$chool choice and freeloading
There's a lot that's dangerous about the rightwing campaign against critical race theory in schools. One of the less obvious dangers is how it advances of the school choice movement. While there's anti-CRT rhetoric in bills going through Republican state legislatures, there are also clauses therein to more fully privatize public school systems throughout the country. In some cases it looks like the CRT rhetoric is just a front for the school choice project. I'm thinking of New Hampshire's new education success account program in particular, but there are other examples. Jennifer Berkshire has documented this as well. This came up for me recently, since I unexpectedly came upon a fascinating history of the school choice movement.
The other day I was walking around my neighborhood and found a copy of Jane Mayer's Dark Money, which if you haven't read, you should. It puts the emergence of the ethnofascy ideology of today's right in the US in a helpful historical light. The basic story is that certain billionaires in this country were raised by Gilded Age robber barons. Their fathers and grandfathers lamented the existence of income taxes and any government action at all. They saw the Russian Revolution, the 1929 stock market crash, and the New Deal as the end of days and adopted a radical, resentful, and voracious form of libertarianism as a kind of political antidote. They came to see the market as flawless savior from government evil. Ultimately of course, rather than some righteous cause, this ideology served their bloated bottom line. And when the 2008 crash happened and Obama got elected, they all heard their fathers' ghosts and thought the communist revolution was coming.
Anyway, in Mayer's history of billionaire financing and political organizing, I was surprised to see a history of how the school choice movement got off the ground in Dark Money. I didn't know school choice as we know it, which started in Milwaukee, got its funding from one of these new robber barons.
Octopus
In 2013, the progressive nonprofit One Wisconsin published a report following the dark money behind school vouchers in Milwaukee. They found that one foundation paid $108 million to 130 organizations to get that groundbreaking program up and running: the Bradley Foundation. Of course, the idea for school vouchers predates the Milwuakee program to 1955, the year after the groundbreaking Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education, that called for an end to educational segregation.
The fringe economist Milton Friedman proposed, the year after the highest court in the United States decided schools should be integrated, that the public system should be shut down. In its place, families should be given money directly and the ability to choose which school their kids go to. In Capitalism and Freedom, he said that schools should be like restaurants: the good ones stay open and the bad ones close amidst market forces.
The idea appealed to the new robber barons looking to dismantle any and every government program. These ultra-libertarians, shut out from mainstream politics (when David Koch ran for vice president on the Libertarian Party ticket in the 1980s he was laughed off stage), decided to get Gramscian and take over ideological state apparatuses like educational, intellectual, and policy institutions. One of Mayer's points in the book is that they used dispersed, intellectual production when fighting for their anti-government agendas. The "Kochtopus" is Mayer's key example: tentacles of influence slithering through education and lobbying.
The Bradley Foundation used this strategy too.
Blood and government money
But the Bradley Foundation's story--how it got its money--is totally embarrassing for anyone professing a "free market" critique of the "government." How did it get the money to pay for its school voucher octopus? That's right: the government!
In 1985, a year after I was born, the US's biggest weapons contractor Rockwell International had a problem. After getting huge government contracts to build pointless missile systems for Reagan (think Star Wars), financial experts warned them to become less reliant on government money.
I repeat: this company had so much government money that financial experts told them they had to do something to make it seem like they weren't just pocketing billions of taxpayer dollars to build pointless weapons. Rockwell's consultants told them they had to spend the government money on something. Guess what they bought? A medium-sized electrical company outside Milwaukee called Allen-Bradley Company. Rockwell bought Allen-Bradley for $1.65 billion in 1985. The Bradley Foundation, its CEO's 'charitable' lobbying outfit, increased its budget by 200%.
Mayer follows that $1.65 billion from Rockwell. Two thirds of it was from government contracts. It was mostly taxpayer money! Shamefully, Allen-Bradley got most of its money from the government contracts too. And it was also for killing people. They got 70-80% of their money for weapons.
Not only that, but Allen-Bradley was a bad place to work. Workers at AB unionized and struck in 1939 to higher wages. In 1966, courts found AB guilty of gendered pay gaps. In 1968 it was found guilty of racial discrimination. Needless to say, Harry Bradley, the head of Allen-Bradley, was super rightwing.
$chool choice
In the end, the combination of its profits and savings from weapon sales and the massive influx of money from the Rockwell merger, the Bradley Foundation had enough money to give Harvard and Yale $5.5 million to open conservative centers to research and publish anti-government libertarian research. And also to spearhead the first school vouchers program, using Friedman's model, in Milwaukee schools. Mayer writes: "the Bradley Foundation would give away $280 million to conservative causes..."
Those causes included educational interventions:
The Bradley Foundation virtually drove the early national "school choice" movement, waging an all-out assault on teacher's unions and traditional public schools. In an effort to 'wean' Americans from government, the foundation militated for parents to be able to use public funds to send their children to private and parochial schools.
Bradley used breastfeeding analogies: he wanted to "wean" parents from the government as if they were babies and the government a mother. But Bradley himself had long suckled at the government's breast for the money he was using to undermine it! (Very Oedpial actually.) But breast-feeding is the wrong metaphor here. Leeching is a better analogy: Bradley was a parasite weakening his host. Indeed, the first large-scale voucher program was in Milwaukee in the 1990s. It was funded with this money.
What's the lesson in all this?
Freeloading
First, libertarianism is a bullshit fantasy that gets robber barons' more profits at our expense. As Mayer shows, a bunch of rich boys afraid of their daddies wanted to bring back the Gilded Age in the 20th cent, so they did. Mayer's book has given me a new kind of context to think about what's usually called neoliberalism. The Kochs, Bradleys, and others like Robert Olin preserved a Gilded Age ideology introjected deep into them as boys and fought against the government for this ideology using government policies for decades. Their well-heeled activism, using an educational production strategy, seeded the ground for what we think of as the new rightwing c. 2008 (and even Trump, given their heightened rhetoric and detachment from reality).
One of my early mentors in graduate school, the philosopher and historian of education Robbie McClintock, called this freeloading. Libertarians calling for freedom, overloading the concept of freedom with their profit motives, but ultimately leeching off of the government. (Elon Musk comes to mind as well.)
Second, Mariana Mazzucato has a theory that's apt here. Government, she says, is entrepreneurial. Where does financing and initiative come from for supposedly private innovations? The tax-funded public sector. Perhaps we can think of our existing school structures in this light and think actively about what it can do and be.
Third, when you hear "school choice" and "market freedom" in education lingo, you should think "freeloading government weapons leech" because that's exactly how that movement got enough money to achieve its goals.