I live in Ohio, where, in the summer of 2023, the state legislature enacted a universal school voucher program that diverts roughly a billion dollars every year out of the state’s public school foundation budget to pay for private school tuition. The voucher expansion showed up in the state budget with minimal public debate. And surprisingly today, a lot of people are not fully aware of its effect on their local public schools. People who follow education issues definitely grasp what has happened, but I meet a lot of people who don’t know the difference between charter schools and vouchers, or people who express surprise when they learn how much money is being diverted out of the state’s public schools, or people who don’t realize that most of the kids taking the vouchers were already in private schools and the state has suddenly begun covering their tuition.

In the past couple of years, voucher programs have rapidly been enacted or expanded across a lot of states, despite that vouchers, when brought to a vote of the people of any state, have never passed.  In a recent Boston Globe column, constitutional scholar Derek Black explains: “Using public funds to pay private school tuition has never ranked high on voters’ priorities…. In fact, when put to the voters, no measure to expand private school vouchers has ever succeeded.”  But legislators keep on expanding vouchers or enacting new programs. Why?  Black continues: “It is not that legislators are misjudging their constituents; it’s that voters and their education needs are not part of their calculus. Big money donors, ideologues, and party leaders have turned vouchers—and dismantling what they call ‘government schools’ into a loyalty litmus test… The voucher fight might, on the surface, look like typical partisan politics, but something more disturbing is happening. Leaders are willing to sacrifice public education at the alter of politics and, in the process endanger the health and stability of democratic society.”

A professor at Michigan State University, who has extensively studied vouchers and described their growth in The Privateers, his 2024 book, Josh Cowen believes big-money has driven the expansion of vouchers as billionaire ideologues promote the privatization of public schooling and invest in the campaigns of politicians who adhere to their ideology: “I see these billionaires and their associated advocacy organizations falling into three categories representing three different areas of public policy that billionaires want to influence. The first, and oldest, are the Christian Nationalists—the folks behind the idea that a far-right notion of Christianity should form the basis of American law and policy. This is the Betsy DeVos version… Next are the zero-government folks. This is mostly Koch Network groups like Stand Together, and Yea Every Kid… They want school vouchers because they see public schools as ‘government’ and—being from oil and gas money—they associate government with ‘regulation.’… Third, and finally, there are the tech bros like Musk and Yass. These guys are new players in the billionaire voucher shell game… (I)t’s hard to identify a coherent aim or ideology that ties them to vouchers. Except for one thing: the privatized, monetized idea of education as just another commodity… If your world view draws from an every-bro-for-himself mentality, stoked with the conviction that you’re a genius investor… it makes some sense that a check from taxpayers to speculate on an open education market has some appeal.”

The executive director of the Network for Public Education, Carol Burris worries about the ultimate end game of the voucher ideologues who have been installed across so many state legislatures: “(T)he gravest threat posed by the school choice movement is its ultimate objective: putting an end to public responsibility for education… In a pay-as-you-go system, few families will have the financial means to educate a special needs child outside the home. What’s more, families in rural areas will be left with few options, if any: In the for-profit marketplace, why go where customers are few and nonaffluent? If your Muslim or Jewish child lives in a town where the majority ‘choose’ a Christian school, there may be no secular option. Schools opening and closing based on profit margins will be commonplace….”

In states where legislators have expanded vouchers, too often media coverage of the consequences has been mostly in publications without widespread distribution: For the Ohio Capital Journal, Rob Moore describes what has happened here in Ohio: “From Fiscal Year 2023 to Fiscal Year 2024, voucher use increased by 60,000 students, whole enrollment in private schools increased by only 3,000 students. This means 95% of new voucher use in 2024 was by students who were already enrolled in private schools…. This means the policy change in Ohio to expand eligibility was largely a windfall to families that were already planning on sending children to private schools. And because of the policy change that was made, it was likely a regressive windfall that accrued mainly to well-off households.  The most recent estimate of the size of total spending on private school vouchers in 2024 is about $970 million. For context, that is more than the state spent on the entire Department of Children and Youth (which runs state child welfare, child care, and early education programs) and the Department of Natural Resources combined.”

ProPublica has been producing a series of detailed horror stores about vouchers. On New Year’s Eve, the most recent of these stories traces Arizona’s closure of a charter school for academic reasons followed by the school’s reopening as a private religious school accepting that state’s ESA vouchers.  Once open, the private school shut down mid-year because the founder ran out of money.  The reporters interviewed an official at the Arizona Department of Education told them that while the state regulates the performance of public schools including charter schools that are technically public schools in Arizona, “state law ‘makes it clear that we have no authority to oversee private schools,’ even ones receiving public dollars. Regarding publicly funded private schools closing midyear, he said that parents ‘have the wherewithal’ to find another school option ‘regardless of the time of year,’ and that the law ‘does not contemplate the department making recommendations to parents’ at all.”

Public school boards are themselves reacting to the penalties for their public schools posed by vouchers.  In rural Wisconsin, the state with the nation’s oldest voucher program, the Kickapoo Area Board of Education in rural Viola, a little rural town west of Wisconsin Dells, east of the Mississippi River, south of LaCross, and north of the Iowa border—passed a resolution protesting the diversion of the school district’s school funding to the state’s private school voucher program which primarily serves students in towns and cities big enough to support a private school that can accept the state’s tuition vouchers: “Whereas, during the 2023-2024 school year, $573,641,910 of Wisconsin citizen’s public tax dollars were diverted to private schools;… during the 2023-2024 school year, 11 students within the Kickapoo Area School District received a private school voucher;… during the 2023-2024 school year, taxpayers in the School District of Kickapoo contributed $113,811, an increase of 440%… for private school vouchers; and… the Kickapoo Area School District was forced to a recurring operational referendum in April 2024 resulting in a levy increase of $1.6 million after year 4 to offset inadequate state school funding and funding diverted to the private school voucher program…. The Kickapoo Area School Board calls on the Wisconsin State Assembly, and the Wisconsin State Senate to (1) discontinue the use of public tax dollars to fund private school vouchers, and (2) provide property tax bill include private voucher funding transparency until the State returns to public tax dollars only funding public schools.”

Perhaps it is not surprising, at a time when education funding is not a hot news item and when local newspapers are dying in many towns, that a lot of people are neither aware of the threat to our public schools posed by today’s voucher expansion nor prepared to do anything to defeat it. While we know that most people will vote against vouchers in an election, in today’s circumstances, getting the public informed enough to push back and building the political will to oppose school privatization is not easy.

First Focus on Children has made available a clear, simple resource (two-pages that can be printed front/back on one page) to distribute at meetings or post on your organization’s website, or send around online to members of your PTA or community organization. Privatizing Public School Funds: Threats to Equity, Access, and Educational Quality details how vouchers:

• Undermine Academic Achievement
• Create Fraud and Wasteful Spending
• Drain State Budgets
• Enable Discrimination
• Have Historically Excluded Marginalized Communities, and
• Provide Handouts to the Wealthy

The resource concludes: “Evidence overwhelmingly supports the claim that private school vouchers are a failed policy. Instead of focusing on private school vouchers that benefit only small numbers of students, lawmakers must consider solutions that advance opportunity for the 90% of U.S. students who attend public schools.” It’s a simple, well-designed resource, and it is free and readily available.