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.
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.]
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Dr. Mike DeGuire is a lifelong educator who served as a principal of a public school in Denver. Now retired, he has assumed an active role in fighting privatization.
The dirty little secret of the voucher movement is that most of them are claimed by well-to-do families whose children were already attending nonpublic schools. Vouchers are a subsidy for people who were already paying tuition at private schools
His post was distributed by Advocates for Public Education Policy.
A4PEP introduced his statement:
Vouchers aren’t winning because voters love them. In fact, they keep losing at the ballot box.
So what’s going on?
In a new post, A4PEP Vice-Chair Dr. Mike DeGuire points to a big driver: billionaire-funded networks that keep pushing “school choice” as a marketplace, where public dollars follow students into private (often religious) schools.
It’s not just messaging, either. These efforts are backed by think tanks, lobbying, and big political spending, and now there’s a new federal tax credit plan that could supercharge scholarship-granting organizations with even less transparency.
If you want the clearest breakdown we’ve seen of who’s behind this and what it means for public schools, read Mike’s full post:
Public education is a public promise. Let’s protect it.
Dr. Mike DeGuire wrote about why vouchers have been winning despite lack of public support.
He said:
One answer: Billionaires
Billionaires Charles Koch, Betsy Devos, Jeff Yass, William Dunn, Phillip Anschutz, Michael Bloomberg, Reed Hastings, Bill Gates, Eli Broad, John Arnold, and the Walton and Bradley families have led the movement for private school choice through support for both charters and vouchers for over 30 years. Their goal is to dismantle what they call the “government school system” and to change how public education is funded. They want to create a “marketplace of options” so families can use money (vouchers) from public funds to send their children to private, religious, or home schools.
The marketplace concept allows billionaires and their investors to make money through real estate, tech and service contracts, and gain significant tax benefits. For many, the goal is to support religious schools which then profit from enrollment growth.
They used their vast resources to set up think tanks and lobbying organizations which employ hyperbolic messaging with misleading data to communicate that public schools are failing, insisting parents need resources (vouchers) to find alternative schooling options. When their voucher goals met with resistance in the 1990s, billionaires focused on spreading charter schools instead, especially in major cities. The charter movement created the false narrative that parents should leave their local public school instead of focusing on increased funding to meet changing student needs.
During Trump’s first term, and after the pandemic hit, vouchers started to reappear, especially in red states, as billionaires backed pro-voucher candidates in state legislatures and Congress to secure favorable voucher legislation. However, not a single taxpayer-funded voucher program in the United States has been approved by voters. Every state voucher program was enacted by legislators, often under heavy pressure from well-funded pro-voucher lobbying groups. Billionaires also funded groups who lobbied Congress to pass the federal tax credit voucher scheme in July that enlists all 50 states to join in the billionaire’s version of “education freedom for private school choice.”
Taxpayers in states that opt in to the federal voucher scheme select from a list of scholarship granting organizations (SGOs) to reduce their tax liability by $1700 when they pay their 2027 taxes. Billionaires have been funding K-12 SGOs for over 25 years. They use the money raised to give scholarships for students to attend private schools. These SGOs will have billions more from individual taxpayers to use for the same purposes. Billionaire John Walton, son of Sam Walton of Wal-Mart and the richest family in the US, co-founded the nation’s two largest scholarships granting organizations, ACE Scholarships and Children’s Scholarship Fund. Most of their scholarships go to students who leave public schools to attend religious schools.
The federal voucher program includes no spending cap, and the billionaires have already tossed in over $10 million to market the program. The voucher advocates are pushing hard for regulations that slam the door on any approach that does not further the growth of this largely unregulated voucher program.
This isn’t a grassroots uprising. It’s a long-running, well-funded project, one that keeps losing at the ballot box, so it shifts strategy: different messaging, different vehicles, same end goal. If we want truly “free” public education, we can’t let billionaires and private interests redefine freedom as a shopping spree financed by public dollars.
The path forward is clear, even if it’s not flashy. Communities can press state leaders not to opt in. Parents and educators can demand transparency from scholarship-granting organizations and insist on real accountability for any program that touches public money. And all of us can keep returning to the basic truth: the best “choice” is a fully funded, welcoming neighborhood public school, one that serves every child, not just the children a private system chooses to accept.
Public education is a public promise. We should protect it like one.
Stephen Dyer, former state legislator, follows the money. As usual, in Ohio, public money is flowing to private organizations that are neither accountable nor effective. In this post, he assays the trail of public funds collected by the Center for Christian Virtue. The Ohio Constitution could not be clearer: no money for religious schools. The Ohio legislature treats the state constitution like an outdated relic.
Dyer writes on his blog Tenth Period:
The Center for Christian Virtue is making quite a play in Ohio’s education policy landscape. They are using a multimillion dollar Capital Square office to run the lobbying effort to continue the state’s unconstitutional private school tuition subsidies. They also are running a so-called $3.2 million Scholarship Granting Organization, which is really just a fancy way of funneling millions more of our tax dollars into unaccountable private schools.
And, potentially most harmful of all, they’re running an operation they call “school planting” where they use the unconstitutional private school tuition subsidy to kick-start “schools” inside of churches across Ohio.
They are now claiming to have done this with 15 “schools” so far, publicly naming four new ones that opened this school year and another 4 next school year. Here’s how they brag about it in their news release about this initiative:
“Through our innovative school-in-a-church model, God is expanding access to Christian education for families in every corner of the state. By leveraging existing church facilities, we help keep costs low, making it possible for more families to afford a high-quality, Christ-centered education.”
Let’s set aside the fact that having schools pop up in churches is an ancient practice and not in any way “innovative” (having American taxpayers subsidize these things is “innovative”, though).
Anyway, here’s the thing: a total of 25 kids in only 1 of these schools — Westside Preparatory, which is the shining example displayed on CCV’s education website — has ever been tested for proficiency in reading and math, with only 9 ever being deemed “proficient” in both1.
This performance reflects these kids’ scores on tests the schools gets to pick from scores of options allowed by the state.
Public schools, in contrast, do not get to pick their kids’ tests.
All taxpayers had to do for 9 private school kids to test proficient on tests the school picked was to unconstitutionally subsidize these schools by about $2 million.2
[Open the link to see the scores.]
But at least the schools’ scores are 51 percentage points worse last year than the previous year in Math. Not an awesome trend, by the way.
Quite a return, wouldn’t you say? I mean, considering that none of these kids ever attended a public school. I am deducing this because in the schools’ first year of existence, only kindergarteners and first graders are included in their enrollment counts.
And that’s it. That’s all we know about the quality of these 15 “schools.” Hence my quotation marks around the word “school”.
Because what these “schools” really seem to be are money makers for CCV so it can finance the elimination of public education.
This is why I call them the new White Hat.
For those who aren’t familiar with White Hat, it was the company run by David Brennan that made millions running Charter Schools in Ohio and simply flipped a small percentage of those profits into Republican campaign war chests with the goal of de-funding public schools and the teachers unions that backed Democrats.
CCV is running the same White Hat playbook — set up a bunch of bullshit shell corporations, siphon millions of public dollars from Ohio’s 1.5 million public school students, use a small percentage of that money to lobby Ohio legislators and governors (who are notoriously cheap to buy) who allow CCV to continue stealing that money from kids, then watch public school kids suffer from it all.
All in the name of Jesus — they call this a ministry even!
Because robbing money from poor kids in Columbus, Athens, Steubenville and Findlay is exactly what Christ would have done.
What CCV is doing to Ohio’s public school kids is blasphemy. Pure and simple.
But get this: Because CCV’s operation involves advocating for the state to shovel money to private schools, we have no idea how much of that largesse CCV is accumulating. We do know that CCV staff is making bank — again, just as Jesus intended.
Please open the link and finish reading this post. Once again, the people of Ohio are being ripped off by grifters.
The introduction of vouchers for private and religious schools is accompanied by certain lies.
Every one of those claims is a lie. Vouchers always cost far more than was predicted. In every state, most vouchers are claimed by students who are already in enrolled nonpublic schools. Voucher schools typically are completely unaccountable for their use of public funds.
Peter Greene offers the example of West Virginia.
West Virginia passed a law to allow taxpayer-funded school vouchers in 2021, and they’ve been tweaking it ever since. They opened it up to more and more students. Consequently, the costs of the program are ballooning: when the law was passed, supporters declared it would cost just $23 million in its first year, and now the estimate for the coming school year is $245 to $315 million.
With that kind of money on the line, you’d think that the state might want to put some accountability and oversight rules in place. You know– so the taxpayers know what they’re getting for their millions of dollars.
But you would be backwards. Instead, the legislature is considering a bill to reduce accountability for private and religious schools.
SB 216, the Restoring Private Schools Act of 2026, is short and simple. It consists of the current accountability rules for private, parochial or church schools, or schools of a religious order– with a whole lot of rules crossed out.
What are some of the rules that the legislation proposes to eliminate for private and religious schools? Here’s the list of rules slated for erasure:
In other words, private religious schools accepting taxpayer-funded vouchers may do whatever the hell they want.
The bill is sponsored by Senator Craig Hart. Hart calls himself a school teacher, and is mentioned as an agriculture/FFA teacher, though I could find no evidence of where he teaches. He was elected in 2024 after running as a hardcore MAGA. He has pushed for requiring Bibles in school, among other MAGA causes.
Said Eric Kerns, superintendent of Faith Christian Academy, “It just gives private schools a lot more flexibility in what they would be able to do as far as assessment and attendance and school days. Our accountability is that if people aren’t satisfied with the education they’re receiving, then they go to another private school or back to the public school or they homeschool.” Also known as “No accountability at all.” A school is not a taco truck.
As reported by Amelia Ferrell Knisely at West Virginia Watch, at least one legislator tried to put some accountability back in the bill. GOP Sen. Charles Clements tried to put back a nationally-recognized testing requirement and share results with parents. Said Clements
I want to see private schools survive, but I think we have to have guardrails of some sort. There’s a lot of money around, and it’s a way for people to come in and not produce a product we need … I think it just leaves the door open for problems.
Exactly. And his amendment was rejected. The School Choice Committee chair said the school could still use a real test if they wanted to, but the bill would allow more flexibility to choose newer test options; I’m guessing someone is pulling for the Classical Learning Test, the conservative unwoke anti-SAT test.
Democrat Mike Woelfel tried to put the immunization record back; that was rejected, too.
Look, the Big Standardized Test is a terrible measure of educational quality, and it should be canceled for everyone. But for years the choice crowd promised that once choice was opened up, we’d get a market driven by hard data. Then it turned out that the “hard data” showed that voucher systems were far worse than public schools, and the solution has not been to make the voucher system work better, but to silence any data that reveals a voucher system failure.
The goal is not higher quality education. The goal is public tax dollars for private religious schools– but only if the private religious schools can remain free of regulation, oversight, or any restrictions that get in the way of their power to discriminate freely against whoever they wish to discriminate against.
This is not about choice. It’s about taxpayer subsidies for private religious schools, and it’s about making sure those schools aren’t accountable to anyone for how they use that money. It’s another iteration of the same argument we’ve heard across the culture–that the First Amendment should apply because I am not free to fully exercise my religion unless I can unreservedly discriminate against anyone I choose and unless I get taxpayer funding to do it.
We’ve been told repeatedly that the school choice bargain is a trade off– the schools get autonomy in exchange for accountability, but that surely isn’t what’s being proposed here. If West Virginia is going to throw a mountain of taxpayer money at private schools, those schools should be held accountable. This bill promises the opposite; may it die a well-deserved death.
I am a proud alumnae of Wellesley College, class of 1960. Wellesley literally changed my life. My best friends today are classmates; we meet monthly on Zoom to compare notes. We confess our deepest hopes and fears and stand by one another. I have returned for Reunion every five years since graduation. I love the campus and the memories.
I have supported an annual lecture series at Wellesley that has brought terrific thinkers to the campus.
Not long ago, my sons endowed a Professorship in my name, the first endowed chair in the education department. It is called The Diane Silvers Ravitch ’60 Chair in Public Education and the Common Good. The first person to hold the chair is a brilliant young scholar named Soo Hong.
Last night, after midnight, one of my dear classmates sent this review, just published. It made me very happy.
Books and media by the Wellesley community
Image credit: Agata Nowicka
AUTHOR Catherine O’Neill Grace
PUBLISHED ON February 24, 2026
ISSUE WINTER 2026
“I was wrong” is one of the most difficult things for a human being to say. Imagine saying it when you have been a conservative public intellectual and expert on public education for decades. Yet that is exactly what Diane Silvers Ravitch ’60 does in her engaging new memoir, An Education: How I Changed My Mind About Schools and Almost Everything Else.
The author of numerous books about the history of American education and education policy, Ravitch turns to the personal in this volume, describing in depth her childhood in Houston, her experience at a segregated public high school, and her journey to Wellesley College in the fall of 1956.
At Wellesley, Ravitch learned not what to think, but how. She arrived on campus feeling, by her own account, like a “fish out of water.” But the College provided her with brilliant peers, gifted teachers, lively debate, and enriching friendships—including with “Maddy,” Madeleine Korbel Albright ’59. She recounts the hilarity of writing the junior show, Call It Red, and the excitement of seeing Fidel Castro speak at Harvard while she was working as a reporter for the Wellesley News.
A political science major at Wellesley, Ravitch went on to earn a Ph.D. in history from Columbia. As her memoir unfolds, she writes openly of loss—the anguish of the death of her 2-year-old son from leukemia, the painful dissolution of her first marriage. And she writes of love—at an education conference in 1984, she met teacher Mary Butz, who became her wife.
She also writes about intellectual transformation. As an education reformer, Ravitch believed deeply in standards, accountability, high-stakes testing, and school choice. Woven through the book is an account of her transition from outspoken supporter of conservative, market-driven policies in public education to one of their most forceful critics. Like many policymakers of the late 20th century, she saw competition, data, and pressure as levers that could fix public education. Serving in senior government roles, including assistant secretary of education during the George H. W. Bush administration, she helped advance reforms rooted in these assumptions, convinced they would raise achievement and close gaps.
But watching these policies unfold in real schools forced her to confront their consequences. High-stakes testing narrowed curricula and hamstrung teachers. Charter expansion and privatization failed to deliver promised gains while draining critical resources from public systems. Most troubling, education reformers increasingly blamed educators for failures that Ravitch now sees as driven by poverty and inequality. Children—especially poor children—were being left behind.
By the end of An Education, Ravitch emerges as a committed advocate for public schools, professional teachers, and democratic accountability. She followed the facts where they led and changed her mind. In this open-hearted, expansive memoir, she explains why.
A former classroom teacher, Grace is senior associate editor of this magazine
Diane Silvers Ravitch ’60
An Education: How I Changed My Mind About Schools and Almost Everything Else
Columbia University Press, 248 pages, $24.95
Mercedes Schneider is an amazing person, a keen-eyed researcher, and a gifted writer. She has a Ph.D. in applied statistics and research. She could have been a college professor, but she preferred to be a high school teacher. She understands the work, and she understands the students. That’s way different from journalists, who write best-selling books about schools based on their cursory experience, or scholars, who write their books based on data, not the lives of teachers or students.
I met Mercedes in the early days of the corporate reform movement, the one led by billionaires. With her sharp intellect, she saw through the hoax immediately. She saw what happened in New Orleans; she observed the influx of TFA teachers to staff the new charter schools. She was never taken in by the grandiose rhetoric of the reformers. She understood that the real goal of the so-called movement was not to improve public schools but to privatize public funding of schools.
In a remarkable burst of energy, she wrote three books in three years:
A Chronicle of Echoes: Who’s Who in the Implosion of American Public Education (2014).
Common Core Dilemma: Who Owns Our Schools (2015).
School Choice: The End of Public Education? (2016).
And she is still in the classroom.
I am now honored that Mercedes has reviewed my memoir. As you would expect, the review is insightful. She understood what I was trying to do: to pull away whatever artifice or cover there might be, and to lay my life bare. It’s not easy to do. She understood.
I urge you to open the link and read her perceptive review. It’s vintage Mercedes.
John Thompson, historian and retired teacher in Oklahoma, reviews the big concerns that will preoccupy the Republican Governor and Legislature in 2026.
He writes:
As Oklahoma’s legislative session begins, commentators are reminding us of the absurdities that will come. The Oklahoma Voice’s Janelle Stecklein’s Welcome to the 2026 Edition of Welcome to Oklahoma’s Political Silly Season. Here are Some Bills Worth Mocking, reported on:
A proposed deregulation bill that would result in alligators taking over our wetlands; the bill to ban Sharia Law; the “doubly criminalizing the stealing of shopping carts,” and the bill which claims “condensation trails left in our atmosphere by airplanes are actually chemical agents designed to interfere with the sun, [and] weather or are a nefarious way to psychologically manipulate us.”
And, former Speaker of the House, Cal Hobson’s, “Hide the Children. Lock the Door. The ’26 Session Draws Near, summarized the bill to require universities to build structures honoring the assassinated Charlie Kirk.
Then came Governor Kevin Stitt’s address to the legislature.
Seven years ago, Stitt promised to make us a “Top Ten” state,” by creating a business-friendly environment by cutting “red tape,” reducing regulations, as well as pushing school choice, and other free-market policies.
But, according to CNBC, Oklahoma is now ranked 41th for business, 48th in education, and 49th in life, health and inclusion.
According to the U.S. News and World Report, we’re ranked 46th in economic opportunity, and 42th overall.
But Stitt told the legislature:
We’ve proven to the world that Oklahoma is second to none – it’s a state that promotes innovation, champions freedom, and creates opportunity for its people.
Oklahoma wasn’t built by government planners or bureaucrats. …
Oklahoma was built by entrepreneurs, risk-takers and innovators who believe in free markets and the American Dream – that if you work hard, take risks and create value, you should be rewarded.
Actually, Oklahoma was founded on populist principles, such as empowering voters to pass initiative petitions and amendments to the constitution. After the voters legalized medical marijuana, and voted for the expansion of Medicaid, Republicans have attempted to undermine those rights. And, now, Stitt is calling for the repeal of those two laws, and passing two other petitions that are the opposite of what voters supported.
Stitt’s most destructive attack could be on Medicaid expansion, known as SoonerCare, which reduced the state’s uninsured rate from 17.6% in 2019 to 13.9 % in 2024. But, now it needs almost $500 million to maintain the federally mandated level of service and to administer new mandates and to more efficiently manage the system.
And Oklahoma’s recent privatization of Medicaid campaign “moved thousands of patients to other insurance providers.” And, it has “resulted in lower reimbursement rates and increased denials for services.”
Medicaid provides coverage for one in four Oklahomans. It provided coverage for more than ½ of the state’s child births. While half of its recipients are children, it helps out many low-income seniors and persons with disabilities.
But, Stitt told the legislature, “Nobody feels sorry for an able-bodied male that should be working between the ages of 25 to 65, and we should not be giving them free healthcare.”
Stitt bragged about his cuts in income taxes, which were “the Path to Zero income tax;” He called them a step towards “one of our greatest budget reform wins in history.”
Due to spending cuts, Oklahoma saved over $5.5 billion dollars. Those funds could be used to address $692 million shortfall for this year, as well as $1.5 billion in increased funding that state agencies have requested.
Instead, he wants to amend the constitution to place a 3% annual cap on recurring spending growth.
The third state question Stitt suggested to lawmakers would be to freeze property taxes for “all levels.” Property taxes are a major funding source for public schools, CareerTech, and county level programs.
And he would like to expand the $249 million per year tax credits for private schools.
And Stitt repeated his calls to reverse the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling and limit tribal sovereignty in Oklahoma.
Of course, Stitt praised Trump and Ronald Reagan. He challenged the legislators to read Reagan’s speech, “A Time for Choosing.” He then said Reagan was “the last best hope of man on earth;” without him we would have taken “the last step into a thousand years of darkness.”
He then bragged about freeing Oklahomans from Covid lockdowns, protecting them from vaccine mandates, and, in the name of protecting individual liberties and religious freedom, preventing boys from playing in girls’ sports.
After boasting about his success in limiting the freedom of transgender students, he called for the elimination of the Oklahoma Secondary School Activities Association (OSSAA) for not promoting the open transfer of student athletes.
And Stitt concluded:
Oklahoma is not just part of this American Dream. We are its purest expression. And this spirit is what has always defined Oklahoma.
Oklahoma is where bold dreams are possible.
I believe these last seven years have been the greatest in state history
Of course, Stitt’s “commitment to limited government and protecting the Oklahoma way of life,” also required cooperation with rightwing legislators; together, they share credit for making “our state … the best in the country.”
Last week, the state senate in Mississippi considered a bill to authorize vouchers. Governor Tate Reeves was enthusiastic about the bill, and Republicans control both houses in the Legislature. It appeared to be a slam-dunk.
But while the state’s House of Represntatives passed the bill, 17 Republicans defected to oppose it. The voucher bill passed by a narrow margin in the House, 61-59.
The Senate gave the bill short shrift.
It was defeated in committee without a single vote in favor.
The Mississippi Free Press wrote:
Mississippi Sen. Brice Wiggins, R-Pascagoula, entered a motion to vote on advancing the bill to the Mississippi Senate floor. The Republican-led committee held a voice vote on the motion, and none of its members spoke in favor of the bill, including Wiggins.
“The nos have it. The bill dies today,” DeBar declared.
Governor Tate was furious.
Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves, a Republican, harshly criticized DeBar and Republican Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann, the Senate president, for the bill’s defeat in a Facebook post Wednesday morning, saying that after 23 years in office, he had “never been more disappointed in elected officials” than he is now with the Senate Education Committee chairman and the lieutenant governor.
“They killed a Republican legislative priority shared by conservatives all across this country and they worked closely with the Democrats to do it,” Reeves wrote. “Even worse—they tried to do it in the dark and hide it from MS conservatives on a deadline day.”
The Mississippi Democratic Party celebrated the legislation’s failure.
“Today’s vote shows what we can accomplish when we stand together for Mississippi’s children against well-funded special interests,” Mississippi Democratic Party Chairman Rep. Cheikh Taylor, D-Starkville, said in a Tuesday press release. “Our public schools are the cornerstone of every community in this state, and this unanimous rejection sends a clear message: Mississippi will not abandon the students and families who depend on quality public education—no matter how much out-of-state money tries to buy our legislators.”
Public school educators were happy to see the bill die.
“Our concern with HB 2 is that it moves Mississippi away from a shared public commitment to education and toward a model that fragments funding and responsibility,” Union Public School District Superintendent Tyler Hansford said in a Jan. 29 Newton County Appeal opinion article. “Public dollars should be used to sustain public systems that serve all students and communities, not to convert a public good into a marketplace transaction.”
Other parts of the education legislation passed:
On Tuesday afternoon, the House Education Committee passed a $5,000 teacher pay raise that includes an $8,000 pay raise for licensed special education teachers in special education classrooms. That bill, House Bill 1126, also includes a structured cap on school superintendents’ salaries, changes to PERS’ years of service requirements, an increase to the Mississippi Student Funding Formula base student cost and a pay raise for school attendance officers’ starting salaries.
The Senate passed three education bills on Jan. 7: a $2,000 teacher pay raise bill, legislation to bring Mississippi Public Employees’ Retirement System retirees to the classroom and a bill making it easier to transfer from one public school district to another. DeBar said at the time that he would like to expand the Senate’s proposed pay raise to $5,000. All three bills await action in the House.
The House’s education bill that includes wide expansion of school choice policies is dead, its fate decided after 84 seconds of deliberation by a Senate panel.
But as the House leadership and proponents of school choice have continued their press, reaching a fever-pitch in recent weeks, Senate leaders have made clear they are opposed to voucher programs that siphon money away from public schools — so opposed that there was no discussion when the committee considered the bill.
“I’m not going to discuss it much other than to say we’ve looked at it in depth and … this committee has passed most everything (else in House Bill 2),” Senate Education Committee Chairman Dennis DeBar said.
After DeBar, a Republican from Leakesville, received no questions, Sen. Brice Wiggins, a Republican from Pascagoula, made a motion to vote on the bill.
After a chorus of “nay” from committee members, DeBar said, “The bill dies today.”
Over the past few years, vouchers have been endorsed by state legislatures even though the public overwhelmingly opposes them. Nearly a score of state referenda have been held, and in every single state, voters rejected vouchers. Even voters in red states said NO to vouchers.
Voters don’t want to pay for tuition at private and religious schools. But legislators ignore their votes. In Arizona, voters rejected vouchers by 65-35%. But the legislature passed a voucher bill anyway, and the cost to subsidize these nonpublic schools is $1 billion a year.
Today’s evangelists for subsidizing religious schools have chosen to ignore the admonitions of the Founding Fathers, who made clear their opposition to state-funded religion. When Thomas Jefferson wrote about “separation of church and state,” he was referencing a widely held principle.
Josh Cowen recently wrote about this issue on his Substack blog:
Since the U.S. Supreme Court rolled back fifty years of national reproductive freedom in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization in 2022, the Christian Right has turned to another long-held priority: an eventual Court ruling that states must fund religious education.
Over the past few weeks, efforts to create religious charter schools have seen new life. Charter schools are public schools operated outside of the traditional district framework. They can be independently managed by a non-profit or, in some states, for-profit management group, or they can be part of larger networks of charter providers. There are roughy 8,000 charter schools across the country, serving nearly 4 million students.
Blurring Public and Private
In mid-2025, a case called St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School v. Drummond deadlocked at the Supreme Court, 4-4. It returned back to Oklahoma, where that state’s highest court had invalidated efforts by a Catholic-run provider to operate a virtual charter school. Had the Court ruled in St. Isidore’s favor, it would have effectively created the nation’s first church-run public school.
But Justice Amy Coney Barrett recused herself, reportedly because her best friend, a law professor named Nicole Garnett, had worked extensively on the legal defense for the Catholic charter school (Side note: while I’m glad Barrett recused herself, notice that the one conservative woman on the Court has held herself to a higher ethical standard than right-wing guys like Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito).
The Court’s 4-4 ruling was less a definitive position and more an artifact of the small, insular nature of conservative—and especially Catholic conservative—American legal networks.
Now, efforts to create a Jewish charter school in Oklahoma, and Christian public schools in Colorado and Tennessee are taking new shape.
Technically, these cases operate in a separate stream of legal theory from school voucher jurisprudence. Vouchers are simply taxpayer subsidies for private schools—either through the tax code or directly through state funds. And since 2002’s Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, their application to religious schools has been constitutional. Three voucher-related cases since 2017—Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia v. Comer (2017), Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue (2020) and Carson v. Makin (2022, 3 days before Dobbs)—have extended protections to religious schools in state voucher systems.
Basically, once states use public dollars to subsidize private providers of a certain social service (such as education), they can’t limit those providers to non-religious organizations.
But for now, state’s don’t have to provide voucher funding to parents. It’s just that if they do fund vouchers, they must allow vouchers to be spent at religious schools too.
This connects to the question of religious charter schools because although charter schools are legally public entities, the organizations operating them in most cases are private. In theory, the arrangements governing these groups are similar to situations where a school district contracts with a private transportation company for their buses, or a cleaning company for their buildings. Except that with charter schools, the contracted party typically provides instructional materials and even often supplies the teachers.
What right-wing activists want is for the Supreme Court to say that states can’t prevent religious organizations from running public schools as part of a charter agreement
And in that, they are taking one tactical approach in a broader legal and political strategy to simply require states to fund religious instruction.
Establishment and Free Exercise
Spurred partly by new “education savings accounts” spreading in red states (aka vouchers, with additional allowable expenses beyond tuition), a vast network of conservative Christian homeschoolers is pushing for new legal rights. Including mandatory subsidies for their homeschools.
And Betsy DeVos, the billionaire and former U.S. Education Secretary, has made no secret of her desire to see the Supreme Court overturn more than a century of state “Blaine Amendments” prohibiting public dollars spent on religious schools. That would basically force all states to pay for some form of religious instruction.
All of this is possible in large part due to the efforts of Leonard Leo, the Catholic super-fixer of right-wing judicial politics all-but-responsible for the Court’s current conservative majority. Leo has made clear that following Dobbs, state-funded religious education is his next major project in the federal judiciary. And he’s enlisting the Alliance Defending Freedom (the main litigation group in Dobbs) to help lead the way. Beyond garden-variety culture warring, this is partly what the sustained effort to holler about LGBTQ and especially trans-students in public schools is about.
Meanwhile, brand new guidance from what’s left of the U.S. Department of Education is informing public schools across the country that federal dollars will now be tied to expansive interpretations of the right for school personnel to pray during the day in schools. So long as they do not technically compel students to pray at lunch or at the start of the school day, teachers and school leaders may choose to lead their students in prayer.
The end-game here is to de-emphasize the first part of the First Amendment—the Establishment Clause prohibiting government from establishing a single religion—and to emphasize the second part, the Free Exercise Clause.
The argument pushed by DeVos, Leo, ADF and their allies is that by providing taxpayer support only for secular public schools, states are putting undue hardship on families who see religious education as a fundamental part of their free exercise of faith but must pay out-of-pocket for it.
What’s at Stake
It’s possible—even necessary—to object to all this without attacking faith. I’m a Christian man myself, looking forward to the season of reflection of Lent that begins next week.
But church-based public schools are the plan on the Right. And although it’s mostly a battle that will take place in the courts, it’s also a battle that’ll take place in legislatures and in the court of public opinion. And those venues are determined by elections and by political organizing.
When I argue that Democrats have to get serious about improving public schools as part of defending public schools, I’m not just making an argument about campaign strategy (though I’m making that argument too).
What’s at stake here is that the American Right is obsessed with schools, and with carving more and more dollars out to subsidize religious education. And that’s going to be what happens without countering that objective with a bold, sustained vision for educational opportunity for every child.
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