What Vouchers Could Do for America
Written by Lancelot Finn (Fall 2002)
Education vouchers are a subtle concept. People are nervous about them because they don’t understand them. This fictional news column from 2025 offers a glimpse of what a voucher education system might be like.
When Forbes broke the news that Jefferson Longes, CEO of Eureka Schools Inc., had a net worth of $1.3 billion, the public reaction to the “first education billionaire” was mixed. One cheerleader was the Cato Institute, which called Longes “the world’s leading edupreneur.” Yesterday, they awarded him the Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty. On the other hand, a consortium of Catholic schools repeated their long-held position that “the education vocation is incompatible with the profit motive.”
“The Profit Motive” was the title of a cover story on Longes in The Nation, which is still a staunch opponent of vouchers. The story described Longes as “a cunning opportunist… a veteran political fixer… [and] a corporate welfare king [who] has cultivated a runaway personality cult.” It documented the “psychic injury” to students that resulted from the national chain’s commercial and technocratic emphasis. And it charged that “by driving forward the voucher revolution, Longes contributed to the Balkanization of American education along ethnic, class and religious lines.”
Steve Thompson of Denver, Colorado disagrees. “The man is my hero,” declares Thompson. “I would go to the cross for him. He showed us what was possible. A 17-year-old is fluent in five living languages and knows Latin and Greek. A 19-year who started a business two years ago gets $120,000 in profits. A 21-year-old runs for mayor of a small town and wins. A 22-year-old is appointed professor at MIT. These are true stories. Before vouchers, they would have been headline news. Nowadays, that’s the kid next door.”
Thompson is the principal at Eagle High School in Denver. Although Eagle is a “public” school, where 73% of the student body registers the traditional way without ever using a voucher, Thompson firmly considers himself an edupreneur.
When Thompson took over in 2002, Eagle was a near-“failing” school, known for drugs, crime and low test scores. Today it is known for smart young teachers, top-notch music, vocational and foreign exchange programs, good college placement rates, and a lively yet laid-back atmosphere. “Option” students (21%), who use vouchers, come from all over Denver, while international tuition-paying students (6%) from 13 different countries. Eagle has a close relationship with the University of Denver, whose Ph.D. candidates teach upper-level classes at Eagle. The Eagle High Rag is distributed in newsstands all over Denver. After school, Eagle’s outer classrooms turn into a lively “evening mall” of shops, internet cafes and music clubs, some of them student-run. In summer, adult and professional classes are offered to the community. Many Eagle students stay, since they may attend for free.
Thompson attributes his success to vouchers, and to Eureka.
“I went into education because my education was crap,” recalls the famously blunt principal. “I knew I could do better and I did, but there was a lot of resistance. Back then, 70% of your teachers were deadbeats. I don’t blame them, that’s just what the system did to you. Students hated teachers, teachers hated students, it was a vicious circle. The whole country was like that back then.
“I could tell right away which teachers were no good, which ones were holding the school back, but I couldn’t fire them because of the teachers’ union. When they realized I wanted change, I became the enemy. People wouldn’t even make eye contact with me. It was ferocious. Later I realized that some of them were secretly on my side. But they would have been shunned if they’d let on.
“Then the state passed a voucher program in 2006, and immediately Eureka opened up three miles away. Our enrollment fell 20% the first year. Finally, I had the ammo I needed. We’d lose our students if we didn’t improve our product. The school board called a meeting and wanted answers. I offered new ideas, the teachers’ union offered more of the same, so I won. Within two years I fired half the staff, hired new people, started new programs. It was like flushing a toilet: you get the gunk out of there, and everything comes back up clean and clear. And like I said, this happened all over the country. Since then, it’s been pretty smooth. I was not above copying Eureka’s programs lock, stock and barrel. But I’ve got my own spin too.”
Eureka was founded in 2003 and spread rapidly eastward, opening in Boston in 2010. Its target market was the lower middle class, particularly immigrants: it advertised at one time or another in seventeen different languages. Eureka specialized in science and math, computers and business. Some early successes won Eureka the label “genius schools.”
Longes lobbied tirelessly for the voucher legislation. When it passed, he immediately exploited it by opening schools. As a lobbyist, he was able to make the most of his money and connections because of his media image as a friend of children. He was almost never photographed except in the presence of one or more smiling children.
The explicitly for-profit character of Longes’ schools drew increasing criticism, however, particularly from the Catholic schools, who argued that Eureka’s curriculum was “materialistic” and “soulless.” Longes drew a storm of public criticism in 2011 when he retaliated by declaring that Catholic schools were narrow-minded and dogmatic “madrassas.”
“I can see where he was coming from,” says Gustav Gerner, head of Eureka’s public relations department. “The Catholic schools’ criticisms of Eureka were not really ‘theological.’ They were just negative advertising, since in lots of places, we were competing for the same students. They could get away with it because in the 2010s they had this Mother Theresa image, underpaid volunteers going to the inner city to give poor inner-city kids a way out of crime- and drug-ridden hell-holes. Edupreneurs tend to underestimate the Catholic schools because they have no concept of innovation. But everyone knows they’re not madrassas, and the remark was totally out of line. The thing is, Jeff is an idealist, too. He loves kids and wants to give them better futures. Profit was never an end for him, it’s a means. He was sick of being called a ‘profiteer.’ Just once, he fought dirty, and it backfired.”
Despite their tensions, Catholic schools and Eureka schools have seen as major allies in advancing the voucher revolution. The work of Catholic schools in the inner cities made vouchers the camp of social justice, the new civil rights movement. Eureka showed that the market could revolutionize education the way it revolutionized other industries. Today, both are on the decline as the education market becomes increasingly diversified. The winners are schools like Thompson’s Eagle High, combining edupreneurial flair with a loyal local constituency.
“Eureka has gone the way of Marlboro and MacDonalds,” says Ethan Bloom, director of Minds of Tomorrow, an education-industry think tank. “There’s too much competition in the US now. They can stay afloat but they can’t expand. Instead, Eureka has become very aggressive in foreign markets.”
In the past few years, Longes has taken on a new global role, zooming around the world in a private jet, meeting with heads of state and visiting the groundbreaking ceremonies of hundreds of new schools in 48 countries. Some of these schools are in dictatorships and police states, where information is tightly controlled.
“We’ve taken some flak for projects in authoritarian places,” admits Gerner. “But we see ourselves as a ‘Trojan horse,’ a conduit for liberal principles. Dictators tolerate us because we’re the gatekeeper to technology and money. We can create the kind of talent they want. But Eureka never toes the local party line. We’re always in charge of our own curriculum.”
Despite all the hype, the “education billionaire” is in part a myth. Like most other edupreneurs, Longes made his fortune from spin-offs, such as adult education. Eureka’s cash cow is health classes. In 2011, Longes responded to rising health insurance premiums by offering a combination of online medicine and health classes at Eureka schools. He convinced insurance companies that people who took his health classes could reduce hospital visits by consulting the “web doctor.” They offered sharply reduced premiums. Eureka’s health scheme was a huge success and has cross-subsidized the schools for a decade.
But such subtleties were muted at the Cato Institute’s ceremony to bestow the Milton Friedman Award. Many Eureka graduates, including screenwriter Ben Zarari and Liberian prime minister Cyrus Dawson, gave brief testimonials. The address of keynote speaker Ryan Basting, a political economist at the Kennedy School of Government, was triumphalist.
“The economic boom of the 1990s was driven by the IT revolution,” said Basting. “That of the 2010s was driven by the education revolution. Americans today are smarter, more entrepreneurial, more adaptable, more creative, happier and more idealistic than they were thirty years ago, because the schools made them that way. They are better scientists, better businessmen, better citizens, better customers. Longes and his fellow edupreneurs have helped to define what promises to be America’s role in the world for the rest of the century: the education country.”
Longes’ own remarks were short but full of emotion. “I’ve been told a few times that I can’t take credit, that it’s the kids who achieve these things. It’s always strange to hear that, because that’s always been completely obvious to me. My students always take me by surprise, in such strange and wonderful ways. You would think the amazement would wear off but it doesn’t. Someone else planted the seeds—maybe God, I don’t know—I just watered them, and I’m always awestruck by the variety and beauty of what comes up… Education is the best business in the world. I’m grateful to the students, teachers, to everyone who made it possible for me. I know there were hard times, but it’s funny: looking back, I don’t remember them at all. All I remember is joy, joy and wonder.”
This column is dedicated to the young people who volunteer in inner-city Catholic schools to give disadvantaged children a chance.
This column is dedicated to the future.