Steve Hinnefeld writes about the very expensive and ineffectual voucher program in Indiana, which is based on a lie. On several lies, actually. The promoters of vouchers claimed that vouchers would save poor kids from failing public schools. He shows in this post that most vouchers are used by students who never attended a public school, who are not poor, and who are not getting a better education than students in public schools. The advocates said it would save money, but the cost this year is nearly a quarter billion dollars.
He writes:
Indiana awarded $241.4 million in the 2021-22 school year to pay tuition and fees for students to attend private schools. That’s 44% more than the state spent on vouchers the previous year.
The increase, detailed in a Department of Education report, isn’t surprising. The Indiana General Assembly in 2021 vastly expanded the voucher program, opening it to families near the top of the state’s income scale and making the vouchers significantly more generous.
Nearly all the 330 private schools that received voucher funding are religious schools. Some discriminate against students, families and employees because of their religion, disability status, sexual orientation or gender identity. Indiana is bankrolling bigotry.
And many of the families receiving vouchers could pay private school tuition without public assistance. Some 20% of voucher households last year had an income of $100,000 or more, well above Indiana’s median household income of about $58,000.
The voucher program, created in 2011, was sold as a way to help children from poor families opt out of “failing” public schools. Mitch Daniels, Indiana’s governor at the time and a leading voucher advocate, said students should attend a public school for two semesters to qualify, giving public schools a chance to show what they could do.
But the two-semester requirement fell by the wayside. Students now have nine pathways by which they can qualify. If a family meets the income requirement, which is laughably lax, a private school can find a way to get them vouchers.
When the program started, supporters said it wouldn’t cost anything, because, if the students didn’t have vouchers, the state would be paying for them to attend public schools. They don’t even pretend to believe that anymore. In 2021-22, 70% of voucher students had no record of having attended a public school in the state. Most voucher funding is going to families that intended all along to send their kids to private schools — and often had the means to do so.
The program initially served both low- and middle-income families. Last year, the legislature threw the door open to high-income families. Now, a family of five making $172,000 can receive vouchers worth over $5,400 on average per child. For about half of all voucher students, the award covers the full cost of tuition and fees at their private school.
Voucher participation had stalled, but with last year’s expansion, the number of voucher students exploded: 44,376 students had vouchers in 2021-22, up 24.3% from the previous year.
Over the years, Indiana’s voucher population has grown whiter and markedly less poor. Nearly 60% of voucher students are white, an overrepresentation considering the program is most pervasive in urban areas, where there are many Black and Hispanic students. Only 10.5% of voucher students are Black, compared to 13.5% of Indiana public and charter school students.
The program might still seem justifiable if Indiana private schools were academically superior. They aren’t. Researchers at the universities of Kentucky and Notre Dame found that students who received vouchers fell behind their peers who remained in public schools.
Indiana policymakers no longer care about that either. They’ve embraced the idea that parents should have complete control over their children’s schooling and the public funds that pay for it. In a world of unrestricted school choice, state money will “follow the child,” wherever that may lead. Standards, accountability and academic quality don’t matter.
The point of privatization is not to help needy students but to destroy the public schools.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
A family of five making 170,000 would get this level from one source, given the full time job of taking care of a bunch of young’uns. Who has that kind of work? Not the guy who checked you out at the Racetrack when you bought your large coffee and a biscuit on your way to earn way less than 170,000 a year.
Vouchers are philosophical bribes. The policy can split an electorate that would otherwise band together and make rules to govern society that would be fair.
Vouchers are legalized, orderly methods to permanently shift public funds to create wealth and opportunity for selected individuals at the expense of communities, students, and teachers. It don’t get more fascist than that.
Thirty percent of Catholic schools are single sex. In reference to school choice, ask the Lilly Foundation (the Lilly company is the largest employer in Indiana) about its funding for religious organizations and its support for privatization. Ask the Southwestern Indiana Catholic Community Newspaper who gets credit for Indiana’s school choice legislative success.
Those who claim anti-Catholic bias are disingenuous given the enormous success of the right wing politicized Catholic Church in moving the nation toward a theocratic, Taliban-like state. The nation is done no favors by people who give the church an immunity card, ignoring the religious make-up of SCOTUS, the religion of Leonard Leo, Steve Bannon and the Koch’s Paul Weyrich, and the religion of many of the on-air Fox personalities like Laura Ingraham.
I’m surprised there is not more written about the timing of demands for women’s repression which sequences with conservative, 60+ men losing their virility to aging. Those same men, when virile in the 1960-1980 period were all in for free love and against laws that banned freedom.
a key understanding about men
Ciede-
Republican men as a friendly amendment
Steve Bannon and Robert P George as poster boys
Linda Ho hum. . . . CBK
All Worth repeating from prior note, referencing Wikipedia re Koch, the Catholic Church, and the libertarians/neo-liberals:
Linda constantly “hits” the Catholic Church . . . hardly a note without that term somewhere in there:
From a brief reading of Wikipedia on the Koch people, and to put it as briefly as I can, Koch and company are libertarians/neo-liberal. The Koch(s) apparently SUPPORT many left/democratic ideas, like pro-choice, same sex marriage, etc., but Koch’s support of Catholic and other universities is about pushing and funding their neo-liberal agenda.
The Koch and libertarians support universities through their ECONOMICS curricula and departments where their big oil interests support flows into ANTI CLIMATE CHANGE (they were at the start of the climate denier coalitions decades ago) and, again, push the economics/political ideas of neo-liberalism. Note what Court decisions followed right after the Roe blitz.
Insofar as some of the groups noted on Wikipedia are notably driven by Catholic supporters, it takes a twisted consciousness, morally and spiritually, to identify neo-liberalism with anything Christian or even Doctrinal Catholic . . . except evil and sinfulness. They Koch’s could care less about Catholicism as their remarkably leftist record shows.
In my view, the right-wing faction of the Catholic Church is far from blameless, but they too are being duped or are complicit. In my view, and for a very long time and in so many cases, Catholicism is a cover and a ruse, like the old Mafia, for those in big business of all sorts who are saturated with predatory capitalism, the free market system, and the NO OVERSIGHT/ REGULATION neo-liberal doctrine. Orthodox Catholics are one-issue voters: hence, The Present Court. Look the Kochs up and draw your own conclusions (some articles were behind paywalls but showed similar headlines, like this:
“The wealthy Koch brothers are best known for making large donations to politicians, universities, and institutions that support their economically conservative views. The Koch brothers are self-proclaimed Libertarians, and believe in an unregulated free market economy. Many Catholics, including Pope Francis himself, have claimed that this type of extreme Capitalism is in contradiction to the teachings of the Catholic church. In light of this, many feel that the church should not accept the Koch brothers’ large donations.” CBK (my emphases)
Well, this has worked out well for parochial schools in Indiana. My parents enrolled eleven of their twelve children in parochial schools at their/our own expense in the 50s-70s. Indiana was a big KKK state during our dad’s childhood so parochial were well established and women still becoming nuns so there were very “cheap” teachers. However, one of us kids had neurological issues and required medication through the day for seizures and the school had no nurse (however, my mother, a licensed teacher was 3 houses from the school and capable of coming to medicate him or he could have walked home for meds.). He was not physically handicapped and able to speak clearly He was later determined to be “learning disabled”. We were required to take entrance exams to qualify for first grade and he failed to even hold the pencil well enough to make the required markings and drawings. So, a bus came right to our driveway from the public school and he went to “special education” classes. My mother found child care for our younger sister and went to his classroom often to assist his teacher, requiring adding a car IF he’d gone to our parochial school in the neighborhood she could have walked from the neighbor’s who looked after my sister. Because they had so many other children in elementary and high school he was on his own solo in public school with no siblings.
Our high school rejected enrolling him but my parents did find a parochial high school that accepted him but there was no bus provided, they had to transport him each morning while all his siblings just walked to the bus. At the end of the school day he walked 6 blocks to a great aunt’s home until my parents finished work and could pick him up. He did not earn a diploma therefore his adult employment opportunities have been limited. So….now those schools DO accept and educate special needs children in Indianapolis area. However, the high school I graduated from has fired a couple of guidance counselors who are married to same gender persons after DECADES of their employment. The entire Indpls Archdiocese canned teachers married to same gender partners. One of the schools refused and the Archbishop arranged for them to be declared not a Catholic school. All of these schools are taking Hoosier taxpayer money that includes contributions of special needs and same gender married folks. They are fine accepting money paid by the rejected persons. Go figure.