A well-researched book for the public policy crowd.
A professor of education policy examines how a small group of wealthy conservatives developed a rationale to privatize schools and support school vouchers.
Cowen, “an expert on school choice who spent formative professional years working with and around leading voucher advocates,” makes a solid argument that vouchers do more harm than good. To demonstrate his point, he examines the individuals and organizations that have promoted—and continue to promote—voucher programs. He begins by showing how the voucher concept originated as a reaction to Brown v. Board of Education. At the beginning, Milton Friedman suggested that parents, rather than government, should have the right to determine where their children went to school. The emergence of a powerful conservative movement (and figures like Charles Koch and Betsy DeVos) a few decades later brought the issue to the cultural fore. Cowen examines the development of the first voucher program in Milwaukee in the early 1990s and how the wealthy, right-wing Bradley Foundation used its money and political influence to “legitimate vouchers as a school reform strategy.” A federally funded program in Washington, D.C., which was itself shepherded into existence by conservative “foot soldiers,” followed. Turning to his own experiences, Cowen suggests that research advocating voucher programs is itself the product of the same wealthy, Christian nationalist networks. At the same time, that research has not been enough to counter the “utter, empirical disaster” that the school voucher system became in the 2010s. Donald Trump reignited the voucher controversy, transforming it into an ideological debate that would have repercussions in later Supreme Court rulings that allowed parents to use voucher money on private religious schools. While this book will likely not interest general readers, educators and education-policy specialists will no doubt appreciate Cowen’s attention to detail and thoroughness.
A well-researched book for the public policy crowd.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2024
ISBN: 9781682539101
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Harvard Education Press
Review Posted Online: June 10, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
Deliberately provocative, with much for left-inclined activists to ponder.
A wide-ranging critique of leftist politics as not being left enough.
Continuing his examination of progressive reform movements begun with The Cult of Smart, Marxist analyst deBoer takes on a left wing that, like all political movements, is subject to “the inertia of established systems.” The great moment for the left, he suggests, ought to have been the summer of 2020, when the murder of George Floyd and the accumulated crimes of Donald Trump should have led to more than a minor upheaval. In Minneapolis, he writes, first came the call from the city council to abolish the police, then make reforms, then cut the budget; the grace note was “an increase in funding to the very department it had recently set about to dissolve.” What happened? The author answers with the observation that it is largely those who can afford it who populate the ranks of the progressive movement, and they find other things to do after a while, even as those who stand to benefit most from progressive reform “lack the cultural capital and economic stability to have a presence in our national media and politics.” The resulting “elite capture” explains why the Democratic Party is so ineffectual in truly representing minority and working-class constituents. Dispirited, deBoer writes, “no great American revolution is coming in the early twenty-first century.” Accommodation to gradualism was once counted heresy among doctrinaire Marxists, but deBoer holds that it’s likely the only truly available path toward even small-scale gains. Meanwhile, he scourges nonprofits for diluting the tax base. It would be better, he argues, to tax those who can afford it rather than allowing deductible donations and “reducing the availability of public funds for public uses.” Usefully, the author also argues that identity politics centering on difference will never build a left movement, which instead must find common cause against conservatism and fascism.
Deliberately provocative, with much for left-inclined activists to ponder.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9781668016015
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
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