By Thomas Ultican 5/4/5026
‘The 74’ was created by billionaires in 2015 to accelerate privatizing public education. Lately, they have been buying established media with excellent reputations. These acquired media of course do not exclusively concentrated on education like ‘The 74’ but they do cover it. Last November, former Secretary of Education Arne Duncan joined Democrats for Education Reform (DEFR) President, Jorge Elorza, to write an opinion piece in multi-billionaire Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post. It promoted Trump’s new voucher program and on April 30th, ‘The 74’ carried an interview with Duncan also promoting that same legislation.
In the last 100 years, the two main groups championing vouchers are the super wealthy and racists not wanting their children in school with “those people.” The late John Walton of the Walmart clan — the richest family in the world — campaigned continuously for vouchers but every time he got them on a ballot the public rejected them. Vouchers have still never won a public vote. After Brown vs the board of education in 1954, southern states enacted vouchers to create schools for white kids only.
In 2025, the most corrupt President in the history of the United States pushed through his “Big Ugly Bill.” Its tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans are paid for by reducing social services and significantly lowering support for medical costs. Lurking in the bill was also the Heritage foundation’s attack on public education know as “tax-credit scholarships.” It is the first ever federal education voucher program which led Betty Pringle, President of the National Education Association, to declare, “This bill will devastate our schools and communities—all to finance massive tax breaks for the ultra-wealthy.”
Sadly, America truly has become the land of billionaires against workers.
Voucher Support is NOT about Better Education
In a Time magazine article, Professor Josh Cowen wrote:
“Although small, pilot-phase programs showed some promise two decades ago, new evaluations of vouchers in Washington, D.C., Indiana, Louisiana, and Ohio show some of the largest test score drops ever seen in the research record—between -0.15 and -0.50 standard deviations of learning loss. That’s on par with what the COVID-19 pandemic did to test scores, and larger than Hurricane Katrina’s impacts on academics in New Orleans.”
In a lame attempt to refute this data, Corey DeAngelis of the University of Arkansas complained that the Indiana study was non-experimental, as it compared voucher students to those remaining in traditional public schools. Because of the difficulties in creating experimentally designed voucher studies only the DC study was experimental and it is not likely to be repeated.
In looking at the DC voucher study, the Center for American Progress published “The Highly Negative Impacts of Vouchers” by Ulrich Boser, Meg Benner, and Erin Roth. The Introduction to their study states:
“How bad are school vouchers for students? Far worse than most people imagine. Indeed, according to the analysis conducted by the authors of this report, the use of school vouchers! — which provide families with public dollars to spend on private schools! — is equivalent to missing out on more than one-third of a year of classroom learning. In other words, this analysis found that the overall effect of the D.C. voucher program on students is the same as missing 68 days of school.”
Clearly, public policy supporting vouchers to improve education is untenable. So why are billionaires like Trump, DeVos, Koch, Dunn, and others campaigning to institute education vouchers? Koch and Trump seem to believe that they should not pay taxes in support of people who need to pay their own way and see vouchers as a path to ending publicly supported schools. People like DeVos and Dunn are Christian nationalists who believe America belongs to Christians and non-Christian are not real Americans. To them, public education is a non-Christian religion competing with Christianity.
Selling Rich Guy Propaganda
In March, Arne Duncan signed on as a senior fellow for DEFR and claims to have been on four or five panels at the annual ASU+GSV conference. The ASU+GSV yearly gathering is where titans of the digital universe gather to discuss how to end public schools and replace them with “Skills-Based Credentialing.” Forbes magazine called the conference “the Davos of Education.” They are calling for replacing grade level classes by putting children and also adults at computer screens earning credentials as America’s primary mode of education.
In her book Slaying Goliath Diane Ravitch described the formation of DFER:
“In 2005, several hedge fund managers – Witney Tilson, Ravenel Boykin Curry IV, John Petry and Charles Ledley – launched Democrats for Education Reform at a posh party on Central Park South in Manhattan, where the inaugural speaker was a young senator from Illinois named Barack Obama. DEFR, as it is deceptively called, was founded to support school privatization by making strategic campaign contributions. Inspired by DFER, charter schools became the pet passion of Wall Street.” (Page 38)
As a new fellow at DEFR, Arne Duncan is still selling the spoiled milk of his days as Obama’s Secretary of Education. When George W. Bush made test-based accountability central to evaluating the nation’s schools plus narrowed their scope to math and English, the consequences were the destruction of wonderful schools in poor communities. Despite the growing evidence that test-based accountability was harming public education, Duncan became a big proponent of evaluating school with standardized testing. Today, that is still the method he uses to judge schools.
His argument for why Democrats should embrace Trump’s voucher program is based primarily on the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) testing declines since 2013. Duncan says, “You saw last year’s NAEP results, which were devastating, but I just don’t see the sense of urgency out there.” It is not in his economic interest to notice that the first few years of testing saw dramatic growth in scores as schools learned to take the exams and then hit a pinnacle during his leadership. As the narrow and punish theory of education was enhanced, as he pushed education technology and as the science of reading was supported by billionaires, NAEP scores started slowly declining.
The 2024 NAEP results are nothing to celebrate but certainly are not a crisis. Since the 2019 testing window, all schools experienced a major COVID-19 disruption and in its aftermath a serious spate of absenteeism arose. Even Duncan noted, “I think the chronic absenteeism rate in Chicago is 41%; just think of four out of 10 kids missing a month or more of school every year!” Since the 2013 all-time high average NAEP scores for 4th grade reading of 222, the average score has dropped to 215 or by 7 points. Likewise, 4th grade math average has dropped 5 points, 8th grade reading has dropped 10 points and 8th grade math dropped 11 points.
With average scores of well over 200 points, these drops are not large but do seem to indicate a problem. However, many people believe standardized testing is not actually useful for measuring learning because of the large amount of error inherent in education testing. The only known factor well correlated to NAEP outcomes is family income, the wealthier the family, the higher the score. Duncan’s claim that the latest NAEP testing results are “devastating” is laughable.
Opinion
Almost 20 years ago, Rupert Murdock noted, “When it comes to K through 12 education, we see a $500 billion sector in the US alone …” For more than thirty years, extremely wealthy people after those billions of education dollars have been spending to privatize and undermine public education. They have created phony think tanks, graduate schools and education media. Vouchers are a major tool for destroying the public system. Vouchers remove funds from public schools and the authors of voucher-legislation work to insure they are given as little oversight as possible. Billionaires like the President of the United States do not care about people not in their social circles. They are what Minnesota Governor Tim Walz calls, “greedy bastards.”
tultican 
Recent Comments