By Thomas Ultican 3/5/2025
Johns Hopkins University and The 74 teamed up one more time to satisfy their billionaire donors and promote privatizing public education. Ashley Berner, Director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy, is featured in a The 74 interview entitled “‘We’re the Outliers’: Ashley Rogers Berner on Public Funding for Private Schools.” She notes that many other countries openly pay for religious schools and calls for America to follow their lead.
In this interview, Berner tells many half-truths dripping with deception. She states:
“There’s dogmatism on both the left and the right. On the left, it’s tied into the unions and their claim to sole authority — that only the district schools, which they run, are legitimate. And on the right, you have the argument that parent autonomy is the desired end goal, that it’s sufficient to determine school quality and the government has no legitimate role.”
I do not agree that on the right “parent autonomy is the desired end goal.” Their goal is ending public education. And Berner’s claim that unions have “sole authority” over education policy or the district schools she says they run is farcical. Teachers unions certainly have an influence but so does the business community and the voting public of which they are members.
She is implying that it is mainly teachers unions that are opposed to privatizing public education. This dismisses the rest of us who believe that public schools are the bedrock that created the world’s greatest, freest and most powerful nation. It is this school system that people like Ashley Berner, Johns Hopkins University and the billionaires funding The 74 are out to end.
Berner’s Argument
In 2017, Berner published her book “Pluralism and American Public Education: No One Way to School.” In it she describes how many European and Asian countries pay for various types of schools. They fund private schools, religious schools and district schools. Because they fund all types of schools, there are no warring sides. She is spreading this argument widely in conservative circles.
Her essay at the Manhattan Institute starts:
“For more than a century, public education in the U.S. has been defined as schools that are funded, regulated, and exclusively delivered by government. The past 25 years have brought some diversified forms of delivery through charter schools and various private-school scholarship mechanisms. Nevertheless, most discussions and debates over school reforms take place within the existing paradigm: only district schools are considered truly public, and all alternative models (whether charters, tax credits, or vouchers), must justify themselves on the basis of superior test scores.”
This 2019 article continues in the same misleading vain. Charter schools are the privatized alternative schools that were originally an experiment. The charters that were given to these schools by states had some performance demands attached. The reality is that these demands were never onerous and in most cases not equivalent to the demands put on district schools. Voucher schools have no demands attached and for two decades the results posted by voucher schools have been horrible.
At the Manhattan Institute, researchers know that even oblique shots at government schools plays real well and Berner does not miss the opportunity. In the interview she stated, “Meanwhile, many critics of the ubiquitous district public school also seek independence from state control and accountability, even if it comes with funding attached.”
In her book, she applies the noun pluralism to education. While for more than a century Americans have been paying for public schools, that is not good enough for Berner. She is calling for school choice paid for by taxpayers. Quite unlike former President Grant’s position:
“Leave the matter of religion to the family altar, the church, and the private school, supported entirely by private contributions. Keep the church and state forever separate.” (Good News Pages 73-74)
At the Fordham Institute, they published Berner’s article “3 ways to increase choice and decrease polarization in U.S. schools.” In it she asserted:
“Third, build the infrastructure to support both choice and quality. A great example is Indianapolis’s The Mind Trust, a nonprofit that, since 2006, has recruited teachers into the state, launched four dozen charter schools and partnered with the city’s public school district to design schools that by design meet their communities’ specific needs.
In 2018, I wrote a piece about The Mind Trust. My conclusion stated:
“Lubienski and Lubienski conducted a large scale research of education data and came to the surprising conclusion that public schools outperform privatized schools. They also saw that most of the “studies” that claimed otherwise were paid for by advocates and not peer reviewed. The claims of success by The Mind Trust seem to fit this description like print to wood block.”
It should be noted; the Mind Trust bringing in hundreds of Teach for America teaching candidates with 5 weeks of training and a two year commitment harmed Indianapolis’s teaching corp.
Berner Ignores Why America has a Separation between Church and State
There is a document in the library of Congress called “Religion and the Founding of the American Republic.” The first line of the document states, “Many of the British North American colonies that eventually formed the United States of America were settled in the seventeenth century by men and women, who, in the face of European persecution, refused to compromise passionately held religious convictions and fled Europe.”
Eighteenth century Americans knew of the suffering brought by the Anglican and Catholic churches. They saw theocracies as the road to terror and wanted strict boundaries separating the secular government and religious life.
In The 74’s interview, Burner speaks about finding an elementary school for her children when she was studying at Oxford:
“The Anglican Church was the top local provider of elementary education, but there was a state-funded Jewish school down the street. There was a Montessori school, all kinds of secular schools.”
This does not seem like enough of a justification for the United States to abandon its constitution and tear up the world’s foremost K-12 education system. But strangely enough, that is exactly what the extreme right has been angling to achieve. This is not conservatism. This is radical anti-Americanism.