The effort to get school vouchers approved nationwide has a long and varied history, but Cowen’s book posits that it is essentially a Christian Nationalist attempt at undermining public education as we know it.

Cowen, whose career as an education researcher in the early 2000s began with the expectation that vouchers, which allow public tax dollars for education to be spent for private school tuition, would ultimately benefit students. However, the reality that Cowen documents in the book turned out to be almost the exact opposite.

Starting in the immediate aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision which ordered an end to segregated public education, and ending with the rise of the conservative Moms for Liberty – a vocal opponent of LGBTQ+ rights – and Project 2025,  an authoritarian blueprint offering detailed plans to broadly enhance executive authority during a second Trump term, Cowen describes the arc of the […]