Dramatic Turnaround
If Cowen was determined to write a conspiracy book, the least he could have done was to make it an exciting page-turner, like Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code or Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I regret to report that The Privateers is written more like a Kamala Harris speech:
Education is personal. In both the social and the neurological senses of the word learning we are adaptive creatures, processing and attempting to make sense of the world around us before we are conscious. Education is also about memory: the way we build identity and outlook based on the information our minds collect and retain, often whether we know we have done so or not. And our memories are evocative: we experience emotion when we recall our own histories as we position ourselves within the events of our lives around us.
I think this excerpt was meant to sound menacing, but the demand for a “reckoning” just made me laugh out loud:
I structure the final chapter as an epilogue, glancing backward but mostly looking forward, weighing warnings about discrimination, exclusion, and human rights alongside very practical threats to democracy on issues like voting and the peaceful transition of electoral power. One need not be fluent in every democratic theory of education, I argue, to look aghast at the role of Bradley Foundation officers in Donald Trump’s election-denial activities, of Council for National Policy members in voter suppression tactics, and ongoing efforts to degrade the freedom of some Americans—and their children—in the name of religious values and free exercise. There must, I insist, be a reckoning.
The conspiracy theory promoted by this book is so unhinged, the evidence for it so lacking, and the writing so poor, that it suggests an alternative conspiracy theory. What if Josh Cowen is actually trying to assist the CNP conspiracy by making such a weak effort to discredit it? This alternative theory is no less credible than the one the book purports to advance.
By Cowen’s own account, he has been a significant beneficiary of CNP-affiliated organizations, has played a central role in producing much of the positive evidence about school choice, and has been closely connected to almost all of the key players in the so-called CNP conspiracy. As a master’s student at Georgetown University, Cowen worked as a research assistant for Patrick Wolf on the D.C., New York, and Dayton voucher experiments that yielded positive results and was published in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management.
When Cowen was a doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin, I provided him with the data from my own evaluation of the Charlotte voucher experiment for him to replicate. He confirmed my positive results, reporting in his very first peer-reviewed publication that “in this estimation, voucher impacts in Charlotte are positive, but appear to be moderated by the probability of compliance.” These results and my role in helping him produce them are somehow absent from the book.
Cowen then joined the Milwaukee school choice evaluation described above and was the first author on a Policy Studies Journal article that found: “We show that exposure to voucher schools was related to graduation and, in particular, to enrollment and persistence in a 4-year college. . . . We conclude by stressing . . . the importance of attainment outcomes in educational research.” These findings are also omitted from his book.
During the time Cowen was working on the Milwaukee evaluation, he and his family wanted to spend the summer in Fayetteville, Arkansas, to be close to relatives. I arranged for him to have office space in our department to facilitate this. This personal connection is also missing from the book. Several years later, in 2015, I asked Cowen to be the external reviewer for the reaccreditation of our department. His positive report helped renew our doctoral program for another seven-year term.
Cowen also reports directly receiving money from the Walton Family Foundation and the Arnold Foundation as well as indirectly benefiting from support from the Bradley Foundation. And in 2018, Cowen was part of a team that received a five-year $10 million grant from Betsy DeVos’s Department of Education to study school choice, with about $2 million of that money going to EPIC, a research center that Cowen codirected at Michigan State University. For reasons that have never been explained, Cowen was removed as the codirector of EPIC in 2020, less than halfway through that multi-million-dollar grant period.
Cowen also describes his six-time attendance at an “exclusive,” “all-expense-paid” gathering of 70 members of the education “establishment” organized by Rick Hess at the American Enterprise Institute, citing an invitation he received as recently as January 2020. While this private gathering included a diverse set of people, including teachers union officials, education reporters, foundation staff, and policy researchers, Cowen denounces it as a clever tool of the conspiracy to make everyone there “complicit” in its wrong-doing: “It is through gatherings like these that a policy proposal such as school vouchers . . . can persist through a decade of some of the worst evidence to accumulate against any education policy plan in the public record.”
If being closely associated with and even financially benefiting from those connected to the CNP, like the DeVos family and the Bradley Foundation, is evidence of being part of the CNP conspiracy, then Cowen would appear to be a co-conspirator through at least 2018. If attending a private gathering at AEI makes him “complicit,” then he remained involved through at least 2020. If reporting positive results from school choice studies is further proof of participating in a CNP conspiracy to hoodwink policymakers, Cowen would also appear to be a co-conspirator for more than half of his professional career.
Only since around 2020 has Cowen adopted a dramatically different interpretation of the evidence and embraced a conspiratorial tone in his disagreements. Who knows what accounts for this relatively recent reinvention, but it is no crazier than the rest of his book to consider that perhaps it is all part of an incredibly sophisticated scheme to discredit CNP critics by posing as an inept critic himself. Readers may never fully grasp the 3-D chess of the CNP conspiracy, but if you see Cowen and me lighting cigars while toasting each other with single-cask bourbon at our next gathering at a secret country mansion in Colorado known as “The Meadows,” you may finally glimpse the truth.
