Why have #schoolvouchers programs persisted and expanded despite a more lopsided base of objective evidence against them than nearly any other current #edpolicy #education initiative?
A few reasons 🧵🪡
1/
First is that today #schoolvouchers activists are directly part of the larger #trump-style revanchist and anti-democratic turn in American politics since Obama’s second term.
Politically their success is intertwined.
2/
But as a policy matter too we see #schoolvouchers linger around even as #education research has tried to place itself in an #evidencebased position to inform policy.
If evidence were all that informed #edpolicy then vouchers would have been dead a decade ago.
3/
There are plenty of political progressives in #education #research that see the same data I do and still give #schoolvouchers a break in ways almost no other programs get.
I think this is partly because the intellectual root for vouchers comes from #economics
4/
And quantitative #edpolicy researchers are overly susceptible to Econ theory (even bad theory like Friedman) as they mostly borrow metrics.
An #economics link is seen by some as code for “rigor.” As if mathematical elegance is the same thing as empirically grounded.
5/
That willingness to assume “mixed” results when really they’re pretty one-sided against #schoolvouchers—especially over the last decade—becomes a vacuum that activists fill with their own “studies.” But mostly promises.
That in turn affects media coverage and public debate.
6/
Mostly I think it comes down to decades of withering attacks on #publiceducation and the false promises plans like #schoolvouchers sell.
#Publicschools are so ingrained with American society that they’re like a family member we love but are so close we see their flaws…
7/
Those flaws provide enough fertile ground for extremists to sow doubts and pitch a seemingly hot new alternative—except this #schoolvouchers paramour will leave you desperate and broke.
8/
The reality is #schoolvouchers/privatization are simply updates of old anti-governmental schemes dating back to massive resistance to civil rights in the 50s/60s: ideas that leverage both latent and apparent white affluent desire for separateness.
With one new pathetic twist:
9/
That twist is exploiting parent-investors who imagine themselves better off in a speculator’s Edu-market than what a public good can provide. Like giving up defined benefits for wildly unstable crypto-markets.
#SchoolVouchers
10/
That’s it in a nutshell. #schoolvouchers persist because they fuse older anti-government, Christian-nationalist social ideas with a new crypto-bro mentality that everyone is better off on their own—and taxpayer $$ for #publiceducation are just there to loot and hoard.
11/11
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