Peter Greene knows the dirty little secret about vouchers: schools choose, families don’t.
Not only do private and religious schools choose their students, they are free to discriminate against students because of their race, religion, sexual preference, disability, or for any other reason. A religious school can exclude students who are not of the same faith. Any private school may exclude gay students or straight students if their parents are gay.
Governor Jared Polis of Colorado is openly gay, but he embraced Trump’s federal vouchers, which subsidizes private schools that discriminate against him and his children.
He is the first Democratic Governor to sign on to the Trump-McMahon voucher plan. They both hate public schools and are doing their best to defund them. Polis is willing to go along.
Now, New York Governor Kathy Hochul is interested in following Polis’s lead. She thinks that she will win the votes of Orthodox Jews by letting the state pay their tuition. This is truly outrageous for two reasons:
The Orthodox Jews vote Republican. Hochul’s gift won’t change their behavior.
The Orthodox schools have been called out repeatedly for refusing to teach the state curriculum, for teaching students primarily in Hebrew, not English, and for delivering a sub-par education.
Governor Hochul should be ashamed of herself.
Governor Polis, on the other hand, has a long history of disdaining public schools. He personally founded two charter schools.
And on a historical note, I had a personal encounter with Polis in 2010, when he was a member of Congress. I was invited by Representative Rosa DeLauro to meet with the Democratic members of the House Education Committee and discuss my book The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education.
When I finished speaking, then-Rep. Polis announced that my book was “the worst book he had ever read” and tossed it across the table at me. He demanded his money back. Another member of Congress pulled out $20 and bought Polis’s book.
Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona is a decorated military veteran and a former astronaut. He recently introduced legislation to roll back Trump’s federal voucher program. The Wall Street Journal denounced Kelly’s proposal, and he responded with this letter to the editor.
He wrote:
Your editorial “Mark Kelly’s Bad Education Choice” (April 18) misses some key facts. We can all agree on one thing: Every parent wants their kid to get a quality education that sets them up to succeed. There’s no better path to the middle class than our public schools. I’m the son of two cops. I went to public schools from kindergarten through the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy. That system gave me a shot, and every kid deserves the same, no matter where they grow up. Massive voucher programs threaten that.
Take my state. Arizona’s universal voucher program now costs about $1 billion a year and is growing. In your editorial, you note that’s only 8% of the state’s education budget, but that billion dollars is forcing real tradeoffs in the state budget, like cuts to community colleges and water infrastructure in a state facing a severe drought. Meanwhile, more than half of voucher recipients were already being privately educated. That means in Arizona hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars are going to subsidize private tuition for families who were already paying for it.
The federal tax credit your editorial defends isn’t free, either. You acknowledge this reality when you criticize clean energy tax credits. With these education tax credits, the cost could reach as high as $50 billion in lost revenue in a single year. That adds to the federal deficit and will likely largely benefit wealthier Americans’ taxes because the credit is nonrefundable. Likewise, because the scholarships can go to households with up to 300% of the area median income, it will subsidize families who can already afford to spend thousands out of pocket to send their kids to private schools.
And public schools across the country will pay a price. When students leave, funding drops. Schools cut programs and staff, sometimes creating a downward spiral. It’s happening in Arizona now. Then what “choice” does a parent have when their local school closes? I support parents who choose private school or homeschooling for their kids. But if we want better outcomes for everyone—higher scores, higher graduation rates—the answer isn’t to take resources out of public schools, it’s to make them better.
I refuse to accept that in the richest country in the history of the world, only a small percentage of our kids get a good education. We should aim higher. My dream when I was a kid was to become an astronaut. I got to achieve that. Every kid deserves the chance to chase their dream too, and that starts with good public schools.
Peter Greene wrote in Forbes about a Democrat-led effort to eliminate the federal voucher program from Trump’s “One Big Ugly Bill,” the one that takes from the poor and gives to the richest. Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona led the opposition to this program. Kelly knows how vouchers have harmed the state budget and public schools in Arizona.
One portion of the President Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” was a federal school voucher program that any state could join. But before that plan can go into effect, a new Senate bill has been proposed that would undo the vouchers entirely.
Senators Mark Kelly (D-AZ), Mazie Hirono (D-HI) and an additional 28 senators have introduced the Keep Public Funds in Public Schools Act. The act would strike IRS Code Section 25, the portion of the IRS code that was inserted to create the federal school voucher program, eliminating that program.
The new voucher program was sold as a tax credit program. It would allow taxpayers to claim a $1,700 tax credit by diverting that payment from the IRS to a scholarship granting organization that would then award at least $1,530 of that donation to a student (the rules governing the program allow SGOs to keep 10% of the donated funds).
Kelly cites his home state of Arizona as a cautionary tale, where taxpayer-funded school vouchers have become costly: “Since 2022, our state’s universal voucher program has diverted and drained money from public schools; last year alone cost Arizona taxpayers nearly $1 billion. Instead of investing in classrooms, special education services, or school safety, lawmakers pushed massive tax giveaways and created a parallel education system that lacks transparency and accountability.”
12News and reporter Craig Harris have run a series of reports showing much of that money has gone to questionable and disallowed purposes, including dirt bikes, custom tires and luxury hotel stays. Choice advocates such as EdChoice have pushed back, but have had difficulty debunking Harris’s results.
“In Arizona, we’ve already seen how universal vouchers are leading to rampant fraud and benefiting people who already had the means to send their kids to private school, while decimating public education for everyone else,” said Kelly.
On X, Secretary of Education Lindas McMahon noted that Kelly surely knows “the Education Freedom Tax Credit does not take a single dollar away from public schools — it brings new, private money into education.”
When Kentucky’s similarly-structured tax credit scholarship program was challenged in court, the state made a similar argument that the program did not use any public taxpayer funds. But when the Kentucky Supreme Court ruled against the program, they rejected that argument. “The money at issue cannot be characterized as simply private funds,” they wrote, “rather it represents the tax liability that the taxpayer would otherwise owe.”
When it comes to granting tax credits, the federal government has one power that states do not. Most states require a balanced budget; the state needs to find a way to cover the money it lost by offering credits rather than collecting on the tax liability. The federal government can just add the uncollected taxes to its deficit tab.
Kelly noted in an interview, “It is a deficit bomb, this federal program.”
The Joint Committee on Taxation, a nonpartisan entity that assists Congress on tax legislation, estimated that the credit could cost $25.9 billion between 2025 and 2034 or around $3 billion to $4 billion a year. That would mean potential income of $300-$400 million for SGOs; several organizations are preparing to launch national SGOs to work with the federal voucher program.
In addition to Kelly and Hirono, the Keep Public Funds in Public Schools Act is cosponsored by Senators Michael Bennet (D-CO), Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), Cory Booker (D-NJ), Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-DE), Chris Coons (D-DE), Tammy Duckworth (D-IL), Dick Durbin (D-IL), John Fetterman (D-PA), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), Martin Heinrich (D-NM), Tim Kaine (D-VA), Andy Kim (D-NJ), Angus King (I-ME), Ben Ray Luján (D-NM), Ed Markey (D-MA), Jeff Merkley (D-OR), Chris Murphy (D-CT), Alex Padilla (D-CA), Jack Reed (D-RI), Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Adam Schiff (D-CA), Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), Tina Smith (D-MN), Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Peter Welch (D-VT), and Ron Wyden (D-OR).
Garry Rayno, writer of “The Distant Dome” for inDepthNH, has been covering the legislature for many years. The presence of a large faction of libertarians in the legislature make it difficult to predict what they will do.
In this post, he reviews the likely consequences of passing a voucher bill for which everyone is eligible.
Rayno wrote about what vouchers will accomplish: They will subsidize the well-to-do while diminishing the resources of poor districts.
He wrote:
This week the House will vote on what is perhaps one of the Republicans’ biggest priorities, universal public school open enrollment or Senate Bill 101.
The bill has changed since it left the Senate with a new funding source so one town’s school property tax dollars are no longer sent to another school district following one of its students.
Under the new plan, the district enrolling another district’s student would receive a $9,000 payment from the state’s often tapped Education Trust Fund which was originally established to hold state tax dollars for public education separately to guarantee the state meets its obligation to provide its students an adequate education and to pay for it.
Over the last five years about $130 million dollars has been drawn from the trust fund to largely subsidize the education of children who were not supported by the state dollars because they are in private, or religious schools or homeschooled and their parents were footing the bill.
Despite two superior court rulings the state is not meeting its obligation to pay for an adequate education for its students, lawmakers have not seen fit to increase state aid to public schools which receive about $4,200 per pupil in state aid, along with differentiated aid for poverty, English language learners and special education making the average per pupil aid around $5,000 per student.
If this bill passes, and it probably will, even more money will be drawn from the Education Trust Fund to pay for students moving from one public school to another.
The State Department of Education declined to predict how many students might take advantage of the new open enrollment policy, so just how much of a hit the trust fund will take is not known.
The trust fund is not the only entity that will experience financial loss with the new policy.
The school district losing the student will lose his or her state aid which ranges from $4,200 on the low end to about $8,000 on the high side.
Chances are the districts losing students will be in property poor communities that can ill afford to lose any state aid for their schools without impacting property taxes. Even if they reduce staff if enough students leave, many costs like buildings, electricity, heating and transportation will remain the same.
The district receiving the students will receive the $9,000 per student state aid but its average per pupil cost is likely to be higher than the state average of about $23,000 per student.
That means the receiving district will have to pick up the difference in theory although adding a few students is not likely to change overall costs much.
And the big issue still hanging over the open enrollment bill is who pays for a student’s special education costs who transfers.
The sending district is responsible for those costs, so some — and it may actually be many — school districts will be sending the receiving districts substantial checks to cover special education services which have been growing steadily more expensive with the state and federal governments not living up to their obligations to pay those bills.
That means local property taxpayers in a sending district will continue to pay the majority of the special education costs for their student if he or she transfers out of the district.
Under the bill, parents are responsible for their student’s transportation to the new school although they can make arrangements with the receiving districts to drop their student at a convenient bus stop, but that is not guaranteed.
Looking at the bigger picture, who will be able to participate in the new open enrollment scheme? Probably not a single parent — most likely a mother — who has to work one or two or three jobs to support her children, or poor families with both parents working.
The largest group served by the open enrollment plan will be children of well-to-do parents who have the time and money to drive their children the 10 or 50 or 100 miles to the school of their choice be it for academics, the theater, music, art or athletic program, or even the special education services, to schools in property wealthy school districts.
Once again it is the reverse Robin Hood concept where the property wealthy districts and wealthy families receive the greatest benefit while the property poor districts and their families will see less state aid and dwindling educational resources for their children.
Much like the state’s voucher program, while it was originally touted as a way for low-income parents to access the best educational environment for their children, the greatest benefit is to those families wealthy enough to send their children to private or religious schools or to homeschool their children.
There is a lot of rhetoric about open enrollment providing the best educational experience for children, but that is only true if you can afford to and have the time to transport their children to another school district.
Since the supporters of the voucher program or Education Freedom Accounts, were able to open the program to any eligible parent in New Hampshire last year regardless of income this year, they have proposed several other ways to expand it beyond the legal cap of 10,000 students this year and 12,500 this coming school year by opening it up to military families and allowing EFA students to take classes at their local public schools at no cost.
When the program originally passed, EFA students were not allowed to go back to their former school for a class or two, there was a bold black line.
Now supporters of the program want to blur the line which is fine for the student and his or her parents but not the school districts which lost the state aid associated with those students.
The proposed changes do not help those low-income parents who were used to finally get the program passed by including it in the budget package during the 2021 session, but are now seldom mentioned. The program did not have the votes to pass on its own five years ago.
If the voucher program were truly helping kids who do not do well in the public school environment from low-income families, there would be a lot less opposition.
Those kids are a small minority and do not receive the vast majority of the benefits.
Those who benefit from the new open enrollment program are the same people who benefit from the voucher program, those wealthy enough to send their children to private and public institutions and homeschool, not those leaving public schools, who are few and far between and a declining percentage.
The greatest beneficiaries of this “school choice” push are not the ones who need government’s help. They can do quite well on their own.
And all of these changes to public education do nothing to reform it or fund it adequately, but do make it more difficult to provide for the educational needs of 90 percent of the state’s children who attend public schools.
And that is the bigger picture too many people fail to see.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott waged a multimillion dollar campaign to defeat moderate Republicans in the Hogse of Representatives so he could finally get the legislature to pass his voucher bill. He wanted to subsidize private Christian schools and was shocked when Islamic schools wanted their students to get vouchers.
Abbott falsely claimed that public schools were “indoctrinating” students, and he wanted the state to pay for students to go to religious schools, whose explicit purpose is indoctrination.
As usual, the overwhelming majority of voucher applicants had never attended a public school. Most were already enrolled in a religious or private school or were none-schooled.
What would’ve been school-choice proponents’ triumphant publicity tour after the application period closed on Texas’ shiny new voucher program, in mid-March, was instead consumed by catty finger-pointing between two top state officials over who’s to blame for the state seemingly botching its attempt to religiously discriminate against some program participants.
It’s the sort of comedic tragedy that has become all too common in the red empire of Texas: Pass a harmful new policy while prevaricating as to its actual intent, create a pretext to carry out the policy in a clearly discriminatory fashion, invite a costly lawsuit that will ultimately end with the state being forced to comply, muddy the waters over who’s to blame.
While pushing the private-school voucher bill through the state House and Senate last year, Republican legislative hands repeatedly insisted, when presented with various theoretical scenarios, that this near-universal “Texas Education Freedom Accounts” program would be open to any and all types of private schools—of all creeds and persuasions. Religious freedom was to reign supreme. How dare thee even question the universality of this venerable program, Republican legislators inveighed.
In predictable fashion, the Texas GOP—lately in the throes of another virulent anti-Muslim bender—hasn’t quite lived up to that promise. In the lead-up to the official voucher rollout, acting Texas Comptroller Kelly Hancock—who is currently in charge of administering the program and was, at the time, trying to win a primary election to hold onto his appointed post—used the administrative process to effectively block certain Islamic schools from participating by alleging such potential applicants were affiliated with the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a national civil rights group akin to the NAACP or LULAC, and the Egypt-based transnational organization the Muslim Brotherhood, each of which the state has deemed a “foreign terrorist organization.” (The rule also sought to block schools affiliated with the darned Chinese Communist Party.) The conflation of CAIR with the Muslim Brotherhood and Palestine’s Hamas is a theory that’s long brewedin the right’s more feverish swamps. (CAIR is suing the State of Texas over this designation.)
In response, a group of Islamic schools and Muslim families went to court over the discriminatory exclusion from the program: “The exclusion is not based on individualized findings of unlawful conduct by any specific school, but rather on categorical presumptions that Islamic schools are suspect and potentially linked to terrorism by virtue of their religious identity and community associations,” the lawsuit read. A federal judge ordered the state to extend its application deadline to allow for these schools to go through the process.
The comptroller’s office has since said that it has accepted all eligible Islamic schools that applied to participate in the program—including Houston’s Quran Academy—but not before Hancock sent a letter critiquing Attorney General Ken Paxton’s handling of the court case and urging Paxton to strip Quran Academy, which the state unsubstantially claims has links to the Muslim Brotherhood, of its ability to operate in the state. In the letter, Hancock—fresh off being blown out in his primary bid to be the duly elected comptroller by ex-state Senator Don Huffines—effectively accused Paxton of being soft on terrorism. “Texas cannot be asleep at the wheel as radical Islam spreads,” Hancock wrote.
Paxton, in the midst of a heated runoff battle with John Cornyn after coming in second in his own primary bid to ascend to the U.S. Senate, took exception to being scolded by the likes of a RINO such as Hancock (i.e., one of the two GOP senators who voted to convict Paxton in his impeachment proceedings in 2023). The still-AG issued a scorched-earth retort, calling the interim comptroller an incompetent never-Trump hack nursing a deep political grudge—and demanding Hancock be fired. (It’s not clear who, if anyone, would have the authority to fire him.)
Paxton then said his office, whose duties include serving as legal counsel for state agencies, would no longer be defending the comptroller in the federal vouchers lawsuit, claiming Hancock’s letter undermined the state’s case and introduced “incendiary” accusations against Quran Academy that had not been entered into evidence in court.
“Never before have I witnessed such a fundamentally unserious person be both an unbelievable embarrassment to the State and put his own interests above Texans,” Paxton wrote. “It would be easy to disregard Kelly Hancock’s letter as nothing more than hotheaded, politically-motivated behavior from someone desperately clinging to relevancy, but it’s far worse than that: His actions hurt my office’s ability to defend the Comptroller’s office in these critical cases.”
For vouchers, there have been some other PR snags as well. For instance, one religious school—Cypress Christian in the Houston area—that hosted a pro-voucher event during Governor Greg Abbott’s promotional tour last year, has itself opted not to participate in the program.
Per the Houston Chronicle, the school’s leader told parents that the institution is “governed exclusively by biblical doctrine and scripture” and that enrolling in the voucher program would inherently result in “ongoing government entanglement.” Many other high-end private schools—where the annual tuition typically far exceeds the standard $10,000 voucher allotment—in the Houston area have also optedagainst participation.
All the while, Abbott—who claims political ownership of both the school voucher program, having succeeded in ramming it through a humbled Texas House, and Kelly Hancock’s comptrollership, an ally whom he plucked from the state Senate to take over the statewide office and launch of the program—was radio silent. The governor, in late March, spent his allotted time at CPAC in Dallas, while Paxton and Hancock traded potshots, droning on about the urgent need to stop the “Talarico takeover of Texas,” referencing the Democrats’ Senate candidate.
Meanwhile, how does the voucher program—which was sold as a tool to allow low-income families to get their kids out of the state’s failing woke indoctrination facilities, known as public schools, and into predominantly Christian private schools—appear to be sizing up with its mission?
It’s certainly succeeded in getting more applications than the $1 billion that the state has initially appropriated can cover, which is about 90,000 spots. Applications had been submitted for about 275,000 students as of late March. But just 25 percent of those—about 60,000—were for students currently enrolled in public schools, according to state comptroller data. (That, per the Texas Center for Voucher Transparency, amounts to about 1 percent of the state’s 5.5 million public school students.)
To be clear, that means the vast majority of the students who are applying for vouchers are already enrolled in private schools, being homeschooled, or entering school for the first time. There were roughly 2,300 schools enrolled in the program so far—though those schools have full discretion in whether or not to accept a voucher recipient. Many of the enrolled schools are parochial Catholic schools or Christian academies. As the Texas Observer has previously reported, dozens of these enrolled schools have policies that restrict admission based on religion and even sexual identity.
The application period closed on March 31, then the process moved on to the next phase in which the state—through its privately contracted voucher vendor—will determine who receives the limited number of vouchers, based on a convoluted, multistep process accounting for family income and other variables.
By that point, it seems assured, some new brouhaha will be consuming the program.
Yesterday, I posted Peter Greene’s post about the voucher battle in Nebraska. Republicans in the state legislature really want vouchers. Voters really don’t want vouchers. I no as recent referendum, Nebraska voters overturned the state’s voucher program. That shoukd have been the end of the story, but it wasn’t. The Republican Governor and legislature decided to ignore the voters and participate in Trump’s voucher plan.
But then Peter discovered the battle was not over.
As we noted last week, some Nebraska fans of taxpayer-funded vouchers tried–again–to get enact vouchers, this time through the sneaky technique of putting them in the budget. Instead of getting their vouchers, they raised a controversy that sank the entire budget.
State Sen. Rob Clements of Elmwood, Appropriations Committee chair, removed the $3.5 million of voucher money, meant to bridg the gap between the end of the state’s voucher program that was repealed by voters, and the beginning of the federal voucher system that Governor Pillen opted into (the voters get no say on that one). And lots of people were upset, as reported by the Nebraska Examiner.
Arguments for the voucher money were baloney. Sen. Christy Armendariz of Omaha argued that the vouchers were needed to protect poor kids who might be “kicked out” of public school. State Sen. Brad von Gillern of the Elkhorn area expressed frustration toward opponents, calling it hypocritical to oppose the measure when many of the same senators argue the state isn’t doing enough to help the poor.
“Shame on you,” von Gillern said. “If you make a pitch for poor people for any other reason, and you can’t support this, you’re a hypocrite.”
Except that vouchers are used mostly by wealthy, already-in-private-school students, and it’s the private schools that get to pick their students, not vice versa. It is telling that the voucher crowd did not have anecdotes of poor children who had been kicked out of public school and had been rescued by vouchers. The program ran all this year, so those stories, if real, should have been easy enough to locate.
Sen. Myron Dorn of Adams, the only Republican on Appropriations to oppose the $3.5 million in vouchers, criticized focus on this one issue, and also criticized the whole sneaky business of trying to slip this policy into the budget when there is no bill or law behind it.
Said Tim Royers, president of Nebraska State Education Association–
This standoff is exactly why you don’t try and pass policy through the budget, especially when that policy is to extend an incredibly unpopular program that was repealed by voters in the most recent election. … We hope enough can come together and negotiate a path forward that keeps vouchers out of the budget.
So Nebraska voucherphiles managed to sink the state budget over a program that voters had already voted down. That’s a bold stance to take and one can hope that Nebraska voters will deliver the reward they so richly deserve. It’s yet another reminder, in a backhand way, that no matter how hard voucherphiles insist to the contrary, supporting taxpayer-funded school vouchers is not actually a winning political issue.
Peter Greene retired after 39 years of teaching, and now is the best-informed and most prolific writer about misguided and sometimes malicious efforts to “reform” public schools.
Peter has his own blog–Curmudgucation–and also writes a column about reform frauds for FORBES.
In this post, he tells the remarkable and unsavory story of vouchers in Nebraska. Nebraska is a solid red state, but its voters don’t want vouchers. Rural legislators–even Republicans–know it’s a waste of money and are sure to defund their public schools.
But the voucher-pushers keep looking for clever ways to bypass the voters, who have made it clear that they don’t want vouchers.
Peter Greene writes:
Nebraska’s voucher fans are bound and determined, like legislators in many states, to get around the voters so they can get vouchers installed.
In May of 2023, Nebraska’s Governor Jim Pillen signed into law LB 753, creating tax credit vouchers for subsidizing private schools.
The concept has been floated in Nebraska before, notably turning up more than once in 2022’s session. In 2023, it finally progressed through the legislature. But NSEA political action director Brian Nikkelson told the Nebraska Examiner that the public did not support the vouchers, and if the bill was passed, there would be a petition drive to force the bill to go on the ballot for voters to decide.
And so there was. It was a heck of a battle, with the pro-voucher forces have attracting a mountain of money, some of it from outside the state. Paul Hammel at the Nebraska Examiner reported that big money contributors include C.L. Werner, an Omaha-based trucking company executive ($100,000), Tom Peed and his son Shawn of a Lincoln publishing company ($75,000 each), and former Nebraska governor U.S. Senator Pete Ricketts ($25,000). Governor Pillen himself has contributed $100,000 to the campaign to save vouchers from a vote.
At the same time, Hammel reported, the American Federation for Children, the school choice advocacy group founded by Betsy DeVos, has contributed $103,000 in in-kind services and $583,000 in cash to the campaign.
It didn’t matter. Support Our Schools needed 60,000 signatures to force a referendum. They ended up with about twice that number (that’s roughly 10% of all eligible voters in the state). So this November, the voters of Nebraska were supposed to have their say. So you’d expect that voucher fans, who keep telling us how much everyone loves vouchers, would just sit back, secure in the knowledge that their program would win the referendum handily.
Well, no.
Instead, legislators cooked up LB 1402. This bill proposed to repeal the Opportunity Scholarships that were created under LB 753, and then to replace them with a new version of Opportunity Scholarships. This version would have been an education savings account (ESA) style super-voucher that hands over taxpayer money to send a student to a private or parochial school. It was more sketchy than last year’s bill because it appropriates state funds (rather than tax-credited contributions) to pay for the vouchers.
But mostly what it did it render the petition drive moot, because it repealed the version of vouchers that the public was going to vote on. “Ha,” they apparently thought. “That’ll stop those damned voters.”
In 67 days, the coalition of opponents gathered the necessary signatures—again. That repeal passed in November 2024, with 45 out of 49 legislative districts voting to repeal, and Nebraska’s voucher law was toast. The voters had sent a clear and unequivocal message.
Surely the state’s leaders would say, “Well, the voters have spoken, so that’s that.”
Fat chance.
Voucherphiles were back with a new proposal in January 2025. “I’m not dissuaded by the fact that it was defeated at the ballot box,” said freshman State Sen. Tony Sorrentino of Omaha.
Pillen’s new idea is to sell vouchers for the “gap” year, the year between the time when Nebraska’s vouchers are required to end and the time when the federal vouchers are supposed to kick in. The proposal is being sent through the state’s Labor Department rather than the Department of Education because that would skirt the requirement for any sort of hearing or debate, probably because voucherphiles have a pretty good idea of how that would go.
Nebraska is one of those states where rural Republicans have opposed all attempts at vouchers, and they aren’t sounding any friendlier about this one. Zach Wendling at Nebraska Examiner talked to State Sen. Tom Brandt of Plymouth, a Republican who opposed Linehan’s previous proposals; he said he is opposed to using any public money for private school choice. He’s still waiting to see how the federal tax credit program includes public schools (because, remember, there are no actual rules yet attached to the federal voucher program).
“The referendum simply eliminated that. Period, end of story,” he continued on the state policy. “There’s no other interpretation you can draw from that.”
The gap funding would cost about $5 million for around 2,500 students. Of course, with no rules in place, it’s possible that not all of Nebraska’s current voucher students would qualify for federal vouchers. Nor can we predict what slice of the federal money pie Nebraska would be entitled to. If it comes to that, we could expect voucherphiles to argue that more gap funding is needed to cover new gaps, or maybe to expand above and beyond the federal offerings.
Nebraska voucher fans are making a lot of “think of the children” noises, but families have plenty of time to look for new arrangements (i.e. finding the student a new school or going back to paying the full tuition with their own money).
This is the same story we’ve seen over and over again. Vouchers never win when voters have a chance to be heard. Every single taxpayer-funded voucher program in this country has been created without giving the taxpayers a say or ignoring the say they had already said. Taxpayer-funded vouchers are all the result of legislators backed by deep-pocketed voucher fans deciding they are going to inflict these on the taxpayers. Nebraska’s taxpayers just happen to have a few more tools to fight back with, but Nebraska’s voucherphiles just keep looking for a way to avoid that whole pesky democracy thing.
I was delighted to see that the very popular Heather Cox Richardson invited Josh Cowen to talk about the ominous spread of vouchers. HCR made clear that public schools are an essential element in building a society that is educated to sustain democracy.
The voucher movenent, on the other side, has turned into a means of building a society that sustains the white Christian nationalism of its funders.
It’s a valuable discussion, and I hope you will watch and listen.
The Century Foundation published an analysis of Trump’s federal voucher program, which explains why it is a hoax and a fraud. The authors are Kayla Patrick and Loredana Valtierra.
The promise it makes is that families and students will choose schools that are just right for them, but the reality is that schools choose the students they want.
The promise is that school choice will benefit black and brown children, as well as children with disabilities, but children abandon all civil rights protections when they enroll in private schools.
The promise is that schools of choice will produce better academic outcomes but typically they produce worse outcomes (see Josh Cowen, The Privateers).
The promise is that school choice represents accountability but it usually means no accountability at all, because nonpublic schools don’t take national or state tests.
Kayla Patrick and Loredana Valtierra write:
Modern school voucher programs are often framed as a response to declining academic achievement and a way to expand “parent choice” by enabling private educators to operate within the public system. But in practice, vouchers operate quite differently than advertised. It’s the private schools, not families, who ultimately decide who enrolls, and they do so outside the accountability systems that govern public education and public dollars and ensure every student has equal opportunity to learn.
The Federal Tax Credit Scholarship Program (FTCS), passed as part of the Republican Party’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” (OBBBA), scales this model for camouflaged privatization to the national level. Though branded as a tax incentive, it functions as a nationwide voucher system that diverts public dollars to private schools while allowing those schools to play by different rules than public providers—evading civil rights protections, academic oversight, and any requirement to provide meaningful evidence to the public of their students’ outcomes.
A National Voucher Program Disguised as a Tax Credit
The FTCS nationalizes a model that at least twenty states and counting –including Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, and Pennsylvania – have already adopted, one which functions by siphoning public dollars through scholarship granting organizations (SGOs). Under this law, individual taxpayers can donate up to $1,700 annually to SGOs in exchange for a 100 percent federal tax credit, effectively turning private donations into reimbursed public expenditures.
SGOs then will distribute “scholarships” to K–12 students to use toward private school tuition, books, curriculum materials, tutoring or other educational classes, and educational therapies provided by licensed providers. While the program is optional for states, at least twenty-seven have already signaled their intent to participate.
[To see which states have expressed their intent to participate, open the link.]
Despite its branding, this design drains public revenue that would otherwise support public schools—which still educate roughly 90 percent of American students—and redirects it to private, religious, and largely unregulated providers.
The program model also ignores what parents time and again have told us they want for their children. When given a direct choice at the ballot box, voters have repeatedly rejected school vouchers and related private-school subsidy measures. In the 2024 election, proposals to authorize or expand voucher-style programs in Colorado, Kentucky, and Nebraska were defeated, and historical ballot measure data show that voters have rejected every statewide private voucher or education tax credit initiative placed before them since 1970. This opposition is reflected in polling that shows nearly 70 percent of voters say they would rather increase federal funding for public schools than expand government-funded vouchers, including majorities across party lines.
[Open the link to see which states have held referenda on vouchers.]
Broad Eligibility, Few Quality Controls, and Limited Public Benefit
Even measured against its stated goal of affordability, the FTCS program misses the mark. But if the goal is to make education more affordable for families under real financial strain, this program is also ineffective. Private K–12 tuition averages nearly $13,000 per year nationwide, placing private schooling out of reach for many families even with a modest subsidy. Yet the tax credit is not targeted to families facing affordability pressures. It allows households earning up to 300 percent of area median income to qualify, a threshold that would make roughly 90 percent of U.S. households eligible. In high-income regions, families earning as much as $500,000 per year could receive publicly subsidized support for private education, while in a city like New York—where median income is about $81,000—families earning nearly $244,000 would qualify. At a time when families are struggling to afford groceries, housing, and child care, this program directs public dollars toward a limited use—private education subsidies for households that largely do not need the financial help—rather than toward measures that would help most families, like lowering child care or housing costs.
At a time when families are struggling to afford groceries, housing, and child care, this program directs public dollars toward a limited use—private education subsidies for households that largely do not need the financial help—rather than toward measures that would help most families, like lowering child care or housing costs.
At the same time, the program imposes no meaningful accountability requirements on participating schools. There are no academic performance standards, no transparency obligations, and no requirement to evaluate outcomes. In contrast to nearly every other federal program serving children, from Title I to Head Start, this is public spending without public oversight. Federal programs historically are monitored for fiscal, quality, and sometimes for safety compliance by the agency with charge over the program. In this case, U.S Department of Education (ED) expertise plays no role in oversight of new national policy for education.1
What State Leaders Can and Cannot Control
FTCS offers a tempting hook for well-intentioned state policymakers as well: Some governors and state legislatures may view the tax credit as a way to unlock new resources for priorities like tutoring or after-school programs. In practice, however, it offers no new, flexible funding for states and gives them little control over how public dollars are used. The law defines “scholarship-granting organizations” so broadly that states cannot meaningfully restrict eligibility, set standards, or influence whether funds flow primarily to high-cost private schools rather than unmet public needs.
Once a state opts in, its role is largely administrative and unfunded. States receive no resources to carry out oversight, cannot impose safeguards, and must submit eligible organizations to the U.S. Treasury without authority to shape program design or accountability. Far from being additional education funding that states need, opting in requires that states absorb the fiscal, administrative, and equity consequences of a federal program they are unable to direct or correct. It is not “free money” for states. The opt-in decision is therefore the only meaningful leverage states have—and governors should use their right to refuse to play along in order to protect their public education systems.
Why Oversight and Accountability Matters
Public funding should never function on a good-faith system. It’s very simple: in good policymaking, whenever taxpayer dollars are allocated, oversight measures are put in place to make sure those dollars are spent in the way intended. We already know from numerous examples in the school choice policy space itself that no accountability means that those who need the help the least receive the most benefit.
Eighteen states have a universal private school choice program. Unfortunately, states that have expanded vouchers or education savings accounts with minimal oversight have already seen waste, fraud, and abuse. Arizona’s universal Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) program, for instance, has minimal controls, audit practices that automatically approve reimbursements, and has been linked to purchases of non-educational items like diamond rings, televisions, and even lingerie with taxpayer funds, prompting investigations by the state attorney general. Rather than lowering costs for families, the program has generated ballooning expenses for the state and contributed to a growing budget crisis—with no measurable benefit to students at all.
Similarly, the federal Charter Schools Program has repeatedly been shown to lack meaningful accountability, with investigations and audits documenting hundreds of millions of dollars wasted on schools that never opened or closed prematurely, and charter networks facing conservatorship over financial mismanagement and self-dealing. These outcomes are the predictable result of public dollars flowing to private operators without meaningful oversight.
Decades of research on voucher programs show mixed or negative academic outcomes, particularly in math and reading, and no evidence that vouchers close opportunity gaps. In Louisiana, Indiana, and Ohio, studies found declines in student achievement following expansions in voucher programs. Students in Louisiana’s voucher program experienced drops in both math and reading in their first two years, while voucher students in Indiana and Ohio performed worse than comparable peers who remained in public schools.
The program nationalizes an unproven experiment while insulating it from the very safeguards that exist to protect students and taxpayers alike.
Taken together, these examples underscore why oversight and accountability are not optional when public dollars are at stake. The FTCS program includes no meaningful accountability, evaluation, or research requirements to justify an estimated $26 billion cost to taxpayers. Without data on student learning, fiscal integrity, or long-term outcomes, the public has no way to assess whether this investment is helping students or simply reshuffling them across systems while diverting resources away from the public schools that serve most children and toward unknown corporate interests.2 In effect, the program nationalizes an unproven experiment while insulating it from the very safeguards that exist to protect students and taxpayers alike.
Who Profits When Public Dollars Become Private Subsidies?
Another consequence of turning public education dollars into private subsidies is that it creates a lucrative marketplace for the companies that manage these voucher systems. A handful of firms have seized on state voucher expansions to secure multimillion-dollar contracts, turning what was pitched as a cost-saving policy into a business opportunity for tech and finance intermediaries. These companies often have limited experience running education programs, and in some states have faced scrutiny over operational problems, questionable spending controls, and high administrative costs.
This track record raises questions about whether families truly benefit from FTCS’s model. It would seem the opposite: it diverts taxpayer dollars into private profit streams instead of lowering education costs for struggling families. Instead of more wasteful government contracts, these dollars should be used to improve neighborhood schools by hiring high-quality educators, increasing after school programs, expanding pre-K, and hiring mental health professionals.
A Tax Policy Not Designed to Support Education
Congress gave sole interpretive authority for this program to the U.S. Treasury Department, deliberately excluding the U.S. Department of Education and its education-specific expertise. As a result, a major national education policy will be implemented through the tax code, with limited attention to accountability, equity, or educational impact. While advocates have urged the Treasury Department to include stronger transparency, safeguards, and state authority, it is unlikely those measures will be adopted to address the program’s core design flaws.
This use of the tax code stands in sharp contrast to prior policies that successfully supported children and families. The 2021 expanded Federal Child Tax Credit helped to lift more than 2 million childrenout of poverty and reduced the country’s child poverty level to a historic low of 5.2 percent. This program will likely do the opposite. Research shows that private school voucher programs disproportionately benefit wealthy families. Consistent with many other provisions in the law, Congressional Republicans have chosen to prioritize a tax break that disproportionately benefits the wealthy, over nearly every other form of charitable giving, such as donations to food pantries, hospitals, or community services.
By incentivizing families to exit public schools, the voucher tax credit also undermines the financial stability of those schools, particularly in rural and high-need communities. Because education funding is largely enrollment-based, even modest shifts can lead to school closures, consolidations, and reduced services. This leaves behind those families who don’t have the time or resources to navigate private systems, and asks taxpayers to reimburse private donations on top of existing public education costs.
Civil Rights Protections Are Excluded
Public schools that receive federal funding are required to comply with federal civil rights laws, including Title VI and Title IX of the Civil Rights Act, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act. In 2024, ED received 22,687 civil rights complaints, including about 8,400 related to disability discrimination, reflecting just how often students and families rely on these protections.
These laws require schools to take corrective action to prevent and respond to discrimination, provide accommodations and services to students, investigate complaints, and offer families meaningful avenues for recourse. This is what public accountability looks like in practice, and its success depends on ED’s legal authority and the staff capacity to respond when families ask for help.
By contrast, the OBBA does not require scholarship-granting organizations or the private schools and programs they fund to comply with these federal civil rights protections, even though they benefit from publicly subsidized dollars. This means that if a student experiences harassment or discrimination based on race, national origin, sex, religion, or disability, families may have little or no ability to hold private schools accountable or seek remedies comparable to those guaranteed in public schools.
Evidence from state voucher programs shows why this gap matters. An investigation in North Carolina found that voucher funds flowed to private schools that were significantly whiter than the communities they serve, reinforcing racial segregation rather than expanding opportunity. In the absence of enforceable civil rights guardrails, public funding supports exclusionary practices that would be unlawful in public schools.
The Cost to Public Schools and Communities
Ultimately, this voucher/tax credit perpetuates a broader pattern of states, in addition to the federal government, stepping back from their responsibility to fully fund and strengthen public schools. Rather than address the systemic problems that perpetuate low-performing schools, it treats educational inequity as a series of individual problems to be solved by sending public dollars to private education. No matter how the administration spins it, these programs fail to prioritize students from lower-income families while simultaneously subsidizing private education for higher-income families. It invites taxpayers to feel as though they are helping children access opportunity, while leaving the underlying inequities in public education unresolved and, in many cases, deepened.
[Open the link to see data on source of insurance.]
This tax credit is projected to cost $26 billion, which is a high price tag that instead could be doing real good in public schools. If Congress instead invested this through Title I, that money would amount to roughly $1,238 per student in schools serving low-income communities. Research shows that investments of this size improve reading and math outcomes. In other words, we know how to use public dollars to help students succeed. This policy chooses not to.
Imagine putting that $26 billion, the lowest estimated cost of the tax credit over ten years, toward Title I, the federal program that benefits most public schools. That would more than double Title I’s current funding at $18.4 billion. Title I’s flexibility allows schools to meet their specific needs to improve student achievement: more teachers, aides, professional development, wraparound services, and more.
IDEA is supposed to fund 40 percent of each student’s special education each year, but the federal government has never met that promise. Current funding at $14.2 billion amounts to less than 12 percent of the promise. However, adding $26 billion to IDEA would almost triple current funding and completely close the gap.
We know that the unprecedented funding from the American Rescue Plan and other COVID relief packages will make a major return on investment: every $1,000 invested per student will be worth $1,238 in future earnings. That funding also required states to at least maintain their education budgets at prior funding so that the federal investment would not replace their responsibility and effort, but work together. The FTCS model completely disregards these precedents, and their values.
The Federal Tax Credit Scholarship Is a Heist Taken Straight from the Right’s Privatization Playbook
The Federal Tax Credit Scholarship program follows a familiar privatization strategy. It routes public dollars to private actors while stripping away the oversight, transparency, and civil rights protections that normally accompany public investment. Framed as generosity and choice, it instead creates a system in which taxpayers assume the cost while private schools and intermediaries operate largely beyond public accountability.
The program recreates many risks at a national scale. The schools and organizations receiving these publicly subsidized funds are not required to demonstrate academic results, comply with federal civil rights law, or provide transparency about how dollars are spent. Families are left without protections, taxpayers without accountability, and policymakers without evidence that the investment is improving student outcomes.
When public dollars are transformed into lightly regulated private subsidies, they invite exploitation. The Federal Tax Credit Scholarship is not an isolated policy choice: it follows a pattern of policies that weaken, and normalize weakening, public education while insulating private actors from responsibility. History shows where this path leads: higher costs, weaker safeguards, and fewer assurances that public investments serve the public good.
Notes
The Trump administration has taken multiple actions to reduce the role of the U.S. Department of Education, including firing staff and reassigning education programs and staff to other agencies through interagency agreements (IAAs) without congressional authorization. Such actions raise legal and governance concerns and further erode the education-specific expertise, oversight, and accountability that Congress has historically vested in ED.
Under the OBBA, the federal tax credit for contributions to SGOs applies to individual taxpayers. The law does not provide separate federal tax credit rules for corporate contributions; whether and how corporations might participate or benefit may depend on future Treasury and IRS regulations and state tax policies. Many states currently allow corporate contributions to SGOs.
Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders is holding the line on spending, except for vouchers, which h will get a big boost. About 85% of the students using vouchers never attended public schools, so Governor Sanders is handing out money to pay for students already enrolled in private and religious schools.
Poor people in Arkansas don’t get much help in the budget, but affluent families get tax cuts and vouchers to pay for private schools, religious schools, and home schools.
Arkansas lawmakers are set to convene April 8 to hash out next year’s state budget. In a Wednesday letter to lawmakers, Sanders said she’s proposing a 3% increase, a pretty standard figure on par with recent years.
But what’s going to be funded in this mostly flat spending plan, and what’s not? At first blush, it looks like well-to-do Arkansans are the big winners, cashing in on private school vouchers and more income tax cuts.
Sanders’ proposed 2026-27 budget, presented to lawmakers by Arkansas Department of Finance and Administration Director Jim HudsonWednesday morning, includes up to $379 million for the Arkansas LEARNS vouchers that parents who opt out of traditional public schools can tap to pay private school or homeschool expenses. That’s a big increase over the $187 million budgeted for vouchers last time.
The 2025-26 school year was the first in which all students in Arkansas were eligible for these vouchers, and the price tag keeps creeping higher. Ballooning costs are pretty much a given, based on what’s happened in other states that pioneered this tricky transfer of wealth from the poor and middle class to their wealthy overlords by paying fancy kids’ tony tuitions for them. Just ask Arizona and Florida.
Lawmakers have made a number of adjustments and budget increases for LEARNS after voucher costs quickly exceeded the budgeted amount. In January, a legislative committee signed off on giving another $32 million in one-time reserve funds to Arkansas’s newly universal school voucher program, bringing its total cost in the current 2025-26 school year to $309.4 million, which covers more than 44,000 students. That $309 million is the base amount proposed for 2026-27, but Sanders’ budget proposes an extra $70 million for it, just in case.
Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families warned in January that vouchers are doing all the things opponents warned they would: creating new spending obligations for taxpayers to cover private school tuitions and other costs that were never on the public dime before; chipping away at public schools’ financial resilience; and generally busting budgets.
These set-aside amounts that were incorporated into the state’s school voucher fund this year, and which are being teed up to be added next year to the tune of $70 million, look a lot like a trap. Last go-round, lawmakers approved about $187 million for vouchers, but then added another $122 million to the school voucher cause in piecemeal fashion over the course of the fiscal year, to ultimately spend $309 million. Now lawmakers are looking at $309 million as the floor for voucher spending for 2026-27, and will almost certainly throw in that set-aside $70 million, too (if not more). How many hundreds of millions more are we going to add in these payouts for the well-to-do each year, in slapdash fashion? Don’t say we didn’t warn you!
Diane Ravitch's blog 