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The Privateers

Name: The Privateers
Brand: Tantor Media, Inc
Price: 29.99 AUD
Availability: PreOrder

How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers

Narrated by: Patrick Lawlor

Author: Josh Cowen

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At a Glance

Format
Digital Audiobook

Duration
07:00.00

Available: 10th September 2024

Digital Audiobook

$29.99

Available: 10th September 2024

Preorder. Download available after release.

A deep-dive investigation of education privatization that reveals voucher programs as the faulty products of decades of work by wealthy patrons and influential conservatives

This thought-provoking work traces the origins of voucher-based education reform to mid-twentieth-century fears over school desegregation. It shows how, in the intervening decades, a cabal of billionaire conservatives supporting a host of special political interests—including economic libertarianism, religious choice, and parental rights—have converged around the issue of education freedom in an ongoing culture war. Through deliberate policymaking, legislation, and litigation, Cowen reveals, an insular advocacy network has enacted a flawed system for education finance driven largely by dogma.

Far from realizing the purported goal of educational equity, privatization is failing students and exacerbating income inequality, Cowen finds. He cites multiple research studies that conclude that voucher programs return poorer academic outcomes, including lower test scores on state exams, especially among students who are at greater academic risk because of their race, their religion, their gender identity, or their family's income. Continued advancement of these policies, Cowen argues, is an assault on public education as a defining American institution.