MSU Professor Might Just Flunk Himself In His Own Class

When the score is 146 to 11 which team usually wins? You would think the team with 146 points would you not. Not in the world of a Michigan State University professor who won’t let a slight difference of 135 get in his agenda’s way.

What am I talking about, school choice, specifically the Let MI Kids Learn program. A proposal in which this professor states would create tax credits for donors “who support, among other things, private school tuition modeled after school voucher programs across the country”. I remind you this is private money not tax/public dollars. How awful it must be for someone to help a family of lower economic resources children to go to a private school.

His name is Josh Cowen and he is a professor of education policy at MSU. In a March 21st op-ed published in the Bridge Michigan titled, “I study school choice, and DeVos plan would hurt Michigan”, he made some interesting comments.

He wrote:

I’ve spent more than 15 years evaluating school choice all over the country, and found both good and not-so-good results from choice programs nationwide. I’m not known for being an advocate for or against school choice. I say: let’s do more of whatever works for kids.

The Michigan Capitol Confidential reported on a nonprofit called EdChoice which tracked 169 education choice studies and found 146 of them had “a positive effect” and “just 11 studies found it had a negative one”. What those negative effects were I do not know? There are as many more programs that made a positive effect I did not bother to drill down into the negative ones.

Josh said something about “whatever works for the kids”, do you believe him? He wrote “These programs have generally been massively harmful to academic growth for poor children in places like Indiana, Ohio, Washington, DC, and Louisiana”. Josh is trying to tell you that paying for poor children to attend a private school is “massively harmful” to the “growth” of those “poor children”. Now that it is in writing do you still agree with what you wrote Professor.

It was also interesting that he attempts to trick people by writing “Let MI Kids Learn is a proposal that packages several good ideas — like support for tutoring, transportation, and after school programs…As an expert on school choice, I could easily get behind public spending on programs like those, but not at the cost of investing in a failed idea.”

Why does “public spending” have to be part of it? Because he is a government man through and through and nothing can get in the way of the state.

As Senator Feinstein would say, Josh ‘The Dogma Lives Loudly Within You’.