AMERIKA

Crisis calls from LGBTQ+ youth spiked by 700% after Election Day

Photo by BĀBI on Unsplash
woman in white tank top
Orion Rummler, The 19Th

November 10, 2024

Editor’s note: If you or a loved one are in crisis, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255), or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741741.

When the presidential race was called for Donald Trump in the early hours of Wednesday, calls and texts to a leading LGBTQ+ youth suicide prevention organization exploded in a massive outpouring of anxiety over the election results.

The Trevor Project saw an overall 700 percent increase in calls, texts and chats compared to prior weeks. The organization offers a lifeline via phone, online chat or text to LGBTQ+ youth who struggle with thoughts of depression, self-harm or suicide while navigating coming out to their families or facing discrimination. Right now, the services are experiencing long hold times at an especially vulnerable time for LGBTQ+ people.

LGBTQ+ youth are afraid, confused and anxious about the outcome of the election in these conversations, a spokesperson for the Trevor Project said. Their crisis services usually focus on supporting the mental health of queer and trans youth from ages 13 to 24 while they navigate relationships, gender identity and coming out. Now, the vast majority of young LGBTQ+ Americans are seeking emergency help due to what they described in text and chat messages to the helpline as “election anxiety.”

These pleas for help are not happening in a vacuum. They are the result of a political environment that has brought transphobia into the political mainstream, especially from Trump’s campaign. The former president’s campaign spent over $20 million on ads portraying trans people as harmful to society or attacking Vice President Kamala Harris’ support of trans people. Trump has pledged to enact extreme anti-LGBTQ+ policies in his second term, such as attempting to charge teachers with sex discrimination for affirming students’ gender identities. Some of his proposals mimic state anti-LGBTQ+ laws that have gone into effect in the past few years.

Those state laws and the vitriolic rhetoric surrounding them have been steadily eroding the mental health of LGBTQ+ youth. Prior research from the Trevor Project, in partnership with the polling firm Morning Consult, found that state proposals restricting the rights of LGBT+ youth in schools, sports and doctor’s offices negatively affect their mental health. New research by the Trevor Project, published in the journal Nature Human Behavior, found that state laws targeting transgender people caused trans and nonbinary youth to be more likely to attempt suicide within the past year.

The spike in crisis services outreach is alarming, said Jaymes Black, CEO of The Trevor Project. But, Black added, the organization is not surprised that the wave of anti-LGBTQ+ policies of the past few years continues to harm young people’s mental health. “The current political environment in the U.S. is heavy, but it is so important for LGBTQ+ young people to know that they do not have to shoulder this weight alone,” Black said.

“LGBTQ+ young people: your life matters, and you were born to live it,” Black added.

The Trevor Project encourages LGBTQ+ youth to take a break from news and social media, silencing notifications when trying to relax and finding community wherever possible, whether in person or online. Additional resources include calling the Trans Lifeline, which has specific resources and upcoming meetings for those “dealing with post-election grief;” texting hotlines such as THRIVE Lifeline and Steve Fund; calling the LGBT National Youth Talkline; or reaching out to a counselor through the Crisis Text Line.

Another way to seek help when in crisis or contemplating suicide is by reaching out to a trusted friend, community or family member.

Lambda Legal, an LGBTQ+ legal group, has compiled a list of state-level resources for LGBTQ+ youth, including mentorship programs and community centers. To connect with new friends and discuss shared hobbies, Q Chat Space offers an online community for LGBTQ+ teenagers. Parents of LGBTQ+ youth looking for supportive spaces can find state and local PFLAG chapters across the country, or join virtual meetings.

Louisiana Illuminator is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Louisiana Illuminator maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Greg LaRose for questions: info@lailluminator.com. Follow Louisiana Illuminator on Facebook and X.

Trump’s First Term Was Bad for Trans People. His Next Term Promises to Be Worse.


Here are six ways a second Trump administration may try to target trans people. We must organize our resistance now.

By Lewis Raven Wallace , 

Truthout

Published November 8, 2024

Dozens of protesters gather in Times Square near a military recruitment center to show their anger at President Donald Trump's decision to reinstate a ban on transgender individuals serving in the military on July 26, 2017, in New York City.

Spencer Platt / Getty Images

Donald J. Trump’s successful 2024 campaign for president prominently featured ads that declared: “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.” The campaign spent an unprecedented amount of money on commercials specifically targeting trans and nonbinary people, particularly trans women, and Trump himself has denigrated trans advocacy and visibility, claiming it will come to an end when he returns to the presidency.

During his first campaign in 2016, Trump appeared relatively unconcerned about issues related to trans people and trans rights. While racism and sexism had been core to his career and image, anti-LGBTQ sentiments had not — he tended toward the northeastern socially liberal sensibilities held even by many conservatives in places like New York City.

Yet, in his first term as president, Trump pursued policies that limited trans people’s access to health care, restricted trans people’s protections from discrimination in jobs and housing, and banned trans people from the military.

The development of Trump’s anti-trans sensibilities from 2016 to the present reflects the growing alliance between Trump and socially conservative activist groups like the Alliance Defending Freedom, the Family Research Council and Moms for Liberty. As Trump has reshaped his political image, he has joined these groups in grabbing onto trans folks as a convenient scapegoat and a focus of some of their most aggressively backwards policies.

Here are six ways in which Trump has promised to target trans and queer people during his second administration:

1. Trump Will Repress Trans Youth in Schools and Punish Teachers Who Support Them

In the name of “Parents’ Rights,” Trump’s website outlines his plans to investigate and defund schools and programs “pushing Critical Race Theory or gender ideology on our children.” Gender ideology has been largely interpreted by right-wing activists to mean any discussion of pronouns, nonbinary and queer identity, and trans-affirming stories, including children’s books featuring trans characters.

Trump also plans to push for a federal “Parental Bill of Rights” similar to those proposed in dozens of states, which require teachers and administrators to notify parents if students want to change their pronouns, and encourage parents to police how gender is taught in schools and whether trans youth are allowed to use the restrooms and locker rooms that align with their identities. These anti-trans education laws, already active in over half of U.S. states, are facing legal challenges which are bound to continue if the U.S. government passes a similar federal law.

2. Trump’s Policies Will Target Trans Women and Girls in Sports

Trump’s platform, which he refers to as “Agenda 47,” names “keep[ing] men out of women’s sports” as one of his 20 priorities for his next administration.

Trans people may be restricted not just from accessing trans-specific care in many cases, but also potentially from accessing any care.

Of course, there is no extant issue with “men” attempting to play on women’s sports teams. In action, this means Trump will continue to malign transgender women as men pretending to be women, calling on junk science to claim that trans women and girls have an unfair advantage in sports. Trump has indicated that he would attempt to use executive action to punish schools that allow trans girls to play on girls’ teams. Congress could also pursue passage of a federal law to this effect — a 2023 bill, HR 734, was stopped by the Democratic-controlled Senate but passed the House.

3. Trump Will Push for a Restrictive Federal Definition of Gender

Taking his anti-trans virulence a step further, Trump plans to redefine gender at the federal level as a binary recognizing only male-assigned men and female-assigned women. This flies in the face of current medical consensus, which defines gender as a category distinct from sex assigned at birth. These definitions are key to interpreting anti-discrimination protection — if sex is narrowly defined as a binary of male and female, federal Title IX protections can no longer be interpreted to protect trans people from discrimination. Trump has also vowed to reinstate rules from his previous administration that allowed federal housing programs to openly discriminate against unhoused trans people who seek services in sex-segregated housing facilities, using similarly narrow and regressive definitions of biological sex to force women into men’s shelters or turn them away entirely.

4. The Trump Administration Will Roll Back Health Care Access for Trans People

The legal definition of sex and gender also has a bearing on trans people’s access to necessary health care, an area in which Trump has been clear about his priorities.

During his first presidency, Trump’s administration set a precedent by rolling back federal protections against health care discrimination for trans people under the Affordable Care Act. If these policies are reinstated, trans people may be restricted not just from accessing trans-specific care in many cases, but also potentially from accessing any care — as open discrimination on the basis of gender identity may become legal (again) under Trump. While individual health insurers and health care providers are free to not discriminate, they will not be prevented from doing so by the federal government; on the contrary, they’ll virtually be cheered on to do just that.

Trump also claims he will criminalize gender-affirming care for minors, punishing physicians who provide such care by restricting Medicaid and Medicare funding and even opening DOJ investigations into these doctors. He has also vowed to stop providing gender-affirming care in federal prisons and to enforce Republicans’ restrictive definitions of gender in prisons and detention centers.

A study in 2017 found that already over a quarter of trans people had postponed necessary medical care out of fear, and that those who delayed care were more likely to be depressed and to attempt suicide. If these rules unfold as Trump has claimed they will, doctors and health care providers will be fearful of providing trans-affirming care, and trans and nonbinary people will be even more afraid to access care at all, causing devastating ripple effects for trans people’s mental health and physical well-being. Trans people in federal prisons, like trans people in many state facilities, will be forced into housing situations that make them even more vulnerable to transphobic violence, and unable to medically transition while incarcerated.

5. The Trump Administration Will Deport and Abuse Trans and Queer Migrants and Refugees

Trump’s campaign rhetoric had included the accusation that a Kamala Harris administration would support “transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison” — a statement which referred to Harris’s agreement that the federal government should in fact provide gender-affirming health care to migrants it is holding in cages without charges.

In addition to keeping trans migrants from getting the care they need while incarcerated, the Trump administration’s open plans to carry out mass deportations affect the health and safety of trans and queer communities in myriad other ways. Many refugees and migrants are trans and queer people pushed out of their own home communities, who are then vulnerable to violence and discrimination throughout their path of migration. Indiscriminate deportation will mean trans and queer immigrants are swept up into dangerous and unwelcoming detention facilities, subject to rape and abuse, and turned into easy targets for violence and discrimination.

6. Trump Will Ban Trans People From the Military (Again)

When President Joe Biden took power in 2021, he acted quickly to roll back Trump’s previous policy banning trans people from open military service. A majority of U.S. residents polled in 2021 (66 percent) supported trans military service. While Trump has not made as much noise recently on this particular issue, in all likelihood, a second Trump administration will lead to a second set of attacks on transgender troops, in spite of the unpopularity of this policy and the multiple legal challenges to the ban during Trump’s first term. Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation plan that lays out the right-wing movement’s visions for a Trump presidency in detail, says “gender dysphoria is incompatible with the demands of military service,” and calls for a ban on use of public money for “transgender surgeries” and abortions.

This election will no doubt usher in an era of fear and regression for trans and queer communities, particularly young people and transfeminine people who are the primary targets of the rhetorical attacks. Over just a decade, trans people have gone from being a little-known minority (at less than 1 percent of the adult population) to a hotly debated scapegoat, in the crosshairs of the new culture wars. But cultural debates aside, the changes to safety, health access and economic security will necessitate sustained grassroots resistance including mutual aid, policy advocacy, and likely defiance of unjust rules and laws. Small, community-driven trans advocacy organizations are already doing this work across the country, and in regions where the repression Trump is pursuing is already well underway — they deserve and need our support as their work becomes ever more challenging and urgent.

This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.

Lewis Raven Wallace
Lewis Raven Wallace (he/they/ze) is an independent journalist based in Durham, North Carolina, and the author and creator of The View from Somewhere book and podcast. He’s currently a Ford Global Fellow, and the Abolition Journalism Fellow with Interrupting Criminalization. He previously worked in public radio, and is a long-time activist engaged in prison abolition, racial justice, and queer and trans liberation. He is white and transgender, and was born and raised in the Midwest with deep roots in the South.

MAGA’s Fascist Attacks on Gender

Fighting the far right's fascist "family values" with an emancipatory vision of gender and family

By Eli Brown

October 11, 2024

Source: Liberation Road


Ted Eytan, “Capital Pride Parade” (2018) / CC BY-SA 2.0


1. Why Is JD Vance Afraid of Childless Cat Ladies?

During a 2021 interview with Tucker Carlson, J.D. Vance made a now-famous quip that the country is run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.” Vance continued: “The entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children. And how does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it?”

Vance’s words resurfaced after his selection as the GOP vice presidential candidate; he has since doubled down on them. Trump has long made similar comments, including reportedly referring to Kamala Harris as a “bitch” behind closed doors. At the recent Moms for Liberty conference, Trump outlandishly claimed that public schools were providing gender-affirming surgery to children without parental knowledge, an assertion so demonstrably false and ridiculous it would be laughable, except that he said it in front of an audience of far right-wing activists who have been instrumental in vicious direct action and legislative attacks against trans people.

Many on the left, center, and even some on the right decried Vance and Trump’s statements as misogynistic and “weird,” out of touch with the values of the American public. While Trump and Vance’s rhetoric may be alienating and unpopular to many, it points to a larger and more alarming reality: patriarchy has become a central component of the MAGA attack plan, dovetailing with its racist attacks as part of a larger vision of white Christian nationalism. And as the right ramps up its assault on gender and especially on trans people, it is crucial for the left to grasp the centrality of patriarchal oppression to MAGA’s broader social, political, and economic agenda and to fight for a different, emancipatory vision of gender and family.

2. Moral Panic and Mass Line on the Right

Since the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision in 2022, the right has discovered that regressive policies on abortion and gay equality are anathema to many Americans. To their dismay, they can no longer rely on anti-abortion activism and “gay panic” to mobilize their base. But through trial and error, they have been working to recycle these old lines and to shift their rhetoric to find new lines of attack. GOP-led states have passed numerous attack bills banning abortion and severely curtailing the rights of trans people. We can view the broad but disjointed attacks of the past years as a kind of practice of mass line development by the far right: which attacks stick, which are effective (and ineffective), and what energizes itsr base?

Through this process, MAGA has shifted the focus of its attacks onto transgender people and especially trans children. But the highly visible attacks on trans people are only the “tip of the spear” of a much broader assault on gender rights and bodily autonomy. As Trump and Vance’s comments make clear, MAGA has in its sights not just trans people but all LGBTQ+ people; women who defy their attempts at control; men who do not uphold toxic patriarchal ideals, whom the right lampoons as too feminine; and all others who fall outside into their narrow definitions of gender and of family.

The policing of a narrow vision of gender, sex, and family is central to the MAGA vision for fascist, patriarchal control. This vision is clearly articulated in Project 2025’s four “promises” to America. The first of these promises, around which all others are articulated, is to “[r]estore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children.”

They are speaking about a certain type of family: white, heterosexual, and Christian. The framing of “protect our children” implies that all those who fall outside those lines are dangerous. This sinister pledge is crucial to their deeply dystopian vision centered on a strict, punitive vision of the heterosexual family, in which women must be mothers and submit to their husbands, even in violent marriages; a man is a father and the authority figure within the family; and the “postmenopausal female,” in J.D. Vance’s words, holds no worth in society except to care for grandchildren.

These are not idle words or empty rhetoric: the right is putting them into practice through law. The reality of life in red and blue states is becoming ever more starkly different.

In MAGA-led states that have banned abortions like Tennessee and Georgia, doctors face agonizing decisions of whether to risk felony criminal charges to provide care when pregnant patients present to the emergency room. While the doctors and lawyers and hospital administrators argue, women have bled out or suffered permanent organ damage while waiting in ER waiting rooms or after being sent home without care. The Republican-led states that are forcing families to have children are the states that provide the least support for families and respond to lack of familial resources punitively by jailing parents and taking away their kids. States with abortion bans are struggling to provide basic gynecological care as doctors move to states where they are not risking felonies by providing care, and medical residents avoid taking residencies in states where they cannot learn the full range of gynecological care.

Trans people and their families are facing desperate choices, too. As Republican legislatures have passed outright bans on puberty blockers and hormone therapy, families with trans kids are fleeing their home states. Trans adults in MAGA-led states fear arrest for using the bathroom or having their drivers licenses revoked.

3. The Dark History of Fascist Patriarchy in Europe and the United States

Why is the MAGA movement so doggedly pursuing harsh and punitive restrictions on abortion, trans healthcare, and other gender issues? These restrictions are a means of exercising social control. Access to abortion and birth control gives people a choice in who they love and marry, and sex and childbearing no longer function as a method of control and submission. And the very existence of trans people undermines the Right’s strict lines of gendered social control as people, both trans and not, are no longer forced into immutable gender roles and instead have the opportunity to make their own way in life. The right is attacking gender precisely because gender rights undermine their ability to exercise social control.

MAGA’s attacks on gender are among their clearest articulations of a fascist vision, and they emulate the fascist movements of the 20th century in their regressive views on women and LGBTQ people and harsh authoritarian restrictions on abortion, repression of LGBTQ people, and attempts to criminalize freedom of movement. Early in their rise to power, Nazis attacked Magnus Hirschfield’s Institute for Sexual Science, where some of the earliest 20th century work on trans healthcare and queer sexuality had been pioneered. Later, the Nazis passed harsh laws outlawing homosexuality and imprisoned gay men, lesbians, and trans people in concentration camps. Likewise, in Mussolini’s Italy and Franco’s Spain, women’s ability to participate in public life and employment was severely curtailed, alongside harsh punishments for abortion.

German propaganda poster showing the Nazi eagle behind an image of the “ideal” family

The fascist definition of the family was central to social control in Nazi Germany, Mussolini’s fascist regime in Italy, and Franco’s Spain. Women played the role of mother to the fascist homeland and embodied a fascist vision of fertility and femininity, raising children to be or to birth future fascist soldiers. Men were expected to adhere to a strict image of strength and masculinity, serving as fathers and enforcers of fascist discipline within the home and soldiers to the fascist state outside the home. The patriarchal vision of the family occurred alongside and was dependent upon the subordination, exploitation and/or elimination of bodies, families, and communities perceived as sexually deviant, racially or ethnically other, politically dissident, or otherwise “inferior.” In the fascist regimes of the 20th century, the valorization of “the family” was part and parcel of a genocidal project denying many actual families the right to the term.

But we don’t have to look across the ocean to find examples of the interconnection of fascism and patriarchy. US racial capitalism was formed around patriarchal relations that developed through the enslavement of African people, the exploitation of non-Black people of color and poor whites, and the extermination of Indigenous peoples, and the policies of European fascist states drew heavily on the mechanisms of slavery in the US. Within this context, the creation and enforcement of strict gender and sexual roles was a crucial mechanism of social control and economic exploitation and included the repression and extermination of Two-Spirit and gender-non-conforming people, laws banning interracial families, and widespread sexual violence by white male enslavers against enslaved women. The “cult of domesticity” that restricted wealthy (and, later, middle-class) white women to the role of mother and homemaker is inextricable from the oppression of the many other women and gender-oppressed people to whom any pretense of “family values” was denied. This was made most brutally clear by the commodification of the reproductive capacity of enslaved Black women upon which the perpetuation of slavery depended, particularly after the closing of the legal Atlantic slave trade. Even after abolition, the valorization of “the family” as a private refuge from public life continued to depend on the exploitative, low-wage domestic labor of poor and working-class women and women of color.

4. Project 2025: Restore What and for Whom?

These early foundations echo into the current structures of US capitalism in which reproductive labor is unvalued or undervalued, to the detriment of the health of the entire society. Care work and reproductive labor include having and raising children, teaching, healing the sick, caring for the elderly, domestic labor, janitorial work, and many other crucial jobs that allow our society to function and reproduce itself. These fundamental contradictions underlie US capitalism, and the right’s current project seeks to exacerbate and crystallize them further.

It is with this context in mind that we must evaluate the right’s supposed promise to “restore” the family. We must immediately ask: restore what, for whom? The preface to Project 2025 states:


“In many ways, the entire point of centralizing political power is to subvert the family. Its purpose is to replace people’s natural loves and loyalties with unnatural ones. You see this in the popular left-wing aphorism, “Government is simply the name we give to the things we choose to do together.” But in real life, most of the things people “do together” have nothing to do with government. These are the mediating institutions that serve as the building blocks of any healthy society. Marriage. Family. Work. Church. School. Volunteering. The name real people give to the things we do together is community, not government. Our lives are full of interwoven, overlapping communities, and our individual and collective happiness depends upon them. But the most important community in each of our lives—and the life of the nation—is the family.

The right’s vision of “the family” draws on a long history of policing people’s bodies and reproductive capacity. All people with wombs must be forced to live as women, and all women forced to birth children, whether to reproduce a dominant elite (for white, Christian, middle class, and upper class women) or a dominated labor force (for everyone else). Policies that create greater ease and security for women and children are actually counterproductive to this fascist project. Meanwhile the rhetorical juxtaposition of “natural” and “unnatural” “loves and loyalties” makes very clear who does and doesn’t count as family, paving the way for the subsequent call for the forcible suppression of trans people, who the right calls an “ideology.” Likewise, the invocation of “real people” who care about “community” implies, chillingly, the existence of other, unreal people who do not. Here again, MAGA’s “family values” involve the extirpation of families considered less than fully human and outside the body politic—a core component, always, of fascist logic.

It takes a particularly contorted, deceptive logic to wrap an assault on the social welfare state in the shroud of “defending the family.” The right is not actually pro-children or pro-family at all. MAGA’s policy platform is horrible for families and children: it provides no paid maternal or paternal leave, slashes funding for public education, heavily restricts Medicaid and WIC, attacks access to healthcare, and seeks to turn a profit on our already badly damaged healthcare system by closing hospitals or converting them into badly funded and poorly staffed for-profit facilities. If we follow MAGA’s vision, working mothers, fathers, and parents will have to work more hours to put food on the table at jobs that abuse them and do not respect their rights; immigrant families will be torn apart; our seniors and loved ones will fall ill and not seek care until it is far too late, and then languish in dangerously understaffed facilities; and our children will go hungry.

And yet despite this, we should not underestimate the attraction of the right’s appeal to “family.” Most Americans deeply value family and community. And historically, the terrain of “family values” is one that the left has been willing to cede to the right. Given the deep entwinement of the white Christian, nuclear, patriarchal family structure with forms of racial, gendered and class violence, this is partly understandable. But if we are to successfully combat MAGA’s racist, genocidal, and patriarchal vision of the family, the left must fight for our own vision rooted in radical principles of self-determination, interdependence, and collective care.

5. A Left Vision for Gender Liberation and Family

Rather than ceding this ground to the right, we must fight both to redefine what family means and for the fundamental freedom of people to freely form family when and how they choose. We must recognize that all of the far right’s attacks across different elements of gender are connected: when MAGA attacks trans children, or access to abortion, or mixed families, they are attacking all of us.

The beginnings of a left defense of gender rights are increasingly cohering into a unified line. The majority of the country supports access to abortion and opposes abortion restrictions. In the 2022 elections, backlash against the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision and the overturning of Roe v. Wade was a key driver of Democratic victories and victories in a number of referendums either codifying the right to abortion or rejecting bans on abortion. Most Americans are at least moderately opposed to bans on trans healthcare, and many feel the Right is overemphasizing trans people and should probably just leave them alone. The pro-democracy united front is increasingly hostile to attacks on families, such as JD Vance’s recent comments.

The seeds of our line are right in front of us, in our defense of access to healthcare, freedom of choice, and the value of both paid and unpaid care work. Our vision of family includes mixed and multigenerational families, immigrant families, queer and chosen families, childless cat lady families, etc. We must uplift the value of collective care and fight for a policy platform that provides what families actually need: childcare and senior care, paid family leave, strong public schools and hospitals with unionized teachers and nurses, and a robust and accessible healthcare system that gives the freedom to access all healthcare regardless of income, including abortion and trans healthcare. Policies like universal healthcare access and paid family leave are popular with the American public and would have a tremendous impact on quality of life for the average American.

Left and progressive forces within our united front should take every opportunity to fight back against abortion bans and attacks on trans rights. Our base is mobilized by these issues, particularly abortion, as are many in the middle who may be swayed one way or another. Equally important, we must resist the siloing and demonization of vulnerable groups of people, whether trans people, patients seeking abortions, or immigrants. The right’s attempts to make these groups into scapegoats are dangerous and signal their fascist intentions.

The task in this moment is clear: we must block the fascists from taking power, broaden our united front to unite with the widest possible array of forces, and build the left to take leadership in the front. Through this struggle, we have the opportunity to articulate a vision that recognizes family as expansive and truly and deeply values reproductive labor, care work, and the responsibilities we have to care for one another.


Eli Brown is a member of Liberation Road. He currently serves on the National Executive Committee and is a member of the Oppressed Gender Work Team.

Donald Trump Tells Unforgivable Whopper About 'Transgender' Classes In School

Ron Dicker
Tue, October 1, 2024 

Donald Trump on Monday suggested “transgender” is the principal subject now taught in schools. He had a sympathetic ear in Fox Nation host Kellyanne Conway, his former adviser who introduced the world to the concept of “alternative facts.”

“We want reading, writing and arithmetic,” Trump said in a conversation about his plans for education reform if he wins the election next month. “Right now, you have mostly transgender. Everything’s transgender.”

“Some of these school programs, I looked at it the other night ― they’re destroying our country,” the former president added.

Trump prefaced his outrageous assertion ― yet another salvo in the culture wars ― by alluding to his plan to close the Department of Education and turn over education completely to the states. “And they’ll do great,” he said.

The Republican nominee noted that the U.S. spends more money per pupil than any other developed nation ― a claim that the data somewhat supports ― and yet is underperforming globally.

“We want school choice, but we have to get out of this Washington thing,” he said. “We’re gonna move it back to the states.”

The president has leaned on transphobia to characterize public schools as a breeding ground for extreme ideology on gender ― and his online plan for education reflects that.

Cutting federal funding “for any school or program pushing Critical Race Theory, gender ideology, or other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content on our children” is the top priority listed on that page.

The plan also lists “Keep men out of women’s sports” as a priority, another sign of the campaign’s embrace of transphobia.

Opinion

Trump Just Took His Project 2025 Promise a Step Further

Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling
Wed, October 2, 2024 



Donald Trump has fleshed out his Project 2025–inspired Department of Education plan, and it involves handing the reins and lofty responsibilities of public school administration over to a group of people with all the time in the world: parents.

“I figure we’ll have like one person plus a secretary,” the Republican presidential nominee told a crowd in Milwaukee Tuesday night. “You’ll have a secretary to a secretary. We’ll have one person plus a secretary, and all the person has to do is, ‘Are you teaching English? Are you teaching arithmetic? What are you doing? Reading, writing, and arithmetic. And are you not teaching woke?’

“Not teaching woke is a big factor,” Trump continued. “We’ll have a very small staff. We can occupy that staff right in this room, actually I think this room is too large. And all they’re going to do is they’re going to see that the basics are taken care of. You know, we don’t want someone to get crazy and start teaching a language that we don’t want them to teach.”

Not only do parents already have enough on their plates without trying to run the public school system, it’s likely that Trump has a specific group of parents in mind to direct education policy.

The goals he lays out are startlingly akin to the policy points of the far-right “parents’ rights” group Moms for Liberty, who hosted Trump as the keynote speaker at their annual conference in September. Moms for Liberty has recently ingratiated itself significantly into national politics and was listed as a member of Project 2025’s advisory board.

In the same speech, Trump also drew attention to the amount of real estate occupied in D.C. by Department of Education buildings, plotting that the dissolution of the federal agency would allow “somebody else to move in.”

“They’re run by the state, and run by the parents, because in Washington—you know half of the buildings, such a large number, every building you pass in Washington says Department of Education,” Trump said. “You’re gonna have a lot of vacant space. Now we can have maybe somebody else move in.”



Trump’s proposal to dismantle the Department of Education wholesale is nearly identical to Project 2025, despite his campaign spending months trying to distance itself from the 920-page Christian nationalist manifesto.


Project 2025 has also proposed revisiting federal approval of the abortion pill, banning pornography nationwide, placing the Justice Department under the control of the president, slashing federal funds for climate change research in an effort to sideline mitigation efforts, and increasing funding for the U.S.-Mexico border wall.

Inside the ‘religious separatist movement in American education’

Jon King, Michigan Advance
September 28, 2024

Desks in an empty elementary school classroom (Shutterstock.com)

The effort to get school vouchers approved nationwide has a long and varied history, but a book released this month posits that it is essentially a Christian Nationalist attempt at undermining public education as we know it.

That’s the conclusion of “The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers,” by Josh Cowen, a professor of education policy at Michigan State University.

Cowen, whose career as an education researcher in the early 2000s began with the expectation that vouchers, which allow public tax dollars for education to be spent for private school tuition, would ultimately benefit students. However, the reality that Cowen documents in the book turned out to be almost the exact opposite.

Starting in the immediate aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision which ordered an end to segregated public education, and ending with the rise of the conservative Moms for Liberty – a vocal opponent of LGBTQ+ rights. Cowen describes the arc of the voucher movement as never being far removed from bigotry and intolerance, whether it be against Blacks or the LGBTQ+ community.

More importantly, however, Cowen describes in detail the academic framework, whether through universities or conservative-funded think tanks, that provides intellectual cover for the movement.

Chief among them was Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman, considered by many to have “launched the modern school choice movement,” with his 1955 essay, “The Role of Government in Education.”
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Friedman, who extolled the virtues of a free market system with minimal government intervention, especially in social areas such as education, wrote that while government financing of education was justified, “the administration of schools is neither required by the financing of education, nor justifiable in its own right in a predominantly free enterprise society.”

Cowen writes that in the aftermath of the Brown decision, Friedman “spoke at Southern conferences paid for by conservative donors, where his lecture notes affirmed his published work by arguing that the ‘appropriate solution’ to tensions rising from integration mandates was a ‘privately operated school system with parent choice of schools.’”

From that setting, Cowen details the decades-long battle about the role of public education, a battle that is no less fierce now than it was in 1954.


Michigan Advance had an opportunity to speak with Cowen at length about the book and its conclusions and is presenting that discussion in two parts. What follows is a conversation that has been edited for length and clarity. Advance questions are in bold, and Cowen’s responses are in regular type.

——————————

Why is understanding who Milton Friedman was so essential to understanding the modern day voucher movement?


There’s this intellectual political history debate about whether Friedman himself was a segregationist, and I sort of alluded to it in the book. It’s not really all that important. What is important is that segregation very quickly latched on to the Friedman idea. And the editors (of Friedman’s essay) understood it to be from the beginning a potential race-neutral way to avoid Brown.

He would go on to win a Nobel Prize 20 years later, worked for (President Ronald) Reagan, advised (Dictator Augusto) Pinochet in the Chilean regime. I mean, this guy was everywhere. He’s still something of a hero among the libertarians. But he’s someone whose ideas did kind of give intellectual heft to conservative public policy.

There were some Southern states in particular that jumped on this idea. Some successfully proposed small voucher systems in the ‘50s, and some didn’t quite have the votes. But you fast forward to when the first real modern voucher system gets off the ground (Milwaukee in 1990), and in a way, none of the sort of Friedman stuff was nearly as relevant at that time as it really is today, again just because of how much (voucher advocates) believe parents really should have the right to separate their kids out from what they think is going on in public schools.


In the ‘50s, it was race. And now it’s sort of race. I mean, the CRT business and the DEI business and gender ideology is in Trump 47 (the Trump campaign’s official policy proposals) and in Project 2025. So, the underlying act of vouchers is separating kids out from the public school because parents don’t like what’s going on in public school.

Starting with Milwaukee in 1990, those original voucher projects were set up so that they were going to be highly analyzed, that there would be strong data, and the expectation was that it would show student improvement, and yet, ultimately, they did not.

Exactly. The original 1990 evaluation that (Wisconsin) sort of obligated itself to when it passed the program, it just didn’t show the overwhelmingly positive results people expected, which is I think why in some sense, the conservative voucher advocates got involved in this so heavily and aggressively. What it was about was whether or not this long-time conservative pipe dream actually works or not. And then the fight sort of sustained itself for 10 years and we’re kind of back in it again.


There were some sort of gently positive results. I kind of concede that there were a handful of positive studies from that era, although at this point, they’re now almost two decades old. But what else was going on in the ‘90s and in the early 2000s was the era of more public school accountability, transparency, standards-based reform in both from the Clinton years and the George W. Bush years. No Child Left Behind was signed by George W. Bush in 2002.

They really believed in these three- to five-year long, open independent evaluations. They just have never really shown what these guys wanted. The argument of the book is not only did vouchers kind of fail to deliver in their own right, but they’ve actually had some unprecedented declines in student achievement.

That’s where you start to see these things kind of return back to. I mean, the reason I opened the book with the ‘50s stuff is this is where you really have to go back to the ‘50s to get that the language that’s used again in today’s debate, because it was not part of the ‘90s, and it was not part of the early 2000s. People like Ken Starr would sort of trump parents’ rights out there from time to time, but they still believed these things would move the needle on academics and test scores. It really wasn’t until recently where they stopped making that argument. For the most part, it’s much more about woke ideology and CRT and where people go to the bathroom and all that business.


In the book you say that as the data really turns negative, it almost cannot be dismissed any longer. It can’t be explained away. That’s where the shift in this approach comes in. Trump’s secretary of education, Betsy DeVos, who is featured prominently in your book, was involved in this long before she became the secretary of education.

Most of us, I think, are fairly well aware of Betsy DeVos and the DeVos family influence in Michigan, but it’s really hard to overstate how influential the DeVos’ have been in national conservative Republican politics for decades. It’s not just here (in Michigan). It’s the Heritage Foundation. It’s focused on the Family Research Council. There’s a DeVos Center For Religion and Family Life at Heritage. A number of the Project 2025 authors have their roots back in some of these big DeVos groups that date back to not just Betsy, but the first generation of Richard and Helen (DeVos). So, their larger goal as a family is much more sort of recentering this vision of Christianity into American life and American public policy, and I don’t think that’s a statement any of that side would disagree with.

When Betsy DeVos became the nominee for education secretary, these old comments that she’d made (reemerged) about seeing school choices advancing God’s kingdom and lamenting the fact that public schools are kind of the community centers. She wants churches to be back in the community center. The phrase Christians would would use, and I count myself among Christians, is as a mission field. I mean, the (DeVos) family has always seen public policy as a mission field for their faith. And vouchers is one area where they’ve been very, very focused of late out of Michigan, but from time to time here as well.


(Note: A request for comment was made to Betsy Devos through the Dick and Betsy DeVos Family Foundation, but was not returned.)

But this Christian-based view of public education, it’s really Christian nationalism is it not?

Yes. That is driving this.


Is the voucher movement’s ultimate goal, as personified by people like Betsy DeVos and the Koch brothers, really just an undercover way to destroy public education?

I think that’s right. I think in the short term, and certainly in the years that I was active working as an evaluator of the space and some of the early programs I write about in the book, they were just trying to get some of the stuff off the ground. I do think there’s been much more of a scorched earth take now where they’re going much harder with this sort of Christopher Rufo era, the JD Vance era, Trump himself era. It’s much more aggressive in terms of just going right at public schools. It’s not something you saw earlier in the ‘90s and in the early 2000s when it was sort of a much more mainstream conservative policy.

But that kind of describes the entire trend right now in American politics, right? This is not the party of George W. Bush anymore. It’s not the party of Mitt Romney anymore. It’s the party of Vance and Trump, and we’re having debates about Haitian immigrants and cats in Springfield, Ohio right now. (Note: The racist, discredited lie that Haitian residents in Springfield have eaten pets has been spread by the Trump campaign despite being repeatedly debunked.) It’s just a different time. And I think the voucher movement has really just sort of hooked itself to that energy and that aggression. I mean, vouchers are two of the first three paragraphs in the education chapter of Project 2025. They need to package that with everything else that’s in that 900 pages. It’s pretty fringe and extreme stuff. And I think the quiet part out loud piece of it is, they’re much more willing to go at public schools in general now as opposed to “not representing parents’ values” or “captured by the teachers’ unions.” You’d hear this from time to time, especially the union piece 20 years ago, but it’s nothing like today. And so I think when Betsy DeVos left office, and I quote this this column of hers in the book, but in that last few months of her in office, she wrote a piece for USA Today where she basically said “What we want to do next as we leave, and that’s long term, we want a Supreme Court case that’s going to throw out all the remaining Blaine Amendments and get mandatory vouchers in every state.”


I think those of us who understand school finances, those of us who understand how public school pay budgets work, understand that would imply a substantial deconstruction of public schools. But they don’t say it that way. All they say is religious families should get funding for religious education.

You have to leave it to experts on budgets and experts on public education to say, “Wait a minute. States can’t afford to stand up two sectors of education.” So if we’re going to have mandatory vouchers in every state as a fundamental religious freedom exercise, then you are really talking about a complete redesign of what schooling in America is.

Isn’t the recent legislation in Ohio, as related in a ProPublica story, that gives taxpayer money directly to private religious schools for new buildings, the realization of that column that Betsy DeVos was writing? I mean, it’s just a direct transfer of dollars.

Yes. They (Ohio) had $16 million in grants, so they kind of just steered it over during the budget process, and it wasn’t until after the fact, it figured out what it was for. I mean, you see that kind of stuff all the time in our budget process, but not for private school construction.

For those of us who’ve been working in this space for a while, the butts in seats problem for private providers has always been an issue for them. It’s actually the reason why the voucher academic results are so dreadful when these things came to scale at a statewide level, because in the early days when all of us who are working on these research teams evaluating them for states and cities, you’d get six or seven private schools of a decent quality to participate. It’s a very normal part of the social science, including an education to get participant schools. They’ll say, okay. We’ll admit some students. We’ll study it. We’ll be partners with you with this work. But just necessarily, the schools that agree to do that kind of thing are just not necessarily representative of what a typical private school might be when you scale this thing out. You’re talking about hundreds of schools and thousands of children using these vouchers, that’s where you start to get these subprime schools, but they’re financially distressed. They’re not very good. They’re often run out of church basements or double wides on church grounds in certain areas of the community. It’s just a very different kind of environment than I think the stereotype of a private school is. And so what’s going on is the other side on this understands that at some point, there’s a capacity problem. If the goal here is really to divert lots and lots of money to Christian schools, you can put as much money in a general fund budget as you want for vouchers. But if you’re kid doesn’t have anywhere to spend it, they’ve understood this to be a design problem for a while. And so the answer is, let’s try to fund private schools directly. That’s where they run into, even now, some thorny constitutional issues. That’s why the ProPublica story is kind of a big deal. They just haven’t tried this before, and now they are.

Michigan Advance is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Michigan Advance maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Susan J. Demas for questions: info@michiganadvance.com. Follow Michigan Advance on Facebook and X.

A Christian Nationalist attempt at undermining public education as we know it?

Jon King, Michigan Advance
September 29, 2024 

Students (Shutterstock)

This is the second part of a discussion with Josh Cowen, a professor of education policy at Michigan State University about his new book “The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers.” Part one of the interview was published on Thursday.

The effort to get school vouchers approved nationwide has a long and varied history, but Cowen’s book posits that it is essentially a Christian Nationalist attempt at undermining public education as we know it.

Cowen, whose career as an education researcher in the early 2000s began with the expectation that vouchers, which allow public tax dollars for education to be spent for private school tuition, would ultimately benefit students. However, the reality that Cowen documents in the book turned out to be almost the exact opposite.

Starting in the immediate aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision which ordered an end to segregated public education, and ending with the rise of the conservative Moms for Liberty – a vocal opponent of LGBTQ+ rights – and Project 2025, an authoritarian blueprint offering detailed plans to broadly enhance executive authority during a second Trump term, Cowen describes the arc of the voucher movement as never being far removed from bigotry and intolerance, whether it be against Blacks or the LGBTQ+ community.

More importantly, however, Cowen describes in detail the academic framework, whether through universities or conservative-funded think tanks, that provides intellectual cover for the movement.
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What follows is the second part of the conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity. Advance questions are in bold, and Cowen’s responses are in regular type.

——————————

Obviously, what happens in November will say a lot about the future of this movement. In your book, you talk about how, in a certain sense, the Trump presidency saved this movement. It came along and revived it when it needed it most. The scores (from school voucher programs) were in. They were down. The statistics were not adding up, and now it’s given it this political boost. Where does it go from here?


Kevin Roberts, the head of the Heritage Foundation throughout Project 2025 was asked “What happens if you guys lose?” and he sort of said, “Well, there’s going to be a Project 2028 then. We’re going to keep going.” I’m not a political strategist. I don’t know that I can tie the future of this thing entirely to the election, but I both agree and acknowledge in the book that what Trump did and the reason it does depend in the short run on what happens in November is it takes something incredibly distracting, and I would argue controversial and sensational or sensationalized, to distract from the magnitude of the voucher-induced (testing) declines over the last decade. How many articles have you seen or maybe written yourself on COVID learning loss? We’re talking about something that is severe for reasons that I think researchers understand, but when you have vouchers in a state, it’s not as talked about. I just can’t imagine in a world of George W. Bush, for example, who signed the first federal voucher system into law. If that thing had just consistently rolled out the negative results that happened a decade after Bush left office, it’s really hard to imagine a world that would be found acceptable, until you walk into the world Trump made where these voucher results are coming out at the same time as Charlottesville, as George Floyd, all of these incredibly sensational moments in American politics. And then you have election denial.

You have kind of 30% or 40% of the American public just refusing to acknowledge what happened on January 6th and that Trump even lost in 2020. And so then when you put it in terms of J6 or election denial, and the reason I do it in the book is because they share some of the same organizations. But if you just think about it culturally, you compare negative school voucher results to something like that. I think negative school voucher results, however dreadful, begin to look a little technical and a little…

As if data doesn’t matter anymore?


Exactly. I say this not to be flippant or snarky, but what’s the point of debating data and evidence with folks who just say, “Trump won in 2020, Trump won.” It did not happen. And so you really are in a world where we’re even debating what reality is and it sounds a little farfetched, but this is really the world we’re in.

And it took that to offset and to give fuel and energy to the voucher push. In a real practical sense too, it’s important to remember that the Supreme Court plays a very big role in this, and Trump did appoint three Supreme Court justices who really have paved the way in the judiciary for vouchers in just the same way they they paved the way for for a rollback to Roe vs. Wade, the same week actually. So, there’s the kind of the cultural political moment Trump made, and then there’s just a very hard cold reality that three Supreme Court justices were added to the judiciary under Trump. And in a 6-3 vote, they crossed a bridge that the original court, 5-4 in 2002, was unwilling to cross, which is that now vouchers can pay for religious education per se and not just be used as payment to providers of a type of service.

Michigan doesn’t have vouchers, but I don’t know how many different private organizations the state partners with to deliver a service as a vendor. And what the court said in 2002 was that private schools are not necessarily exempt from that type of relationship just because they’re schools. You just can’t use it for indoctrination or proselytizing. But that’s basically exactly what today’s version of the court in 2002 said could happen. So there’s the cultural political stuff Trump made, and then there’s just the very cold hard reality that the justices also have really paved the way over the last 4 years.


But even with this disdain toward data, it can’t be denied that learning losses from voucher systems are far greater than COVID learning loss, correct? Groups like Moms for Liberty, in a sense, were born out of the idea of student learning loss due to COVID restrictions.

Exactly, and when Betsy DeVos was an elected official, she had to comment on this. It’s a lot different when you’re back in Ada, Michigan, and you can just tweet out something. But she’s on record. They couldn’t just ignore it. At the national level, they all understand these things existed, which is why the strategy pivoted to more culture war stuff while blaming kind of the old bugaboo of government regulation. While charter schools are really a different thing, if the charter transparency push in Michigan ever gets back off the ground, you’re going to hear this from the charter groups themselves about overregulation. “It’s going to have a chilling effect on our schools to have the state asking us how the dollars are being spent.” This is just the theory of action that the DeVos folks came up with to explain away the negative results. But what’s important for our conversation is that they didn’t deny the results existed. They couldn’t. Some of them were too stark and too well publicized.

(Note: A request for comment was made to Betsy Devos through the Dick and Betsy DeVos Family Foundation, but was not returned.)


You mentioned charter schools, which are public schools, although as you said, they’re a different animal than a voucher system. But they do represent another option for parents to make in terms of traditional public schools. So, where does parent choice fit in? Where should it fit in, in your mind?

Well, if you talk to Heritage or one of these guys, they’ll call me a school choice critic, which I emphatically reject. There are many of us that support certain types of charter schools. In Michigan one in four Michigan kids goes to school in a school of choice either through schools of choice, our inter-district choice system or charter schools themselves. There are 150,000 Michigan kids in charter schools today. I have some real reservations or problems with the way our charter school sector is structured, which is mostly run by for-profit managers. It concerns the teacher protections that are in those environments, teacher pay, and things. But the evidence in favor of some charter schools in other states is undeniable, and nothing like that positive evidence for charter schools really exists in the voucher research literature. And conversely, nothing like the negative voucher results exists in the charter school literature. They’re not only structurally different. The evidence based behind them is different too, but sometimes you do get these things lumped together because, in my view, the voucher folks are just trying to piggyback off of successful charter schools.

Even in our state here today, you’ll see (charter and voucher advocates say) “Michigan kids deserve more school choice.” I wrote a piece on this a couple of years ago in the Detroit News where I said we have choice, there’s a lot of choice. All they want is private school tuition covered. And you see some of the ancillary debates right now. Our universal school meals program in the state; there have been a couple of different reports on private schools in our state wanting to cash in on that too. And so I think it’s important that the nuance behind some types of choices is really important to this conversation because as you point out, charter schools are public schools. And not only that, but there’s just a substantially far greater sort of research base behind them. However, what there isn’t is a restriction in choice.

The book brings it full circle, starting with Brown v Board, ending with Moms for Liberty and Project 2025, and seeing this cycle. What do you hope to see happen from here?

I mean, at the end of the day, what I hope to see happen is an understanding that this is not really about fundamentally improving education outcomes for the vast majority of people. This is a separatist movement in American education, trying to take dollars to separate, isolate out into cordoned off spaces based on what they call religious values. I would say it’s Christian nationalism. I think others would would say so too.

I think at some point when this moment has passed in American politics, I would hope that there is a renewed effort to make improvements in public schools. There needs to be reinvestment. There needs to be a rethinking of some of the structure, some of the design, some of the curriculum. You know, there’s debates in our state about literacy. I strongly support new efforts to improve dyslexia education in our state, which does set me apart from some of the public school groups.


We have to have honest conversations about where public schools need to improve, but where those conversations can’t go, in my view, is toward a direction where the solution is taxpayer funding for this religious separatist movement in American education, where we’re just going to give people who are giving up on public schools community investment money to go learn in church schools. That’s not the answer. Folks can go learn in church schools if they want to, but if we’re at a point where we’re sending taxpayer dollars for that, I think it’s a fundamentally different vision of what American education is.

Michigan Advance is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Michigan Advance maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Susan J. Demas for questions info@michiganadvance.com. 

Inside the ‘religious separatist movement in American education’

Jon King, Michigan Advance
September 28, 2024 

Desks in an empty elementary school classroom (Shutterstock.com)

The effort to get school vouchers approved nationwide has a long and varied history, but a book released this month posits that it is essentially a Christian Nationalist attempt at undermining public education as we know it.

That’s the conclusion of “The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers,” by Josh Cowen, a professor of education policy at Michigan State University.

Cowen, whose career as an education researcher in the early 2000s began with the expectation that vouchers, which allow public tax dollars for education to be spent for private school tuition, would ultimately benefit students. However, the reality that Cowen documents in the book turned out to be almost the exact opposite.

Starting in the immediate aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision which ordered an end to segregated public education, and ending with the rise of the conservative Moms for Liberty – a vocal opponent of LGBTQ+ rights – and Project 2025, an authoritarian blueprint offering detailed plans to broadly enhance executive authority during a second Trump term, Cowen describes the arc of the voucher movement as never being far removed from bigotry and intolerance, whether it be against Blacks or the LGBTQ+ community.

More importantly, however, Cowen describes in detail the academic framework, whether through universities or conservative-funded think tanks, that provides intellectual cover for the movement.

Chief among them was Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Freidman, considered by many to have “launched the modern school choice movement,” with his 1955 essay, “The Role of Government in Education.”

Friedman, who extolled the virtues of a free market system with minimal government intervention, especially in social areas such as education, wrote that while government financing of education was justified, “the administration of schools is neither required by the financing of education, nor justifiable in its own right in a predominantly free enterprise society.”

Cowen writes that in the aftermath of the Brown decision, Friedman “spoke at Southern conferences paid for by conservative donors, where his lecture notes affirmed his published work by arguing that the ‘appropriate solution’ to tensions rising from integration mandates was a ‘privately operated school system with parent choice of schools.’”

From that setting, Cowen details the decades-long battle about the role of public education, a battle that is no less fierce now than it was in 1954.

Michigan Advance had an opportunity to speak with Cowen at length about the book and its conclusions and is presenting that discussion in two parts. What follows is a conversation that has been edited for length and clarity. Advance questions are in bold, and Cowen’s responses are in regular type.

——————————

Why is understanding who Milton Friedman was so essential to understanding the modern day voucher movement?


There’s this intellectual political history debate about whether Friedman himself was a segregationist, and I sort of alluded to it in the book. It’s not really all that important. What is important is that segregation very quickly latched on to the Friedman idea. And the editors (of Friedman’s essay) understood it to be from the beginning a potential race-neutral way to avoid Brown.

He would go on to win a Nobel Prize 20 years later, worked for (President Ronald) Reagan, advised (Dictator Augusto) Pinochet in the Chilean regime. I mean, this guy was everywhere. He’s still something of a hero among the libertarians. But he’s someone whose ideas did kind of give intellectual heft to conservative public policy.

There were some Southern states in particular that jumped on this idea. Some successfully proposed small voucher systems in the ‘50s, and some didn’t quite have the votes. But you fast forward to when the first real modern voucher system gets off the ground (Milwaukee in 1990), and in a way, none of the sort of Friedman stuff was nearly as relevant at that time as it really is today, again just because of how much (voucher advocates) believe parents really should have the right to separate their kids out from what they think is going on in public schools.


In the ‘50s, it was race. And now it’s sort of race. I mean, the CRT business and the DEI business and gender ideology is in Trump 47 (the Trump campaign’s official policy proposals) and in Project 2025. So, the underlying act of vouchers is separating kids out from the public school because parents don’t like what’s going on in public school.

Starting with Milwaukee in 1990, those original voucher projects were set up so that they were going to be highly analyzed, that there would be strong data, and the expectation was that it would show student improvement, and yet, ultimately, they did not.

Exactly. The original 1990 evaluation that (Wisconsin) sort of obligated itself to when it passed the program, it just didn’t show the overwhelmingly positive results people expected, which is I think why in some sense, the conservative voucher advocates got involved in this so heavily and aggressively. What it was about was whether or not this long-time conservative pipe dream actually works or not. And then the fight sort of sustained itself for 10 years and we’re kind of back in it again.


There were some sort of gently positive results. I kind of concede that there were a handful of positive studies from that era, although at this point, they’re now almost two decades old. But what else was going on in the ‘90s and in the early 2000s was the era of more public school accountability, transparency, standards-based reform in both from the Clinton years and the George W. Bush years. No Child Left Behind was signed by George W. Bush in 2002.

They really believed in these three- to five-year long, open independent evaluations. They just have never really shown what these guys wanted. The argument of the book is not only did vouchers kind of fail to deliver in their own right, but they’ve actually had some unprecedented declines in student achievement.

That’s where you start to see these things kind of return back to. I mean, the reason I opened the book with the ‘50s stuff is this is where you really have to go back to the ‘50s to get that the language that’s used again in today’s debate, because it was not part of the ‘90s, and it was not part of the early 2000s. People like Ken Starr would sort of trump parents’ rights out there from time to time, but they still believed these things would move the needle on academics and test scores. It really wasn’t until recently where they stopped making that argument. For the most part, it’s much more about woke ideology and CRT and where people go to the bathroom and all that business.


In the book you say that as the data really turns negative, it almost cannot be dismissed any longer. It can’t be explained away. That’s where the shift in this approach comes in. Trump’s secretary of education, Betsy DeVos, who is featured prominently in your book, was involved in this long before she became the secretary of education.

Most of us, I think, are fairly well aware of Betsy DeVos and the DeVos family influence in Michigan, but it’s really hard to overstate how influential the DeVos’ have been in national conservative Republican politics for decades. It’s not just here (in Michigan). It’s the Heritage Foundation. It’s focused on the Family Research Council. There’s a DeVos Center For Religion and Family Life at Heritage. A number of the Project 2025 authors have their roots back in some of these big DeVos groups that date back to not just Betsy, but the first generation of Richard and Helen (DeVos). So, their larger goal as a family is much more sort of recentering this vision of Christianity into American life and American public policy, and I don’t think that’s a statement any of that side would disagree with.

When Betsy DeVos became the nominee for education secretary, these old comments that she’d made (reemerged) about seeing school choices advancing God’s kingdom and lamenting the fact that public schools are kind of the community centers. She wants churches to be back in the community center. The phrase Christians would would use, and I count myself among Christians, is as a mission field. I mean, the (DeVos) family has always seen public policy as a mission field for their faith. And vouchers is one area where they’ve been very, very focused of late out of Michigan, but from time to time here as well.


(Note: A request for comment was made to Betsy Devos through the Dick and Betsy DeVos Family Foundation, but was not returned.)

But this Christian-based view of public education, it’s really Christian nationalism is it not?

Yes. That is driving this.


Is the voucher movement’s ultimate goal, as personified by people like Betsy DeVos and the Koch brothers, really just an undercover way to destroy public education?

I think that’s right. I think in the short term, and certainly in the years that I was active working as an evaluator of the space and some of the early programs I write about in the book, they were just trying to get some of the stuff off the ground. I do think there’s been much more of a scorched earth take now where they’re going much harder with this sort of Christopher Rufo era, the JD Vance era, Trump himself era. It’s much more aggressive in terms of just going right at public schools. It’s not something you saw earlier in the ‘90s and in the early 2000s when it was sort of a much more mainstream conservative policy.

But that kind of describes the entire trend right now in American politics, right? This is not the party of George W. Bush anymore. It’s not the party of Mitt Romney anymore. It’s the party of Vance and Trump, and we’re having debates about Haitian immigrants and cats in Springfield, Ohio right now. (Note: The racist, discredited lie that Haitian residents in Springfield have eaten pets has been spread by the Trump campaign despite being repeatedly debunked.) It’s just a different time. And I think the voucher movement has really just sort of hooked itself to that energy and that aggression. I mean, vouchers are two of the first three paragraphs in the education chapter of Project 2025. They need to package that with everything else that’s in that 900 pages. It’s pretty fringe and extreme stuff. And I think the quiet part out loud piece of it is, they’re much more willing to go at public schools in general now as opposed to “not representing parents’ values” or “captured by the teachers’ unions.” You’d hear this from time to time, especially the union piece 20 years ago, but it’s nothing like today. And so I think when Betsy DeVos left office, and I quote this this column of hers in the book, but in that last few months of her in office, she wrote a piece for USA Today where she basically said “What we want to do next as we leave, and that’s long term, we want a Supreme Court case that’s going to throw out all the remaining Blaine Amendments and get mandatory vouchers in every state.”


I think those of us who understand school finances, those of us who understand how public school pay budgets work, understand that would imply a substantial deconstruction of public schools. But they don’t say it that way. All they say is religious families should get funding for religious education.

You have to leave it to experts on budgets and experts on public education to say, “Wait a minute. States can’t afford to stand up two sectors of education.” So if we’re going to have mandatory vouchers in every state as a fundamental religious freedom exercise, then you are really talking about a complete redesign of what schooling in America is.

Isn’t the recent legislation in Ohio, as related in a ProPublica story, that gives taxpayer money directly to private religious schools for new buildings, the realization of that column that Betsy DeVos was writing? I mean, it’s just a direct transfer of dollars.

Yes. They (Ohio) had $16 million in grants, so they kind of just steered it over during the budget process, and it wasn’t until after the fact, it figured out what it was for. I mean, you see that kind of stuff all the time in our budget process, but not for private school construction.

For those of us who’ve been working in this space for a while, the butts in seats problem for private providers has always been an issue for them. It’s actually the reason why the voucher academic results are so dreadful when these things came to scale at a statewide level, because in the early days when all of us who are working on these research teams evaluating them for states and cities, you’d get six or seven private schools of a decent quality to participate. It’s a very normal part of the social science, including an education to get participant schools. They’ll say, okay. We’ll admit some students. We’ll study it. We’ll be partners with you with this work. But just necessarily, the schools that agree to do that kind of thing are just not necessarily representative of what a typical private school might be when you scale this thing out. You’re talking about hundreds of schools and thousands of children using these vouchers, that’s where you start to get these subprime schools, but they’re financially distressed. They’re not very good. They’re often run out of church basements or double wides on church grounds in certain areas of the community. It’s just a very different kind of environment than I think the stereotype of a private school is. And so what’s going on is the other side on this understands that at some point, there’s a capacity problem. If the goal here is really to divert lots and lots of money to Christian schools, you can put as much money in a general fund budget as you want for vouchers. But if you’re kid doesn’t have anywhere to spend it, they’ve understood this to be a design problem for a while. And so the answer is, let’s try to fund private schools directly. That’s where they run into, even now, some thorny constitutional issues. That’s why the ProPublica story is kind of a big deal. They just haven’t tried this before, and now they are.

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