Tag Archives: Josh Cowen

Crazy-Pants Makes Crazy Prediction

19 Nov

By Thomas Ultican 11/18/2025

A propaganda rag, ‘The 74’, reported, “[R]esearch from Stanford estimates learning loss over the past decade has cost our country over $90 trillion in future growth.” The article was written by Eric Hanushek, a Stanford University economist, and Christy Hovanetz, an education researcher from Jeb Bush’s pro-school choice and pro-education technology organization, ExcelinEd. Unsurprisingly, the article linked above is a paper Hanushek wrote. Crazy-pants Eric has a long history of using his own papers to support new research which is typically long on assertions and short on convincing analysis.

Last year, he claimed COVID-19 “learning-loss” could cost America $31 trillion in future economic development. Hanushek’s latest paper asserts, “The present value of future lost growth would be approximately three times current GDP (which is $30 trillion).” The justification for this new assertion is more than uncertain. The new paper refers to a model from his 2011 paper written with Ludger Woessmann­ for the Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development. That paper was long on Arithmetic with several assumptions short on common sense. In his latest paper and this article, he is claiming that a small drop in the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) scores added to what he calls “Covid learning loss” will cost America $90 trillion in future growth.

Eric Hanushek first gained notoriety with his 1981 paper, claiming “there is no relationship between expenditures and the achievement of students and that such traditional remedies as reducing class sizes or hiring better trained teachers are unlikely to improve matters.” This claim attracted conservative billionaires but had little relationship with reality. When providing solutions in ‘The 74’, Hanushek and Hovenetz contradict his 1981 paper writing:

“First, states need to invest in effective personnel. They can do this by incentivizing strong teaching and by supporting strong teaching through professional development in evidence-based practices such as use of high-quality instructional materials and assessment data to inform instruction.”

A few decades ago, a friend gifted me the book “An Incomplete Education” by Judy Jones and William Wilson. After my 1987 edition, Jones and Wilson have updated the book and republished several times. I fondly remembered their description of economists:

“Economists are fond of saying, with Thomas Carlyle, that economics is ‘the dismal science.’ As with much that economists say, this statement is half true. It is dismal.”

“Where once rulers relied on oracles to predict the future, today they use economists. Virtually every elected official, every political candidate, has a favorite economist to forecast economic benefits pinned to that official or candidate’s views.” (Incomplete Page 120)

It just so-happens that Eric Hanushek is an MIT trained economist who is good at creating reports that conform to the beliefs of conservative billionaires. His work is scientific propaganda masquerading as academic excellence.

Notices from Hanushek and Hovanetz

“No single event over the postwar period has had an impact on our educational system that comes close to that of the pandemic.” This statement from their article is hyperbole not fact.

The impact of vouchers in Washington DC and Ohio were worse than COVID-19. In his book, “The Privateers”, Josh Cowen shared that the losses due to COVID-19 were around -0.25 standard deviations while losses in DC due to vouchers were around -0.40 standard deviations and in Ohio they were as high as -0.50 standard deviations. (Privateers Page 6) However, these were not nationwide results. Unfortunately, we don’t have much information about the mumps, measles, flu and polio epidemics of the 1950s but there is every reason to believe their impact was close to that of the COVID-19 epidemic.

The authors hold up Mississippi, Tennessee and Louisiana as examples to emulate stating:

“Some states made noteworthy progress on NAEP this year: Mississippi, Louisiana and Tennessee. Each has a track record of high expectations and strong accountability.

“These states use an A–F school rating system that puts reading and math achievement front and center. They measure what matters — proficiency and growth — and they report results in a way families and educators can understand. Transparency and rigor are fueling their progress.”

The A—F school ratings system is worthless because it only measures parent income. As Diane Ravitch wrote on her blog:

“The highest rated schools have students with the highest income. The lowest rated schools have students with the lowest income.”

I wondered what Hanushek and friend were alluding to, so I graphed the average NAEP data for 4th and 8th grade reading and math since 2015 to see if it provided a clue.

NAEP Data for Louisiana, Mississippi and Tennessee

I added a bar indicating the NAEP cut scores for the 2024 NAEP designations of basic, proficient and advanced as a reference. It is well known that NAEP’s proficiency level is set well above grade level which means 70% of students not being rated proficient is not a bad score. Furthermore, writing in Forbes, Peter Greene shared, “An NCES report back in 2007 showed that while NAEP considers “basic” students not college ready, 50% of those basic students had gone on to earn a degree.”

The data graphed here indicates to me that all three states have solid public education programs. It is noteworthy that in reading their 4th graders only averaged basic but by 8th grade their average results were above basic. However, all three states are among the bottom 15 scoring states in the US and as we would expect are in the bottom 15 states in family income. What I do not see is why they are held out by Hanushek and Hovanetz as exemplars.

Concluding Remarks

The first blogger to label Eric Hanushek crazy-pants was Peter Greene. I have found Peter’s creativity worth stealing.

Let’s be clear, there is no such thing as “learning loss” involving students. This is a complete misnomer. Students may not achieve some state provided targets but they are always learning; maybe not what we want them to learn but always learning.

Eric Hanushek is a huckster for conservative billionaires. This latest claim is beyond farcical. Claiming to have knowledge of economic development in 40 years is fantasy and then tying that fantasy to NAEP testing data is bizarre. His $90 trillion claim for loss of future economic development would embarrass a carnival barker.

Hanushek is the guy who thinks education can be measured in days of learning which means that students learn in a near linear fashion. They absolutely do not but even this bogus claim would seem prescient when compared to this latest assertion.

Standardized testing only correlates with family income. To evaluate education based on this fictitious instrument is fraudulent. By extension, this makes economist Eric Hanushek a con artist.

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Promoting Vouchers to Destroy Public Education

15 May

By Thomas Ultican 5/15/2025

It is clear that the motive for financing voucher adoption has never been about improved education or democratic principles. Pro-voucher billionaires are using their stolen opulence to end taxpayer funded education for all. Vouchers are their most effective tool in this venture.

The latest mania is a wild scheme to give parents bank accounts from which to pay for their children’s education. These so called education savings accounts (ESA) are not really vouchers. They just directly transfer public money to private citizens while shunning accountability measures.

What could possibly go wrong?

ESAs used to be systems like the Coverdell ESA or the 529 tax advantaged plans where a parent put money in an account for their child’s higher education. Today, ESAs are states giving money directly to individuals and telling them to use it to educate their children almost any way they see fit. Wealthy people, who send their children to private schools, now get a nice chunk of change from the state.

Writing in the billionaire funded education propaganda channel, The 74, Jeb Bush is ecstatic about the new ESA voucher program just arm twisted into existence by the Texas governor. Bush declares:

“After decades of debating private school choice, Texas has delivered a monumental victory for its students and families. With the passage of a $1 billion education savings account (ESA) program, Texas joins a growing list of states giving parents real power to customize their children’s education. But this is more than just a win for Texas families — it is a moment of national significance that can reshape how ESA programs work across the country.”

All of the hyperlinks, in Bush’s declaration, are to former articles from The 74 pushing school privatization.

Abbott Lying to Texans about Vouchers

Why is it that when given a chance to vote on vouchers, people always vote against these “monumental” victories? Before billionaires destroyed their political careers, even Republican politicians from rural Texas opposed vouchers. They could see that the only winners would be wealthy people in cities like Dallas. Where rural people live, there were no privates schools to take vouchers. The ESA scheme transfers wealth from rural areas to urban areas by underfunding public education to pay for vouchers.

The Economic Policy Institute reported in 2023, “An analysis of voucher programs in seven states found an unmistakable trend of decreased funding for public schools as a result of voucher expansion.”

Texas Can Expect a Fraud Fest

The right-wing Texas Policy Research champions ESAs and informs:

“Education Savings Accounts (ESAs) represent a more flexible alternative to vouchers. Instead of directing public funds solely toward private school tuition, ESAs allow parents to use the money for a variety of educational expenses. ESAs function like a debit account that parents can use to pay for tuition as well as other approved education-related costs, such as tutoring, online courses, special education services, and homeschooling resources.”

There are two big problems with this approach. Instead of the school, private or public, managing their child’s education now parents who normally have no training or expertise in education must do it. Secondly, handing out money to thousands of parents for their children’s education is a giant management problem. Fraud and abuse are guaranteed.

In February, two Phoenix men 21 and 20 years-old were convicted of voucher fraud. They pleaded guilty to money laundering, agreed to pay $196,526.33 in restitution and were given supervised probation. 

Two Colorado residents, Bowers and Hewitt, were recently indicted for submitting fraudulent applications for 43 “ghost” children.

Just over a year ago, three employees of the Arizona Department of Education and two others were indicted for fraud, conspiracy, computer tampering, illegally conducting an enterprise, money laundering and forgery related to the ESA Program.

The defendants approved ESA applications for minor students, both real and fictitious, and admitted them into the program by using false, forged or fraudulent documentation such as fake birth certificates, and falsified special education evaluations. The defendants approved and funded these fictitious student’ ESA accounts and expenses for reimbursement which went to their own benefit.

Save Our Schools Arizona summarized an ABC15 receipts study documenting extravagant ESA spending by parents:

  • $3,400 for one purchase at a golf store
  • $10,000 for one purchase at a sewing machine company 
  • $19,000 for more than 100 passes to Arizona Snowbowl Ski Resort
  • $100,000 for extravagant appliances that freeze dry food which cost $3,000 each
  • $350,000 for “Ninja Warrior” training centers, trampoline parks & climbing gyms
  • $400,000 for trendy, indoor hydroponic tower gardens that cost $1,000 each
  • $1.2 million for martial arts instruction

Save Our Schools Arizona also reported on ESA Director John Ward’s explanation:

“Even a $4000 piano for a single family? Director John Ward explained, ‘These are absolutely allowable. Now, if it was a luxury piano, some type of grand piano, baby grand, we may not approve that as a luxury item.’ So, ‘luxury’ pianos aren’t approved, but what about ‘luxury’ driving lessons in BMWs and Teslas? According to Ward, ‘while you may think this may not be a good use of that family’s ESA funding, at the end of the day, they get a fixed amount of money, and if that’s how they’re going to choose to use it, that’s their prerogative.”’

Most people hope that responsible public servants would not create this kind of unaccountable taxpayer funded system but that is the nature of the ESA voucher scheme. Arizona’s ESA program, which now serves over 70,000 students across the state, is staffed by 32 employees. 

Failed Policy

Josh Cowen writing about vouchers in his book, The Privateers states, “The purpose was and is to do away with schools existing as a core function of democracy and stand up instead a privately held, sectarian, and theocratic version of publicly funded education.” The results with vouchers the past 20-years have been abysmal. From an education policy standpoint, no one would recommend continuing with them.

In February 2017, Kevin Carey’s article in the New York Times was a rude awakening for voucher hawking billionaires. He reported on three voucher studies.

The first was a 2015 voucher study in Indiana that showed significant drops in math results.

This was followed by results from a Louisiana study showing voucher students having huge comparative losses in both English and Math. Carey wrote, “Martin West, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, calls the negative effects in Louisiana ‘as large as any I’ve seen in the literature’ — not just compared with other voucher studies, but in the history of American education research.”

Finally the conservative think tank, Thomas B. Fordham Institute that is a proponent of school choice, did a Walton Family Foundation financed study of a large voucher program in Ohio. They reported, “Students who use vouchers to attend private schools have fared worse academically compared to their closely matched peers attending public schools.”

Reviewing these and other results prompted Professor Cowen to remark, “… the evidence against vouchers is actually overwhelming.”

Conclusion

The only reason vouchers schemes are gaining ground is because billionaires like the Walton Family, Betsy DeVos and Charles Koch are spending lavishly to make it happen. They target Republican politicians, who oppose vouchers, by funding primary challengers. They have created and funded the state policy network (SPN).  Influence Watch reports, “The SPN has close ties to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) with the two organizations sharing many members, and the SPN supporting policies formulated by ALEC and its members.” SPN is a network of 167 conservative and libertarian think tanks throughout the United States and Canada which coordinate efforts to support billionaire policy goals, raise funds, and amplify the influence of its members.

One billionaire policy goal is to end free universal public education.

SPN is an anti-democratic movement created to subvert the will of people. There has never been a voucher program to win an election. Vouchers only occur where Republican politicians can ram them through state legislatures and then fight tooth and nail to keep them off ballots.

The billionaire created voucher movement is harming American students and undermining democracy.

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Network for Public Education Goals

10 Nov

By Thomas Ultican 11/10/2023

Network for Public Education (NPE) issued two agendas at the conclusion of the October Washington DC Conference. NPE Director, Carol Burris, announced, “A Resolution in Support of Community-based Public Education, a Pillar of our Democracy” and Julian Vasquez Heilig, Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs Western Michigan University, put forward “Freedom to Learn,” a kindergarten through university agenda.

Freedom to Learn

Since “A Nation at Risk” in 1983, public education has been under serious attack. In the 21st century, the attacks have become well-financed, deceptive and mean-spirited.

Christopher Rufo became the darling of autocracy with his attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). In 2017, he was working at the Discovery Institute in Seattle, Washington which focuses on intelligent design and opposes Darwinian-based biology. When President Trump decided that DEI training for federal workers was deeply infected with critical race theory, Rufo, now at the rightwing Manhattan Institute, stated on the Tucker Carlson show, “It’s absolutely astonishing how critical race theory has pervaded every institution in the federal government.”

 He trained his sights on public schools, disingenuously claiming they were teaching critical race theory (CRT). Soon CRT became the name for anything bigots did not like. Billionaire-funded think-tanks, Manhattan Institute, Heritage Foundation and CATO Institute beat homophobia drums and blew bigotry trumpets against DEI.

Hostile state legislatures enacted laws that undermined public schools, community colleges and universities. They instituted curriculum bans, eradicated DEI programs and attacked science, as well as public health programs. Laws were passed allowing terrorist groups, like Mom’s for Liberty, to push mindless, censorship agendas while attacking librarians and teachers, branding them as groomers and child molesters. They also cut public school funding while promoting vouchers and other privatization schemes.

Time magazine ran an opinion piece by American Federation of Teachers President, Randi Weingarten, and Stand for Children’s CEO, Jonah Edelman. They observed:

“In a recent lecture at ultra-conservative Hillsdale College, culture war orchestrator Christopher Rufo detailed the strategy for replacing public education with a universal voucher system. ‘To get to universal school choice, you really need to operate from a premise of universal public school distrust,’ Rufo explained. Earlier in that same lecture, describing how to lay siege to institutions, he noted the necessity to create your own narrative and frame and advised his audience they ‘have to be ruthless and brutal.”’ (Emphasis Added)

Interestingly, the closer to the classroom, the better the image of public schools will be. In the 2022 Gallup survey, 84% of the general public rated their district’s public schools as passing. Parents gave them an 89% passing rates while they rated the entire nation at 73%.

The steady drumbeat of attacks on public education, starting with 1983’s “A Nation at Risk,” has harmed peoples’ view of public education but less than one might imagine. 

Professor Heilig introduced three targets:

  1. Promote “freedom to learn and access to education through working with coalition partners to support bills to increase federal and state funding for all levels of public education and protect the freedom to teach and the freedom to research.”
  2. Fight back “against legislative bans on the teaching of U. S. history, science and psychology, and other educational gag orders, and by defending individual educators who face harassment, discipline or termination as a result of these laws.”
  3. Support “efforts to provide more resources to our public schools, colleges and universities and the students who depend on them every day, resisting efforts to defund our preK-12 and higher education systems.”

Community-based Public Education

Carol Burris stated public education is the pillar of democracy and should be based on the common school design originally envisioned by Horace Mann. Public schools teach all who live within their boundaries, “regardless of race, ethnicity, creed, LGBTQ+ status, or learning ability.”

It is taxpayers who bear the responsibility for funding such schools and have the right to examine how tax dollars are used to educate children. Schools should be accountable to community residents who have the right and responsibility to elect those who govern them.

Extreme Instability of Charter Schools from NPE’s Broken Promises

In 2019, Jeff Bryant and Carol Burris co-authored “Asleep at the Wheel,” about the federal Charter School Program (CSP):

“We estimate that program funding has grown to well over $4 billion. That could bring the total of the potential waste to around $1 billion.”

This claim by NPE was widely criticized as an over-statement. Carol Burris and her small team made a very detailed study of the CSP program producing “Still Asleep at the Wheel.” They discovered the estimates were low and 40% of charter schools receiving CSP grants had closed or did not open.

Charter schools were introduced in the 1990s as an education experiment with the potential to significantly improve American education. Since then, there were no positive changes, including no significant improvement in standardized test scores. On the other hand, they have divided communities, undermined public schools and driven up segregation.

It is legitimate to conclude the charter school experiment has been a three-decade failure but the federal government continues lavishly funding the CSP.

Burris shared a growing concern with efforts to privatize public education, remove governance from school communities and divert power to private boards, religious institutions, and both nonprofit and for profit corporations.

Therefore, NPE calls for a series of reforms to “preserve our public education system and protect the students who attend public schools.”

Recommended reforms include:

  • An immediate moratorium on creating new charter schools, including no replication or expansion of existing charter schools.
  • End CSP that subsidizes and encourages charter expansion.
  • Require certification of all charter school teachers and administrative staff in accordance with public school requirements.
  • All properties and equipment owned by charter schools become the property of the local public school district if the charter closes.
  • Prohibit charter schools from refusing transfer students mid-year if they have available space.
  • Pro rata reimbursement for school districts (or states) when students leave a charter school during the school year.

In 2018, the Center for American Progress, who would never be mistaken as hardcore lefties, wrote about the first five large scale voucher studies ever. They summed up the report stating:

“How bad are school vouchers for students? Far worse than most people imagine.”

Josh Cowen, University of Michigan, has studied vouchers for close to 30 years. At the conference, he stated, “If we were using evidence informed education policy, vouchers would have died 5 years ago.” Cowen also noted test score losses from voucher students are as large as or larger than those experienced in either Katrina or Covid-19. Data since 2013 shows that vouchers have been catastrophic.

Nevertheless, Carol Burris said, “We support a parent’s right to educate their child in a private school; however, we believe that private services should be funded privately and not by the public.”

Vouchers were originally the choice of southern segregationist in the late 1950s after the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision. In 2002, the Supreme Court ruling in the Zelman v. Simmons-Harris case held that publicly funded vouchers could be used to send children to religious schools. It was a 5-4 decision, authorizing state legislators to force taxpayers to send their dollars to religious schools.

Voucher programs are always instituted by legislative bodies. There has never been an education voucher program voted for by the public.

Carol Burris stated, “We advocate for the phase-out of all voucher programs.”

Until that happens, NPE is calling for several legislative actions including:

  • An immediate moratorium on the creation of new voucher programs or their expansion.
  • Require private schools that receive vouchers cannot discriminate in any form, including based on religion, gender, marital status, disability, achievement and LGBTQ+ status.
  • Mandate financial audits of voucher programs, participating private education providers and third-party voucher-granting organizations.
  • State to collect data on voucher school closures and year-to-year changes in tuition.
  • Require certification of all school teaching and administrative staff in schools that receive vouchers in accordance with public school requirements.
  • Require that voucher students, including micro and homeschool students, participate in the same state testing programs as public and charter students and the results be made publicly available.
  • Voucher school facilities are obligated to meet building codes.
  • Require pro rata voucher funding be returned to local, state, and federal sources if a student returns or transfers to public school.

Wrap-Up

Ever since the Clinton administration, there has been a well-financed attack on public education. Much of this has come from billionaires and the Catholic Church has played a key role in advancing the voucher movement. Ten years-ago NPE was formed by mostly educators to save public schools. During its first decade, NPE fought against the privatization movement through social media by raising awareness and giving teachers a voice.

As it heads into the second decade, NPE is promoting an agenda to undo the recent damage to public schools, calling for the common sense changes listed above.

Let’s do it!

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