With the passage of Amendment 2, Kentucky faces an existential choice regarding its public schools.

Supporters of “school choice,” or the use of public funds to fund private schools, often call this the civil rights issue of our time.

It’s a special kind of gaslighting, not only because numerous studies have shown how little academic progress students make when they use vouchers, but also because the school choice movement was born out of parents’ and politicians’ dismay over the 1954 Brown v. Board decision that was supposed to end legal segregation in schools.

This resistance was bolstered by Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman’s book The Role of Government in Education, in which he opposed all forms of government oversight and was the first to propose changes to the tax code to subsidize private education.

“It was this idea—which became school vouchers—that allowed segregationists to present the racist response to the Court’s desegregation orders as a matter of the marketplace and what we would now call parental choice,” writes Josh Cowen in his timely new book, The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers.

The book tells the fascinating story of how the school choice movement began in the era of racial segregation and then gained momentum as a way to help poor and minority students in failing school systems.

All seemed lost when a series of studies showed that voucher programs actually hurt students. But then, in the midst of the Trump administration’s culture wars, yes, a vast right-wing conspiracy of conservative think tanks and “soldier scientists” began linking school choice to “parental rights,” leading to an explosion of states offering “universal vouchers” that redirect state funds to families regardless of family income.

Cowen says it’s amazing that studies show that in almost every state, 70 percent of the voucher money goes to families who already send their children to private schools.

Cowen’s book is instructive for Kentucky because in a few months we’ll be voting on Amendment 2, which would rewrite our state Constitution to erase a provision that explicitly prohibits money from going from public schools to private schools. Cowen is a former Kentuckian — he spent five years as a professor of public policy at the University of Kentucky’s Martin School — and he understands how damaging this amendment is to the state’s public schools.

“Kentucky is uniquely unprepared for this kind of reform,” Cowen, now of Michigan State University, told me in a recent phone interview, because most of his school districts are rural and don’t have many private schools.

“But you’re also talking about a constitutional amendment that’s going to do all this damage.”

If Amendment 2 passes, it would be the first time school choice has succeeded on a state ballot. It’s unclear what form of school choice the GOP supermajority in the General Assembly will choose; they tried to launch a kind of education savings account program before a constitutional challenge quickly shut it down in 2022.

TJ Roberts, the far-right politician from Northern Kentucky who is expected to win the 66th congressional district in November, recently tweeted that he would introduce universal vouchers on the “first day” of the 2025 session, and doubtless many of his colleagues support doing just that.

A huge right-wing conspiracy

But reading Cowen’s book might change your mind.

He documents the many conservative think tanks — the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Foundation, the Bradley Foundation, ALEC, the Council for National Policy — that are funded by true believers like Charles Koch and Betsey DeVos, the billionaire who served as Trump’s education secretary and espoused Friedman’s theories that all public education is subject to too much government control.

As Cowen writes, “For some, it was economic self-interest combined with free-market ideology; for others, religious fundamentalism animated the priorities.”

Around 2017, a series of studies on voucher programs conducted in Washington, Indiana, Ohio, and Louisiana repeatedly found that vouchers do not help students learn, but rather the opposite.

“The failure of vouchers to improve outcomes for children who transferred to private schools after vouchers were expanded statewide in Louisiana and Indiana posed an existential threat to the voucher movement,” Cowen writes.

Fortunately for advocates, a series of culture wars erupted at the same time. Moms for Liberty and other groups revitalized the “parents’ rights” movement with manufactured panic around critical race theory, LGBTQ issues, and trans students in particular.

“That the evidence base supporting the ideological push for vouchers is directly and inextricably linked to efforts to end reproductive rights, anti-LGTBQ policies and book banning, efforts to silence racially charged telling of American history, and the ultimate goal of undermining public education is a wake-up call that something truly radical is happening,” Cowen writes.

For example, Ohio recently expanded its education voucher system and now allocates $2 billion from its general fund to subsidize private schools, most of them religious.

A Washington Post investigation found that 90 percent of private school vouchers nationwide went to religious schools. And ProPublica recently discovered that private schools in Ohio were urging parents to apply for vouchers to help their bottom lines.

Cowen noted that any kind of voucher program would be concentrated in Jefferson and Fayette counties, where most private schools, especially Catholic ones, are located. The rest of the state would simply see a funding shortfall, and more public money would leave public schools. The temporary private schools created to use vouchers would soon disappear, as they have in other states.

To show how small vouchers would help ordinary people, education advocate Andrew Brennen recently calculated that if Kentucky handed out the average voucher amount of Indiana and Ohio — about $5,000 — it would have no impact on tuition at many private schools, such as St. Xavier in Louisville, which charges $17,000 a year. Closer to home, Sayre School in Lexington charges $28,500 a year for high school.

All eyes will be on Kentucky in November. Even Corey DeAngelis, a character in Cowen’s book, is now a household name here, after he recently used Twitter or X to aggressively harass the Pulaski County school system for posting information opposing Amendment 2.

As Cowen writes, DeAngelis made clear that the voucher movement “began to succeed when it stopped making statistical arguments about performance measures and started making moral arguments about parental rights and curriculum content.”

What is Cowen’s policy prescription? Fund schools better. Kentucky went down its own radical path in 1990 when it decided to fund public schools more fairly and better through a unique formula that no longer relied on local property taxes.

But lawmakers from both parties have failed to keep up with the funding, leading to growing inequality, and now many rural counties — the largest employers in many counties — are in financial trouble, despite a recent funding boost from the GOP Legislature.

It could get worse. The Kentucky Center on Economic Policy recently found that public schools could lose as much as $1.2 billion in funding and hundreds of jobs if Amendment 2 passes and vouchers are adopted.

Are public schools a public good, or should education become a private enterprise? Kentuckians will have to decide.