Transcript: Alec MacGillis

A conversation with the ProPublica reporter, on rural Republican resistance to school vouchers

America is in the grips of polarization, and the recent assassination attempt on Donald Trump has underlined the potential for an escalation in political violence. It has never been more important for the media to complicate dominant narratives and resist oversimplification. This week, a journalist I admire returns to the program to model what that looks like in practice, bringing us a nuanced story about tensions within the conservative movement over school vouchers.

Alec MacGillis is an award-winning American journalist, and a reporter for ProPublica. He’s also the author of Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America.

This is an edited transcript for paid subscribers. You can stream the interview for free here.

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TH: It's great to have you on the program today. You're one of the journalists that I follow most closely, because I think you do such a good job of complicating the dominant media narratives — something that is more and more important as we have this heated polarization in America. Last time you were on the podcast, we spoke about the crisis of absenteeism in the wake of pandemic school closures. I asked you back on the show today to talk about your recent piece for ProPublica (and The Atlantic) on the battle over school vouchers. We do have listeners in America, but for our Canadian listeners who may not be familiar with this issue, can you set this up for us? What are school vouchers — and how did you get interested in covering the debate around them?

AM: School vouchers have been around since the 1990s in America. They started in a couple cities, Milwaukee and Cleveland at first. It's basically taxpayer money that families can use to help them pay for private school. If you choose to go to private school, you get this voucher — it might be $2,000 or $3,000 or $4,000 or $5,000 or $6,000 or $7,000 — that you can put toward your private school tuition. When they started, they were just in a handful of cities and they were really targeted at kids that are stuck in struggling school districts in cities, mostly low-income families. 

The argument was mostly a conservative argument, but it was also some Black Democrats that supported it as well. It was basically that we should give these families a choice, to help get a better education for their kids. More recently, there's been a massive expansion in these vouchers, around the country, to the point where in about a dozen states now they have become universal — meaning that any family of any income level can now get a voucher from a couple thousand dollars, maybe all the way up to $7000 to $8,000 per kid per year, toward their private school tuition.

Regardless of what the family's income is, they can qualify for vouchers. So, there's just been this huge surge in uptake, and also costs, for these voucher programs in the states that have gone universal.

TH: Your piece highlights some really interesting tensions. You talked to a second term Republican state representative, a Trump supporter, who is part of a fight against Republicans pushing for school vouchers. Tell us about Todd Warner and why he objects to these vouchers.

AM: What got me so interested in this particular story was that there is this remarkable dynamic happening in some of the states that have had the big voucher expansions, or are contemplating them. These are mostly conservative-led states — what we call red states or in some cases purple states, politically mixed states — where you have had this debate playing out. You have people in the most rural areas of these states, which are traditionally the most conservative parts of these states, that are resisting the voucher expansions. 

They know, for starters, that this voucher money, this taxpayer money, will not be going to people in their communities, because there are virtually no private schools in many of these rural areas. Instead, the money will be going to the suburbs to the big metro areas in these states, mostly to middle and upper middle class families. In these states, this voucher money is now mostly going to families who already have their kids in private schools. These are families that have, for years now, been affording private and parochial schools, and are now basically getting cheques from the government to help subsidize that. 

So, you have these rural representatives like Todd Warner, the state rep that I met with in Tennessee, who are very conservative. He's a very conservative guy. He's a Trump supporter, a small business owner. But he knows that this money is not going to be coming to his rural community and he's opposed to it. He's also worried about the fact that as these voucher programs grow, they will inevitably take money away from public schools. 

In these rural communities, even though they're very conservative communities, people really do value the public schools. Because they are the schools that everyone has gone to for generations. They support all sorts of community life. The Friday night football in West Texas, basketball games, the holiday concerts. They are often the biggest employers in these communities. The notion that we need to be opposed to public schools — that public schools are something that we need to escape or tear down — that doesn't resonate as much in these rural communities, even though they are otherwise quite conservative. That's this remarkable dynamic now, where you have some of the strongest resistance to this one national conservative plank, school vouchers, coming from some of the most conservative parts of the country.

TH: So many interesting threads here. One of the things you point out is that this sort of anti-public school sentiment is, in part, a result of the school closures. But the rural schools reopened in 2020, is that correct?

AM: Yes. The school closures provided a huge opening to voucher proponents around the country. Because they could say, “Look, in all these districts that were closed for a year, or even a year and a half in some cases, to in-person instruction — you public schools, you left us high and dry, you abandoned us. We have to give families another option, because you weren't even there for us when it mattered.” That became a very strong argument for the voucher proponents. 

On top of that, the school closures and the shift to Zoom school gave a lot of parents a window into what was being taught to their kids. They could see it on the screens, and in some cases they didn't like what they saw. They saw maybe some envelope-pushing on progressive social issues, gender issues, racial issues, and that sparked some of this culture-war backlash against the public schools. 

That dynamic was way less present in rural communities. The schools opened up much earlier on average. Many of these rural parts of America, schools were back open in the fall of 2020. Then, on top of that, there simply has been less of that edgier instruction going on in rural schools that might spark some backlash from some parents. So, it's just an entirely different context in which these schools have been operating.

TH: How have the pro-voucher Republicans responded to these critiques coming from their own ranks?

AM: In some cases, they have tried to essentially sweeten the pot for rural Republicans who are concerned about the effect on their public schools. In some states, they have tried to couple the money for the new voucher programs with some additional funding for public schools, at least at first, to try to make it seem less harmful to go to vouchers. In Ohio, pro-voucher republicans have actually proposed providing funding to build new private schools in rural areas. It's really quite remarkable if you think about it — providing public capital for new private schools, basically to take away the argument of, “We don't have any schools here in our rural communities to even spend this money on. Why should we support this?” They're saying, “We'll give you money to build private schools to receive these vouchers.”

But the biggest response has been essentially one of threats. It's basically, “Get on board with the vouchers, or we will come after you in the primaries.” And we saw that in Ohio. I visited a county in Ohio where the local state rep, who was also a very conservative voucher opponent, was taken out in a primary earlier this year. The most dramatic example of this came in Texas, where the governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, explicitly targeted about 15 voucher opponents, rural Republican voucher opponents, in the Texas State House and was able to take out 11 of them in primaries. And so, it will be interesting to see now whether Texas forges ahead with its own very costly universal voucher program, now that they've taken out those resistors.

TH: What you are chronicling here, the result of this, is there are bipartisan alliances being formed between Democratic lawmakers and rural Republicans. From the outside, sitting where I am in Canada, it seems like these kinds of bipartisan alliances are incredibly rare in America right now. One Democrat you spoke to likened it to the movie Twins, in its odd couple status. Is it the case that these kind of alliances are very rare — or do we just not hear about them enough?

AM: They are quite rare. This is really quite unusual. What I found interesting about it was that you have this national ideology around school choice and school vouchers, where this has just become something that Republicans are expected to support at the national ideological level. But then at the local level in rural areas, there was just too much of a clash with the actual lived reality, and the actual circumstances of life in these communities, where even these otherwise very conservative Republicans just couldn't go along with the ideology. They just knew too much from how things actually function where they are — that this would not be good for their constituents. It really is, I think, quite unusual for an issue like this to cause this kind of bipartisan alliance. But I do think it's still worth highlighting.

There's this notion, I think, on the left in the U.S. that rural America is this font of the most extreme versions of conservatism that we're seeing now. The kind of MAGA Trump conservatism — that this is all being fueled by rural America. There's some very strong counters to that, and this, I think, is one issue that really shows that it's much more nuanced at the local level. When you get closer to what's actually happening, things look much more nuanced on the ground in rural America.

TH: I did want to get some of your reflections on where the American political scene is at right now. We're recording on Tuesday, July 16. It was an incredibly troubling weekend, with the assassination attempt on Trump. Politicians on both sides of the aisle — and the media as well — are now being questioned about how they may or may not have contributed to polarization. Do you think we in the media need to rethink how we cover politics, given the escalation in political violence?