This year was supposed to be better for the nation’s schools. Hope sprung from the receding threat of COVID-19 and a new administration committed to public education. But the legacy of the Donald Trump presidency and continuing pandemic-related disruptions for students have led to the enactment of numerous state laws establishing or expanding private school voucher programs.
Private school vouchers undermine the fundamental promise of a high-quality, equitable education for all students.
Republican state legislators, exploiting the crisis to invigorate their school privatization agenda, are using school closures to push for vouchers. The decades-long underfunding of public schools by these same legislators meant the resources needed to ensure student and staff safety in the pandemic weren’t there. And many state capitol buildings were closed to the public earlier this year, preventing the demonstrations and testimony that often put pressure on state legislators to vote against school voucher bills.
This was a perfect storm for privatizers, and resulted in the introduction of voucher bills in dozens of states. Many failed but too many passed, and the effort to undermine education as a public good and a key pillar of our democracy got a significant shot in the arm. The effects of this will be felt for years to come.
Private school vouchers, in a nutshell, redirect public money to private institutions. They undermine the fundamental promise of a high-quality, equitable education for all students, as private schools often discriminate based on factors like religion, fluency in English, disability, sexual orientation, and gender identity. Vouchers also drain resources from public schools, which are not only required to serve all students, but are also vital community hubs and local units of democratic government.
There are several kinds of private school vouchers:
- Traditional vouchers pay for a student’s private school tuition with direct payments from the public treasury. Legislatures typically don’t enact traditional “voucher” programs because voters don’t like them.
- Education Savings Accounts, or “ESA” voucher programs, direct public funds (generally a percentage of the per-pupil amount provided by the state to public schools) into a personal account. These funds can be used to pay for a student’s private school tuition, as well as a broad range of other private education expenses, including tutoring, online coursework, transportation, or even homeschooling.
- Tax credit scholarship programs, also known as “neovouchers,” provide individuals or corporations with up to a 100 percent, dollar-for-dollar credit to send the money they would otherwise owe in taxes to private organizations. These organizations then fund private school vouchers for families to pay for tuition and other private education costs.
At least eight states have enacted new voucher programs in 2021 (as of mid-summer). Some of these states, including Arkansas and Indiana, already had one or more existing voucher programs. This multiplication of voucher schemes is common once an initial program is pushed through.
Other states with new voucher schemes this year had previously been voucher-free. Kentucky, for example, established an education opportunity account program, an ESA voucher funded by a tax credit mechanism that provides $25 million annually in tax credits to individuals and corporations in exchange for donations to third-party voucher-granting organizations. The bill was vetoed by Democratic Governor Andy Beshear, but the state legislature overrode his veto.
The Kentucky law places almost no restrictions on voucher-granting organizations, which can set their own criteria for the distribution of voucher funds. The private schools accepting these vouchers have virtually free rein to operate. They are often not held to high standards of academic quality or fiscal management, nor required to meet state accountability standards. The voucher law allows these schools to discriminate based on race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, English fluency, and academic ability. The law is now being challenged in court by Kentucky public school parents and school districts.
The idea that vouchers simply shift to private schools the funds that would have been used on public education is a myth.
West Virginia also enacted the state’s first voucher program in 2021. The state zoomed from zero to sixty, enacting a near-universal voucher that is the broadest in the country. The new voucher law permits any student enrolled in public school or entering kindergarten to receive an Education Savings Account voucher, with the public school enrollment requirement ending in 2026 if participation is low in the first few years. The ESA amount is 100 percent of state per-pupil funding.
The West Virginia law, notably, requires parents be notified that the use of vouchers to send students with disabilities to private schools constitutes a “parental placement” under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. This means students and families waive most of their rights under the federal law that protects students with disabilities and guarantees them a free public education with all the programs and services required to meet their needs. The loss of rights isn’t what’s notable—this is true for almost all voucher programs. The fact that parents are informed of this loss is what’s unusual.
At least fourteen states expanded their existing voucher programs this year, sometimes extending eligibility to a broader set of students or lifting the cap on the number of vouchers or the ceiling on tax credits. Unlike new programs, these expansions often fly under the radar, but they are far from trivial.
In Montana, the voucher program enacted in 2015 provides 100 percent tax credits for donations up to $150. The expansion bill passed in 2021 raised that amount to $200,000. The bill reduces the cap on the size of the program from $3 million to $1 million in 2021, and $2 million the following year, but provides that in the future it will increase by 20 percent following any year where at least 80 percent of the cap is used. The new law also raises limits on the size of the voucher and does away with a requirement that voucher schools administer and publish the results of standardized tests.
The expansion of initially small voucher programs is a favored tactic of pro-voucher groups. First, legislators propose a targeted or pilot program for a vulnerable group of students—often students with disabilities. Then they expand that to other student subgroups, even if there’s no evidence of need or clear evidence of harm.
In 2021, Arkansas passed two bills expanding the existing voucher program for students with disabilities and youth in foster care. This was despite a 2020 report by the state revealing inequitable enrollment by race and income, a glaring lack of usable data on academic outcomes, and little accountability for the public funds funneled to private schools. The new laws expand the definition of a disability that makes students eligible for vouchers and now include children of military families in the program.
In Georgia, the establishment of a new voucher program was avoided in 2021, but the state still expanded its special needs voucher. Kansas, Oklahoma, and South Dakota, like Montana, expanded their tax-credit voucher programs. Florida, which already diverts nearly $1 billion per year to private school voucher schemes despite severe and chronic underfunding of its public schools, streamlined and expanded the state’s myriad voucher programs.
Much of the school privatization battle is fought at the state level. Thus, despite the ouster of pro-voucher former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, and the Biden Administration’s opposition to voucher programs, the struggle over policies that divert public funds to private schools has only intensified.
At a very basic level, private school vouchers don’t do what education policies are supposed to: promote positive educational results. Study after study has shown that students who use vouchers to attend private school don’t perform any better than their public school peers. In fact, some studies have found that academic outcomes worsen for voucher students.
The claim that vouchers save money is only persuasive if you don’t have all the facts. The idea that vouchers simply shift to private schools the funds that would have been used on public education is a myth. Voucher programs often subsidize private education for families that can already afford it, and whose children would never have attended public schools.
The amount of a voucher often falls far short of the full cost of private school tuition, meaning families must make up the difference. And vouchers often shift expenses for essential services to parents that are normally included in a free public school education, such as transportation, free and reduced price lunch, and disability-related services. If vouchers save the state money, it is on the backs of children and families.
But vouchers don’t save money for the government, either. A recent study published by the National Education Policy Center concluded that implementing universal vouchers would increase the total cost to the public by 11 to 33 percent, or up to $203 billion per year. Because private schools can discriminate in enrollment and services, voucher programs can concentrate in public schools those students who require increased resources to access equitable educational opportunities, such as students with disabilities and those learning English.
Public school systems also have substantial fixed costs—including facilities and staff contracts—that cannot be reduced when students from different classrooms, grades, and school buildings exit to use vouchers. Fraud and waste are common in voucher programs, and there is scant fiscal accountability for private schools or voucher-granting organizations.
Finally, privatizers’ assertions that vouchers promote civil rights are absurd. Voucher programs came about after the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision so white families could attend segregated private schools and thereby avoid integration. Today vouchers often play a similar role, or at least have similar segregative effects. A 2017 Century Foundation report concluded that “voucher programs are more likely to increase school segregation than to promote integration or maintain the status quo.”
Private school vouchers rob the public treasury, pay for discrimination, do not improve student outcomes, increase segregation, and weaken an enormously important public good. Many parents and community members know this, and through their advocacy a significant number of these bills die, including bills proposing larger expansions or additional programs in states like Arizona, Georgia, and Kansas during their 2021 legislative sessions. Public education supporters have succeeded in beating back voucher legislation by forming bipartisan coalitions, including recruiting rural Republican legislators, and through grassroots mobilization. Strategies like these have defeated voucher proposals every year in Republican-controlled Texas.
That’s good news but not good enough. Much work needs to be done to counter this push to defund the nation’s public schools, stratify communities along racial and economic lines, and create an education “marketplace” with no regard for quality or accountability. That work is happening everywhere, taken up by students, parents, educators, advocates, lawyers, elected officials, and everybody else who values public schools as crucial community institutions.
This article was edited from the version that was published in the magazine to correct a phrasing error.