When New Hampshire’s Republican lawmakers inserted a school voucher bill into the state budget, proponents claimed that the new program would be no big deal, that it would only cost the state about $130,000. That was in May 2021. Less than two years later, the program’s cost now stands at $14.7 million—and the legislature is poised to spend more on it.
That pattern—school voucher programs swiftly ballooning to take a huge chunk of public dollars to fund private schools—has been repeated across the country.
In a new report from Public Funds Public Schools (PFPS), researchers look at seven states that have been running a school voucher program long enough to develop a track record. The results of the study show that program costs mushroom quickly into major state expenditures, directing mountains of taxpayer money at private schools even as public schools find themselves working with less funding.
In each of the seven states that the study examined, researchers found that public school funding—as a percentage of the state’s gross domestic product—declined, even though enrollment increased over the same time.
The conventional voucher program is simple: funds from the public treasury are routed to a private school to cover all or part of a student’s tuition. Vouchers first enjoyed a wave of popularity after the U.S. Supreme Court dealt a blow to segregation in Brown vs. Board of Education. As scholar Steven Suitts explains in Overturning Brown, after the Supreme Court’s decision, white families used vouchers to flee newly-integrated public schools by placing their children in “segregation academies.” After white students had fled, many communities then reduced taxpayer funding for the now-predominantly Black public schools.
The modern voucher movement was kicked off by Wisconsin in 1990. Since then, most modern voucher initiatives have started small, limiting vouchers to families below a financial level or who attend a school with low scores on the state test. When Ohio launched its program, religious schools were allowed to accept voucher students, and that was quickly challenged as a violation of the separation of church and state. Ultimately, the Supreme Court in Zelman vs. Simmons-Harris found that because voucher money went to parents, not the schools, the voucher program did not breach the church-state barrier.
Since those days, states have implemented two other voucher types. One is a tax credit scholarship, in which a wealthy individual or business can take a tax credit for money contributed to a third party organization that administers a voucher program. Another type of voucher program sets up “education savings accounts,” which allow families to spend voucher money on a wide range of education options.
As the PFPS report notes, “voucher programs—of any type—send public dollars to private schools or companies, depleting the public treasury and shifting public resources to private hands.”
Voucher defenders claim that they save money for taxpayers. But research shows that voucher programs cost more per pupil than public schools. Certainly, it seems counter-intuitive to claim that students can be educated more cheaply if they are spread out among many schools instead of located in one. And indeed, the PFPS study reports that “the claim that it costs less to educate students with private school vouchers than in public schools ignores numerous realities.”
Families often absorb those extra costs, as do public school taxpayers who either pay more to plug the gaps or see programs cut from their local schools.
The funding issues are exacerbated by programs that switch to “universal” vouchers—vouchers extended to students who never were in the public school system to begin with, meaning that the public system loses funding, but loses $0.00 in costs. While a traditional voucher system posits that we can use the same amount of money to educate 100 students whether they are in one school or five different schools, the universal voucher posits that districts can use the same amount of funding to educate 100 students that it does to educate 130. In other words, universal vouchers are a funding cut for public schools. The research, moreover, has yet to find any significant academic benefits to voucher programs.
Voucher schools, like private schools, are able to discriminate as they wish.
Voucher schools, like private schools, are able to discriminate as they wish. Illinois’s voucher system includes schools that will not accept LGBTQ+ students or children of same-gender parents, require at least one parent to be born-again Christian, and in at least one instance, prefer students from homes with no Internet. Voucher schools regularly refuse students with special needs, or require them to waive their rights under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA).
Taxpayers are getting very limited service for their dollars, but as the PFPS report shows, they pay heavily for it.
In Florida, voucher programs carried a price tag of $241,219,945 in 2008; by 2019, that figure had ballooned to $996,257,636. In the same period, per-pupil funding for public education dropped from $9,799 to $8,628.
In Indiana, the cost of the state’s voucher program went from $20,284,504 in 2012 up to $181,860,463 in 2019.
In Ohio, spending on vouchers went from $69,772,755 in 2008 up to $360,646,965. Ohio is the only state that PFPS found had an actual growth in per-pupil spending and education spending; nevertheless, these funds did not keep pace with the growth of voucher spending.
Georgia showed the most growth in voucher spending, starting in 2009 with just more than $11 million and growing to almost $110 million, a growth of 883 percent. In that same period, Georgia’s per-pupil spending for public school dropped.
Arizona’s voucher program grew from 2008 by 270 percent to reach $250 million in 2019. Now Save Our Schools reports the program is at $300 million, with state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne bragging that the department approved 25,000 requests in a single day.
The pattern is clear enough. Voucher programs change swiftly from a minor expense to a major budget expense, an unaccountable taxpayer-funded subsidy for private schools even as public schools are slowly defunded. Any promise that a voucher program will have a minor impact on state finances is an empty one.