School Choice "Advocates" are Corporate Lobbyists in Disguise
The shadowy billionaires promoting school choice couldn't care less about your children
In a previous SubStack post, I laid out voluminous data demonstrating that private schooling has virtually zero measurable impact on academic performance and lifetime achievement when the datasets are normalized for basic demographic factors. In that piece I also presented a great deal of data from around the world showing that the primary reason rich people send their children to private schools is the exclusivity factor. Simply put, rich people don’t want their children exposed to the unwashed masses.
With exclusivity being the primary selling point for private schools, enabling them to charge tens of thousands of dollars per year for a basic education, it stands to reason that if the government offered vouchers which threatened to pierce that veil of exclusivity, private schools would simply raise their prices.
In the face of these obvious, inexorable market dynamics, why do so-called “school choice advocates” continue to promise the American people that their children’s attendance at a posh, high-performance private school is just one vote away? The answer is that they’re being paid to.
This is probably a good point in the article to offer the disclaimer that I am a registered lobbyist myself—though I have no lobbying clients that have any involvement with the issues discussed here. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with lobbying. The moral problem comes when people act as lobbyists, but pose as innocent and impassioned “advocates.”
I could spend a great deal of time going down the list of self-described school choice advocates and analyze precisely where their millions of dollars are coming from. In the interest of time, you can either take my word for it or you can go look up the relevant non-profit disclosures and see for yourself.
In short, a group of billionaires with massive investments in the private education industry stand to rake in huge profits from the passage of school choice policies. And they are paying a dedicated contingent of professional shills to convince you to support those policies.
I don’t think there is anything wrong, per se, with billionaires seeking to change public policy for their own financial benefit. And even if you disagree, you can’t be surprised that they are doing so. The more critical question is: Do your kids stand to benefit from these policies alongside the billionaires who are supporting them? Unfortunately, the answer to that important question is likely no.
If school choice policies go national, the government vouchers won’t be enough to send your child to an elite private school. Those schools will raise prices to maintain exclusivity. Denying that these price hikes will take place is nothing more than wishful thinking.
While the rich continue to send their children to the expensive, exclusive private schools, there will be an industry of “McDonalds” type chain and franchise charter schools that emerge to snatch up those vouchers. These “private schools for the masses” are unlikely to provide your child with an education that’s any better than the public school down the street, and in many cases, it will be an inferior education.
As a rule, American oligarchs do not spend tens of millions of dollars out of the kindness of their hearts to change the laws in this country to benefit anyone other than themselves and their own business interests. The astroturf propaganda and lobbying campaigns promoting school choice are no exception.