libertarians and the Christian nationalists. And it’s the Bradley Foundation that’s responsible for getting that voucher program in Milwaukee up and running.
Q: Indiana adopted vouchers in 2011 under former Gov. Mitch Daniels, who seems far from being a Christian nationalist, and the state started expanding them under Mike Pence, Daniels’ successor as governor, who famously said he was “a Christian, a conservative and a Republican – in that order.” What stands out about Indiana’s voucher program?
COWEN: You know, the Indiana program, at its inception, was supposed to be the thing that Betsy DeVos really wanted, according to her framework of the world. Compared to Louisiana, it was less regulated, it was bigger, and it had a higher income cap. There was so much attention to Louisiana vouchers, because the results were so bad, because of the connection to Hurricane Katrina, and because Milton Friedman himself, before he died, called Katrina an opportunity to get his idea up and running. Indiana, for the DeVos people, was, “This is how we’re going to do it well. We’re going to correct the mistakes that Louisiana made.” Then the results are almost as bad.
And voucher supporters couldn’t pin it on the state the way they tried to do in Louisiana. There’s nothing that Louisiana has, really, in common with Indiana, other than the fact they both are fairly conservative politically. The economies are different, the geographics are different. They are just very, very different. What you can say is, it’s not a very good idea to subsidize schools that don’t really have an interest in an academic mission.
Q: Indiana policymakers argue that parents know best how their children should be educated and state education funding should follow the child, whether that’s to a public, charter or private school. What’s wrong with that argument?
COWEN: If that were true, they would be compelling private schools to tell parents the truth, when it comes, at minimum, to test scores and how the voucher money is being spent. Some test scores are reported, but policymakers have bent over backward, whether in Indiana or elsewhere, to make sure parents know as little as possible about the voucher scheme.
Over the last decade, as vouchers have gotten bigger in Indiana and elsewhere, when you ask how private schools funded by vouchers are doing compared to public schools, the results are dreadful. You get headlines saying, like Chalkbeat wrote about Indiana in 2018, “Student math scores decline for years in nation’s largest voucher program,” which Indiana was at that time.
That’s the headline that’s a real threat to expanding vouchers nationally, so they spin a good line about parents. And parents should be active agents in their child’s education. But let’s not lie to parents with a bumper sticker slogan about parents’ rights. Let’s arm them with information and say, “Your child will fall, on average … behind about 6% more children if they take a voucher based on what we know in Indiana.” That’s a huge drop.
If the argument is, “Josh, parents should have the right to teach their kids creationism, instead of science,” I would say, “OK, fine, but not on the taxpayer dime, No. 1.” But, No. 2, if you really believe that’s what parents really want, just tell them the truth.
Q: The Indiana legislature approved, and Gov. Mike Braun signed, legislation that creates a universal voucher program by removing all income limits for participating families, effective in 2026-27. There’s concern about how this will impact funding for public schools, of course. Why else should we care?
COWEN: About 70% of voucher users, on average, are already in private school at the beginning. For them, this is just a garden-variety, cash subsidy for existing behavior. But about a quarter or so of (voucher) students are transferring from public to private schools. Until the last couple of years, those have been more vulnerable kids because there have been income caps. They have been located in places like Indianapolis or in Cleveland. And that’s why I call vouchers the education equivalent of predatory lending.
What I really worry about are these vulnerable kids, particularly kids from historically marginalized communities, that these schools prey on. Sometimes public schools have failed these kids, and we need to talk about that. But the solution isn’t to push them into a school that’s going to do even worse and tell them it’s about hope and opportunity.
Steve Hinnefeld is a freelance writer based in Bloomington. He formerly was an adjunct instructor at the Media School at Indiana University, a media specialist at Indiana University and reporter for the Bloomington Herald-Times.
Dwight Adams, an editor and writer based in Indianapolis, edited this article. He is a former content editor, copy editor and digital producer at The Indianapolis Star and IndyStar.com, and worked as a planner for other newspapers, including the Louisville Courier Journal.
