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ProPublica: It’s Easy to Open a Private School and Get Voucher Money!

By dianeravitch
October 7, 2026 //
7

A team of reporters from ProPublica learned that almost anyone can get approved to open a new private school, regardless of their experience and background. They found out by doing it themselves.

This story encapsulates the downward slide of American education since the first charter school opened in 1992 in Wisconsin. In pursuit of innovation or deregulation or whatever, many states have gone too far, to the point where anyone can open a school. Anyone can teach. No accountability. In Arkansas, the reporters needed only to fill out a form on the Internet, pay $45, and buy an American flag. That’s all! They had their own school and were eligible to get public money from the state voucher program. After January 1, their “school” would qualify for federal voucher money too!

They wrote:

We have no business running a private school.

We’re reporters, not teachers. That doesn’t matter. Inexperience has hardly been a barrier for those who want to start their own schools, as we have reported this year. And it didn’t stop us, either. 

Over the last few months, to test the process, reporters from ProPublica partnered with local journalists in three states to establish private schools. None required much effort.

In Arkansas, all it took was a few clicks on the Arkansas secretary of state website, $45 and an American flag to form a bona fide private school with the Arkansas Times.

We established a school with Mountain State Spotlight in West Virginia after filing our new school’s name and location with authorities on a piece of notebook paper, then exchanging a few emails.

And with The Assembly in North Carolina, we filed an online notice of intent to open a private school at Ponysaurus Brewing Co. in Durham, while perched on its metal bar stools, eyeing glasses of a crisp kolsch.

We used our names and news organization email addresses, following each state’s rules for starting private or microschools, a type of private school intended for just a few students. Experience running a school wasn’t needed. No one from any of the states asked us about our backgrounds or qualifications, though West Virginia did ask for proof of a high school diploma. No one questioned what we plan to teach or how we would measure whether students are learning.

And yet we could enroll students in two states right now, if we wanted to. Arkansas even suggested ways our school could accept public money through the state’s voucher-style program.

For the record, we are not enrolling students and have no intention of operating our new schools. We did, however, register a website for our new school ventures, ProPublicaAcademy.com, and even designed some fun pencils to show our school spirit.

This year, a team of ProPublica reporters has been documenting how the American education landscape is shifting dramatically as states use public money to help fund private schools. With few regulations, hundreds of new private and microschools have proliferated.

Our reporting has shown the relative ease with which people — some with questionable backgrounds — founded their own schools in unusual places. They’ve popped up in barns and on farms, in strip malls between an antique shop and an ax-throwing business and in churches, where lighting and sound for worship services is part of the curriculum.

All of this led to a clear reporting question: If the hurdles to open a private school are so low, could we do it? And what would we learn along the way?

Smith Richards, Cohen and Strain, in the Arkansas Times newsroom at Strain’s cubicle, apply online to found a private school.

Open their graphic to see which nine states allow anyone to open a school with no curriculum, no standards, no testing, no experience.

Categories Education Industry, Funding, Ignorance, Innovation, North Carolina, Privatization, School Choice, Stupid, Vouchers, West Virginia

Why States Should Avoid the Federal Voucher Program

By dianeravitch
October 5, 2026 //
4

In the Public Interest is an organization devoted to protecting the public interest. We live in an era when the public sector is at risk of being privatized, so that private sector organizations can extract profits. This project is reflected in the privatization of hospitals, vegetarian practices, nursing homes, retirement communities, private homes, and any other opportunity to turn a profit. All too often, the private owners drain their prize of profit, bankrupt them and move on.

This is happening in public schools, where entrepreneurs have persuaded many cereal and state officials that they can run schools better and for lest cost than educators.

The public has NEVER approved a voucher program yet they are being passed by state legislatures, adopted despite parents’ opposition. Now comes a federal voucher program, which mainly subsidizes the tuition of students in private and religious schools. Some public schools kids take a voucher, but whatever comparable data exist, the children lose ground compared to those who attend the public school they abandoned.

For every student who leaves public schools, the school must make cuts. Will it be sports, recess, the arts, or larger class size?

It’s basically a lose-lose situation: the public schools lose students and funding. The voucher achools hire uncertified teachers and are unable to match the certified teachers in the public school.

Here is a commentary on the federal voucher program by Jeff Hagan of In the Public Interest:

New proposed regulations released for public comment regarding the federal tax credit school voucher program have done nothing to alleviate concerns that the federal program—a tax program administered through the Treasury department—will further undermine public education in the United States.

“Not only is the program not in the best interest of the nation’s school children, it’s not in the best interest of the nation itself,” says Shar Habibi, executive director and research director of In the Public Interest, a national research and advocacy organization that explores the role of privatization of public things, including education.

“To our school children we owe the best possible education, and this lets them down,” she says. “Nothing about this program suggests that supporting and improving academic and educational outcomes for children–especially our most vulnerable children–were considered in its development. The fact that it is—as even supporters state—“a tax law…not an educational program” tells you what this legislation was always about: a subsidy for wealthy families who already send their children to private schools.”

In the Public Interest has long been opposed to school vouchers at every level.

“School vouchers have never been in the public interest,” says Leigh Dingerson, senior fellow at In the Public Interest. “They offer taxpayer dollars to private and religious schools, draining resources for our public schools. Where public schools are and have always been ‘the great equalizer,’  vouchers only divide us.”

Habibi points out that the problems with vouchers go beyond the schoolhouse.

“Vouchers put the nation as a whole at risk. A strong, nationwide system of public schooling is essential to a thriving democracy and a robust economy.”  

While President Trump promised to “return education to the states,” this program in fact denies states the ability to choose how to ensure — as every state constitution requires — that all children have access to a quality education, free of charge.

Under this program, multi-million-dollar organizations can collect donations and hand out school vouchers in virtually any state in the country that agrees to participate, with little oversight from state policymakers or voters and with no regard to the state’s history or vision for providing public education to its children.

This federal school voucher program will, over time, lead to the decimation of our nation’s system of public schools. ITPI’s already-stated position that all states decline to participate in the program has not changed with the release of these new regulations.

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Categories Budget Cuts, Citizenship, Democracy, Education Industry, Privatization, School Choice, Vouchers

Network for Public Education Urges States Not to Opt in to Federal Voucher Program!

By dianeravitch
October 5, 2026 //
6

The Network for Public Education is dedicated to the preservation and improvement of public schools. Public schools are a foundation stone of our democracy. Nearly 90% of American students are enrolled in public schools.

We urge concerned citizens to write to their Governor and tell them NOT to participate in the federal voucher program!

Every community needs high-quality public schools but diverting public money to private alternatives weakens public schools.

Public money should be spent in public schools.

The Trump administration does not like public schools. It encourages public funding for religious schools, vouchers, charter schools, for-profit schools, and home schools. Research and experience teach that these alternatives choose their students and they discriminate. And they get worse academic results than public schools.

Voucher schools are free to reject students with disabilities. Unlike public schools, students in special education have no rights.

Do not fall for the machinations of the Trump regime against public schools. Their intentions are not good. They loathe public schools, the schools that educated 90% of all Americans and created the greatest nation in the world.

From NPE executive director Carol Burris:

October 2, 2026

The Network for Public Education Urges Governors Not to Opt-in to the Federal Voucher Program

On October 1, the U.S. Treasury Department released regulations for the federal tax creditvoucher program that was slipped into the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and pushed through reconciliation.

The rules confirm that this program will advantage sending public dollars to private and religious schools, including schools that freely discriminate. Governors must decide whether to opt-in by January 1.

We make our recommendation that states not opt-in based on the following:

Opting in allows federal tax dollars to fund discrimination against children.

When a state opts in, federal tax dollars can flow to private and religious schools and other providers that discriminate against students based on disability, academic challenges, LGBTQ status, or religion. States are expressly forbidden from adding protections of their own.

Opting in pushes cash-strapped public schools toward “pay to play.”

The regulations allow scholarships for public school students to cover services such as tutoring or extra special education services. However, nothing in the regulations stops public schools from turning programs they now fund into paid services that would require families to scramble to cover with scholarships.

A struggling district could convert elementary band, middle school art, or high school SAT prep into programs paid for with these vouchers. Here is the catch: to do that, the district must first charge parents. Some students will get a voucher. Others will not. Children whose parents cannot pay will be shut out.

This moves us one step closer to libertarian Milton Friedman’s vision, in which parents pay to educate their children and public education disappears. Make no mistake. This has been the far right’s goal for decades.

Opting in now creates a blind commitment to a program designed by those who actively undermine public schools.

At this point, the regulations are not final nor has Treasury released its Guidance regarding what expenses will be eligible under the program. That Guidance is expected “by the end of the year,”according to Kevin Salinger at Treasury. Without the Department’s Guidance for what qualifies as an eligible expense, a governor may opt-in, only to find out that virtually any spending that makes its way to public schools or districts has been disallowed. And then they’re stuck, because it’s clear that once in, states cannot back out until the following year.

Opting in fuels the growth of schools without rules.

As privatization has expanded, NPE has documented the fraud, abuse, and chaos that charter and voucher programs have produced. Dangling more tax dollars with few restrictions will draw more bad actors into education, opening low-cost, experimental schools that mislead parents and shortchange children.

States cannot block money from flowing to schools with poor fiscal or academic records. They cannot require public reporting on how funds are used or which students are served. They cannot add safeguards against waste and fraud.

Opting in adds to an unsustainable federal deficit.

Treasury projects that by 2030 the program could cost $26 billion a year in lost federal revenue.

That is more than Title I or IDEA, the largest federal programs supporting public schools.

Opting in will drain donations from charities American families depend on.

Large, respected charities like St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, and smaller ones that fund suicide prevention centers and domestic violence shelters, will now compete with a program that offers a dollar-for-dollar tax credit instead of a deduction. In an affordability crisis, donors will be drawn to giving that returns their entire contribution.

We encourage friends of public education to act today. Write your governor with a simple message: Do not opt our state into the federal voucher program. Then urge your members of Congress to repeal it. Join the millions of Americans who treasure public education and recognize this voucher program for what it is—a stealth attempt to destroy our beloved public schools.

Categories Bigotry, Charter Schools, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Equity, For-Profit, Funding, Home Schooling, Network for Public Education, Privatization, Research, Resistance, School Choice, Separation of church and state, Support for public schools, Virtual Charter Schools, Vouchers

Peter Greene: New Regulations for Federal Voucher Program Tie the Hands of Local Officials

By dianeravitch
October 2, 2026 //
5

Starting on January 1, 2027, the federal government will sponsor its own voucher program. In this post, Peter Greene explains how the new program will work. You can be sure that every dollar spent on charter schools and vouchers will be taken away from public schools.

Peter Greene writes:

Since Congress passed President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill with its federal school voucher, questions have abounded about the exact form that the tax credit program would take. Today the Treasury Department released proposed rules for the voucher program, and some of those questions are being answered

One of the persistent questions has been how much flexibility will states have in how the program is administered. The answer that came today is “Not very much.”

The basic structure of the tax credit voucher program works like this: a taxpayer redirects $1,700 to a scholarship granting organization (SGO) and receives a dollar-for-dollar tax credit. The SGO uses that money (minus an up-to-10% administrative fee) to grant scholarships to students, who may then use the money for educational expenses. 

While the state must require SGOs to meet the state’s requirements for charitable organizations, the state may not put restrictions on how the SGO operates “such as by limiting the type of school that scholarship recipients may attend or the types of qualified elementary or secondary education expenses for which scholarship funds may be used.” 

This restriction on restrictions dovetails with the voucher movement’s push to render legal the use of redirected taxpayer dollars to fund religious schools without setting limits on how those schools can discriminate.

The rules appear to solidify the idea that an SGO cannot be removed by the state for reasons other than failure to comply with the law’s SGO requirements. These requirements simply require an SGHO to serve at least ten eligible students and spend the appropriate amount of money on the vouchers. Nothing in the law requires SGOs to monitor or assess the educational quality of the vendors who receive the money.

The rules issued do indicate that an SGO can choose to limit its scholarships “to specific subject matter” or to students whose household income is less than 80% of the area median gross income, but it appears that those limits would be placed at the SGO’s discretion and not the state’s.

The federal voucher program caps eligibility at 300% of area median gross income, a generous cap that would make the vast majority of American families eligible for the voucher. 

The rules published today show that if a state wanted to, for instance, add restrictions that directed vouchers only to low-income students or students in particular communities, they could not do so. Nor could they impose any restrictions that would keep the voucher dollars from going to religious schools. 

In short, any governors who expected to use these redirected taxpayer dollars in ways that aligned with their own policy goals may need to reconsider. If they opt in, their hands are tied.

There are other details to be dug out and discussed, but one rule guarantees that these discussions may go on forever. While some “stakeholders” recommended restricting state’s ability to opt out after opting in, the rules indicate that a governor will opt in for just one year at a time.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Education Industry, For-Profit, Funding, Privatization, School Choice, Separation of church and state, Trump, U.S. Department of Education, Vouchers

The Five Biggest Charter School Grifts

By dianeravitch
October 2, 2026 //
4

Bruce Baker taught for many years at Rutgers University in New Jersey. He now teaches education policy at the University of Miami. He will have many opportunities to observe and document edu-grifting in Florida.

In this post, he identities the five biggest charter scandals and explains how they worked. Much of what you will read was called “legal graft” by past pundits. In other words, the charter operators collect millions in public funds while providing a dubious education, and they get away scot-free.

In other words, take the money and run. No consequences.

He writes:

Five cases, four mechanisms, one ranking: this post lines up the biggest fraud prosecutions, the biggest company-store combination, and the biggest sweeps contract in the charter sector’s history against the single largest real-estate deal any operator has ever built, and asks which one moved the most money. The answer isn’t the one with an indictment attached.

In The Grift Model I group the ways charter operators route public money into private hands into four repeating types: enrollment inflation (getting paid for students who aren’t really being educated — phantom seats, unverifiable attendance, ghost enrollees); related-party transactions (a school’s own board or executives sitting on both sides of a contract); the company store (a captive vendor a school is required to buy from — curriculum, credentials, back-office services — that happens to be owned by the people running the school); and real estate (buying, or arranging for a related party to buy, the very buildings public dollars already financed, then leasing them back at a markup).

What I hadn’t done before is put the five biggest documented cases — regardless of category — on the same page and rank them by dollar figure. A caveat before I do: these numbers come from different kinds of documents (a criminal restitution order isn’t the same instrument as a municipal bond prospectus), cover different time spans, and in a couple of cases reflect an auditor’s or a prosecutor’s counting choice as much as anyone’s. I’m ranking them anyway, because the comparison itself is the point — and because the single largest number on this list isn’t attached to anyone’s indictment.

Here they are, five to one.

5. White Hat Management, Ohio: about $100 million over a decade

White Hat’s “sweeps” contracts with ten Hope Academy and Life Skills Center campuses in Cleveland and Akron routed roughly 95 percent of each school’s state funding to the management company, which then handled teacher salaries, facilities, and operations with minimal board oversight — company-store logic applied to an entire school’s back office rather than one vendor line. Over a decade that added up to something like $100 million. When several of the nonprofit boards tried to switch management companies, White Hat argued the computers, furniture, and classroom equipment it had bought with that money belonged to White Hat, not the schools — meaning the boards would have to buy back the property their own public funding had already paid for once.

In 2015, a divided Ohio Supreme Court sided with White Hat, 4–3, upholding the buy-back scheme as an enforceable contract term. Justice Paul Pfeifer’s dissent put it about as plainly as a judicial opinion gets: “the contracts require that after the public pays to buy those materials for a public use, the public must then pay the companies if it wants to retain ownership of the materials.” Justice William O’Neill called it, in a dissent The Progressive covered in full, “a fraudulent conversion of public funds into personal profit.” Neither dissent changed the outcome. Nobody broke a law here — a state’s highest court looked at the arithmetic and, on the merits, said it was fine. (Court News Ohio’s case summary has the full procedural history.)

4. ECOT, Ohio: $117 million ordered repaid

Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow was, at its peak, Ohio’s largest online charter school. Ohio funds schools on a formula built around enrollment and documented hours of learning activity — a formula that works fine when “attendance” means a body in a classroom, and considerably less well when it means a login timestamp nobody is verifying. A state audit covering fiscal years 2016 through 2018 found ECOT couldn’t substantiate the participation hours behind a large share of the funding it had claimed. The Ohio Auditor of State’s officeultimately found the school owed $106.6 million to the Ohio Department of Education, plus additional findings against ECOT-affiliated management entities, for a combined total just over $117 million. ECOT shut down in January 2018 rather than pay it back; Ideastream’s coverage of the final audit and the Dayton Daily News both note the state has spent the years since trying to collect. A related judgment against affiliated entities separately reached $161.6 million. It remains the largest attendance-fraud clawback in the sector’s history: virtual schools, virtual kids, real dollars.

3. Chester Community Charter School / CSMI, Pennsylvania: roughly $122 million combined

This is the case I use to show what happens when the company store, related-party real estate, and plain self-dealing all show up in a single school under a single owner. Chester Community Charter, Pennsylvania’s largest brick-and-mortar charter, is managed by CSMI, a company controlled by Vahan Gureghian. A 2009 Philadelphia Inquirer public-records fightestablished that CSMI had been paid roughly $60.6 million in management fees since 1999. In 2010, Gureghian sold the school’s buildings — which he owned personally — to a newly created nonprofit, for the specific and sole purpose of leasing them back to the school, for $50.7 million, financed through municipal bonds and requiring roughly $4 million a year in lease payments; Pennsylvania’s Auditor General found the school had also improperly claimed $1.27 million in state lease reimbursements on buildings the program’s own rules made ineligible, because the “related parties” on both sides of the lease were, functionally, the same person before and after the sale. Then, in 2016, a federal Office of Inspector General audit found that the school’s CEO — Gureghian himself — had written checks to himself totaling $11 million without board approval. Add the pieces up and you get a single owner, across roughly fifteen years, sitting on every side of upward of $122 million in transactions with the school he ran. No criminal charges resulted from any of it.

2. The A3 charter network, California: $400 million generated, about $80 million allegedly diverted

Between 2015 and 2019, Sean McManus and Jason Schrock used a network of 19 online charter schools, partnerships with struggling private schools, and summer athletic programs to enroll thousands of students who, per prosecutors, never took a class. The scheme generated roughly $400 million in California public education funding; investigators alleged about $80 million of it was funneled into companies the two men controlled. Voice of San Diego’s account calls it, by the state’s own description, one of the largest charter-school fraud cases in the country’s history — and yet neither man served a day in prison. McManus, an Australian citizen, was sentenced to four years but served it under house arrest with an ankle monitor in Australia; Schrock’s ankle-monitor time was credited against his sentence. Nine other defendants pleaded to reduced or misdemeanor charges. Both men paid roughly $19 million each in fines and restitution, and the California State Controller’s office says the state has recovered more than $240 million overall — real money back, on a fraud whose architects never spent a night in a cell.

1. National Heritage Academies, Michigan and six other states: $853.6 million

In 2021, National Heritage Academies — the country’s third-largest for-profit charter operator, with more than 90 schools — arranged to sell 69 of its campuses across seven states to Campus Partners 1, a nonprofit newly created for the transaction, with no operating history and, at the time reporters looked, no registration on file with Michigan’s attorney general. NHA’s owner, J.C. Huizenga, controls both the seller’s side (through Charter Development Co., which retained the facility-maintenance and ground-lease contracts) and, through his general counsel installed as the new nonprofit’s president, effectively the buyer’s side as well. The purchase was financed through $853.6 million in tax-exempt municipal bonds, issued by an industrial development authority in La Paz County, Arizona — a jurisdiction with no obvious relationship to any of the seven states where the schools actually sit. The schools then signed 30-year leases back to the very entities that had just “sold” them. Network for Public Education’s account and NCSPE’s coverage at Teachers College, Columbia University both flag the same detail: nothing about this required hiding anything, and no one has been indicted. Local commissions in Michigan raised transparency objections and briefly slowed a few approvals, but the deal closed.

It is, by a wide margin, the largest single dollar figure on this list — more than double the other four cases combined — and it’s the cleanest illustration in the sector of this project’s core argument: the extraction that scales isn’t the kind that needs a prosecutor. It’s the kind a bond market is happy to underwrite.

Open the link to see his comparisons of these five top educators-grifts.

Categories Accountability, California, Charter Schools, Cheating, Corruption, Education Industry, Ethics, For-Profit, Funding, Hoax, Ohio, Privatization, Vouchers

What Will the New Federal Voucher Program Mean for Public Schools?

By dianeravitch
October 1, 2026 //
0

In January 2027, the federal government will launch a new voucher program. It’s available to states if the Governor opted to participate. The program was part of what Trump called his “One Big Beautiful Bill,” but which critics called “One Big Ugly Bill,” because it locked in big tax cuts for the wealthiest while cutting benefits for middle-class and poor Americans.

At the recent conference of the Network for Public Education, our board met to discuss whether we would support resistance or collaboration. Although we understand that some schools want to capture any money they can to support their students, we decided to stand strongly for the principle: PUBLIC DOLLARS FOR PUBLIC SCHOOLS. AND ONLY PUBLIC SCHOOLS. we concluded that if public schools accept vouchers, it will normalize the ideas embedded in the program, that is, that education is a consumer good. We believe it is a civic responsibility.

Leigh Dingerson’s description of this new program was published by In the Public Interest, which reports about the privatization of everything.

Public schools may participate in the program, but only for programs and activities that they do not already provide, like after-school tutoring, transportation, and field trips.

Leigh Dingerson wrote:

The idea that government has an inherent interest in providing a free, public education for every child used to be sacrosanct, except among a small set of radical reformers like Milton Friedman. But a 40-year campaign for “school choice” has quietly gathered steam. Proponents of privatization are now openly acknowledging that their sights are set on eliminating public schools. They want to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education (founded to ensure the civil rights of children in schools) and offer no-strings-attached public dollars to private and religious schools. And now, a lawsuit filed in Nebraska just this month argues that the U.S. system of public schools violates the First Amendment and asks the state to declare public schools unconstitutional.

The first nationwide, federally funded school voucher program is set to begin in January, but it has already become a political football in both red and blue states. Governors are being pressured to allow vouchers to be handed out in their states, and deep-pocketed special interests like the Heritage Foundation and large faith-based networks are spending tens of millions of dollars to build the infrastructure to funnel federal funds into private and religious schools.

There is much we don’t yet know about the program, including the mechanism to collect and dole out the money via Scholarship Granting Organizations (SGOs). Regulations are being developed by the Department of the Treasury and are expected within weeks. But we do know this: States are not obligated to participate in this program. In fact, governors or other designated agencies must decide annually whether to allow federally funded vouchers to be handed out in their states.  

What Can Be Done?

The implications of almost-universal private school vouchers are enormous. The federal tax credit voucher program signals a massive shift towards a privatized, market-based system with few if any guardrails to serve our most vulnerable students, ensure equity, rein in discrimination, or address educational quality.

What can state advocates and policymakers do?

Encourage your governor to opt out of the program.

  • The governors of Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Oregon have publicly announced their intention to decline to participate in the voucher program. Remember that the decision to participate or opt out of participation in the program must be made Governors may simply wait a year to see how the program plays out.

Consider legislation to narrow or guide your state’s participation.

  • Vermont has enacted a law that establishes criteria under which the state will participate in the program. It includes that SGOs have a “core mission of providing educational opportunities to economically underprivileged students” and that neither the SGO nor any school that receives funding under the program may “discriminate against any student” in a variety of categories. It also requires each SGO to report annually to the House and Senate Committees on Education, including data on the use of the voucher funds and the individuals receiving them.
  • In Rhode Island, the legislature has passed legislation which requires that both the legislature and the governor must jointly approve any decision to opt in to the program.

Watch for efforts to commit state funding to corporate entities vying to help administer the program.

  • A number of corporate entities have been created to “facilitate” and profit from the implementation of this program. For example, in Florida the legislature recently earmarked $2 million in its budget, apparently to contract with LearningSpring, a Denver-based start-up affiliated with the Koch network, to offer an online platform to help administer the federal voucher program.

Understand where your state might have authority to protect public education and ensure the integrity of taxpayer spending in the private market.

  • Familiarize yourself with your state’s private school (and homeschool) regulations and consider legislative language to strengthen them, and understand any state requirements for registered nonprofit organizations and whether they place any restrictions on, or allow oversight of, Scholarship Granting Organizations.

 What’s the matter with vouchers? The research is clear.

School vouchers are not new. We have half-a-century of experience with vouchers. Education Law Center’s Public Funds for Public Schools Project documents the many additional and important down-sides to vouchers. Among them:

 As students return to schools this fall, some have noted that this may be “the last normal year” for American schools.  It’s important for advocates of public education to make sure this critical institution doesn’t crumble.

Leigh Dingerson
Senior Research Fellow

Additional Resources

The following organizations offer additional resources on vouchers and the federal voucher program:

Education Law Center
Public Funds for Public Schools project.
The National Coalition for Public Education
The Network for Public Education

Categories Budget Cuts, Education Industry, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Funding, Privatization, Religion, Resistance, U.S. Department of Education, Vouchers

Peter Greene: The Ghost of Milton Friedman Haunts Us

By dianeravitch
September 25, 2026 //
16

Peter Greene, our brilliant champion of good sense and reason, writes about the specter that energizes the privatization movement. Milton Friedman, leader of unfettered capitalism, encouraged his followers to abandon public schools. We are living with the consequences of this disastrous ideology, funding failing charter schools, funding semi-literate home schools, funding intolerant religious schools, funding grifters and phonies whose only interest is profit.

Greene wrote:

We’ve discussed, many times (e.g. here and here) Milton Friendman’s ideas for education, pretty simply described as “burn down public schools and replace them with a private free market for education.” Nancy McLean summed it up like this in 2021:

He and his libertarian allies saw vouchers as a temporary first step on the path to school privatization. He didn’t intend for governments to subsidize private education forever. Rather, once the public schools were gone, Friedman envisioned parents eventually shouldering the full cost of private schooling without support from taxpayers. Only in some “charity” cases might governments still provide funding for tuition.

Friedman first articulated this outlook in his 1955 manifesto, but he clung to it for half a century, explaining in 2004, “In my ideal world, government would not be responsible for providing education any more than it is for providing food and clothing.” Four months before his death in 2006, when he spoke to a meeting of the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), he was especially frank. Addressing how to give parents control of their children’s education, Friedman said, “The ideal way would be to abolish the public school system and eliminate all the taxes that pay for it.”

Friedman liked the idea of vouchers, but mostly as a way to get the free market mainlined into the nation’s education system. And to really understand what that means, we need to understand how Friedman saw the free market.

Many public school supporters (including me) have argued that Friedman’s free market love is misplaced because of course a free market would choose winners and losers in a system with multiple tiers. Don’t you get it, we have brayed lustily– A free market education system would result in all sorts in inequality for students in school and society at large.

The ghost of Milton Friedman replies, “Don’t threaten me with a good time.”

For Friedman, the free market was not a magical engine for equality and uplifting one and all. Instead, it was a system that perfectly suits a world that is– and ideally ought to be– filled with inequality between people.

Society is filed with winners and losers, and the free market is an excellent way to sort them out. Society is inevitably, and correctly, hierarchal and unequal. Friedman wrote in Free to Choose, “Life is not fair. It is tempting to believe that government can rectify what nature has spawned,” without any sense that government might have had a hand in creating that unfairness. Nor could Friedman ever really grasp the notion that power imbalances were self-perpetuating by the system and not some sort of natural and just occurrences (Friedman never, ever came up with a convincing free market answer for racist elements of business and society).

That’s only the beginning. Please open the link and read it all. It’s an excellent description of the ideology that is undermining our public schools. Not to make society better, but to make it worse.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Corruption, Democracy, Education Industry, Evil, Extremism, Failure, Privatization, Vouchers

Why You Should Attend the NPE Conference This Weekend!

By dianeravitch
September 22, 2026 //
4

Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, explains why this NPE conference will be stellar.

She writes:

A community governs its public schools. Neighbors elect a board, set a budget, and decide what their children learn. That is exactly what privatization threatens, and it is what NPE’s national conference is built to defend. Over two days, September 26–27, at the Hyatt Regency Conroe near Houston, more than 40 sessions take on the fight from every angle. Here’s a taste of what’s on the schedule.

Vouchers and charters. In “Beating Vouchers in Court,” Derek Black, Jessica Levin, Fred Jones Jr., and Sharon Krengel will walk through recent wins in Montana, Utah, and Ohio, where voucher programs were declared unconstitutional. They will also review the live challenges in Tennessee, Wyoming, Florida, and Missouri. In “A View from the Trenches,” two Florida school board members and an Arizona teacher offer a candid account of what universal ESA vouchers have already done to how public education is funded and governed. And a session on the federal tax-credit voucher scheme, set to launch in January 2027, lays out what advocates in opt-in and opt-out states can do right now. 

In “Taxation Without Representation — Using a Conservative Argument to Combat Charter Schools,” Gregory Walace, Alison Chaplar, Betsy Flanagan, Daniel Marcano Jr., and Jennifer Simões will show how that framing sparked a grassroots movement, moved public opinion, and helped drive proposed legislation. “What’s Next for Charter Schools? A Review of Charter Strategies Across State Lines,” Patti Everitt, Gregory Walace, Carol Burris, and Dave DeMatthews lead an interactive look at how charters keep expanding in key states with few guardrails and little public engagement, which national initiatives fund that growth, and the research and messaging advocates can share across state lines to push back.

Takeovers are where democracy gets stolen outright. Houston high schoolers will describe how they organized against the HISD takeover. Parents from Houston (CVPE) and Fort Worth (FORT) share how they are fighting to win their voice back. An Indianapolis panel will dissect the sharpest trick of all — an elected board left in place, but stripped of control over buildings, transportation, and property taxes. “The Struggle to Govern Ourselves” will confront the research showing takeovers overwhelmingly target majority-Black districts, while organizers from New Orleans share hard-won lessons from years on the front lines. And in “The People’s Board,” presenters will take on Student Outcomes Focused Governance, the corporate model quietly sidelining elected members in board after board.

Follow the money. Maurice Cunningham, Mercedes Schneider, Mike DeGuire and David Armiak teach their best techniques for tracing dark-money networks back to the billionaires and foundations bankrolling privatization in two sessions. Other sessions map the private firms profiteering off vouchers and spotlight Wisconsin’s campaign to get voucher and charter costs printed right on taxpayers’ bills. 

The money grabs keep getting more creative. Texas advocates expose SB 1882 “partnership” charters as a fast-track privatization grift. Another panel takes on corporate tax breaks — energy-hungry data centers now the worst offenders — draining billions from schools. And with 17 states cutting or capping property taxes in 2024–25, national and state experts lay out how to defend the local revenue public schools depend on.

Faith, nationalism, and the classroom. Sessions on building school–congregation partnerships and mobilizing faith leaders in hostile states sit alongside a hard look at Christian Nationalism and its playbook for defunding and reshaping public education.

The newest battlegrounds. Randi Weingarten joins experts to debate AI’s role in classrooms — cognition, privacy, mental health, and the environment. A separate panel takes on ed-tech overreach and the lawsuits challenging how it commercializes student data. And student organizers from SEAT share how they’ve carried the fight to school boards, the legislature, Congress, and the Supreme Court.

The skill builder sessions are the reason you will leave with more than notes. Charles Siler, a former Goldwater Institute lobbyist who helped build the privatization playbook before turning on it, joins Manny Garcia to teach what messaging actually moves people. Rachel Coyle and Susan Spicka show how to win over hostile legislators. Others cover new-media strategy, gathering community input at scale, and getting real press traction beyond the press release. 

The keynotes anchor it all: Diane Ravitch and Texas AFT’s Zeph Capo open Saturday; Southern Education Foundation CEO Raymond Pierce speaks at lunch; investigative journalist Katherine Stewart headlines Sunday brunch; and Howard University’s Dean Emerita Leslie Fenwick closes us out.

You’ll meet the students, parents, teachers, clergy, researchers, and organizers who are actually winning in courtrooms, at statehouses, and on ballots. Privatizers have the money. We have the people, the passion and the plan. Register now here, book your room here in the hotel block, and join us in Conroe, Texas, right outside Houston.

I can’t promise that hotel rooms are still open but Carol will help you if you made a terrible mistake and forgot to sign up.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Budget Cuts, Censorship, Charter Schools, Childhood, Closing schools, Corruption, Democracy, Education Industry, Equity, Ethics, Failure, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, Funding, Parent Groups, Privatization, Religion, School Choice

Arizona: Vouchers Are Working Well for Religious Schools

By dianeravitch
September 22, 2026 //
2

Gene Glass, one of the nation’s most eminent education researchers, sent me the following perspective on how vouchers are subsidizing religious schools in Arizona.

But first a short primer on why Americans have honored “separation of church and state” until recently.

Until recently, every state and the federal government abided by the principle that public money should not be spent on religious schools or religious education. The term “separation of church and state” was first used by Thomas Jefferson. Like other Founding Fathers, he abhorred the idea that the state should pay the tuition of students at religious schools. Students had the right to attend religious school. But not at public expense.

Today’s advocates of school choice claim that the Founding Fathers had no views about public schools, but they are wrong.

In 1785, the Founding Fathers wrote the Land Ordinance, which described the layout of towns that would be built as the new nation expanded westward. Every new town would have 36 lots, each a square mile. Lot number 16 was designated for a public school, centrally located so it could serve all children. The Land Ordinance of 1785 said: “There shall be reserved the Lot No. 16, of every township, for the maintenance of public schools within said township.”

Later, the Founding Fathers added lot 36 as a school land, with the understanding that it could be sold off to produce income for the public school.

They certainly showed no preference for public support of private or religious schools.

Today’s voucher movement, as many scholars have documented, had its origins in the resistance to the Brown V. Board of Education decision of 1954. Most whites in the South did not want their children to attend schools with Black children; several Sourhern legislatures passed voucher laws to allow white children to escape desegregation, but federal courts knocked out all those laws.

Vouchers experienced a resurgence in recent decades. But every time they went to a state referendum, they have always lost, usually by large margins. The public doesn’t want to pay the tuition for children at religious schools or at private schools that exclude students because of their race or disability or other characteristic.

Despite the fact that the public opposes vouchers, state after state has adopted them, typically because state legislators want to satisfy religious activists.

Professor Glass sent the following description of what is happening in Arizona. Bear in mind that voters in Arizona overwhelmingly defeated a voucher proposal in 2018. The Republican governor and legislature ignored the vote.

Professor Glass wrote:

Thanks to reporting by 12News, we’re finally getting a clearer picture of which schools are raking in the voucher money.

For those of you who haven’t followed the voucher program closely, a word to the wise: It has been a colossal pain to get information about the program, especially after the Legislature opened it up to every student in the state in 2022.

Sure, state officials bend over backwards to give parents information about how to use the program, as they should. But if you’re a run-of-the-mill taxpayer (or news reporter) who wants to know how your $1.15 billion is being spent, well, you’re out of luck.

Fortunately, Craig Harris at 12News took it upon himself to open up that black box. He and his colleagues have battled with state officials for several years now (and borne the brunt of the outrage from the pro-voucher crowd).

As part of that transparency battle, 12News successfully sued the Arizona Department of Education to get records on 2 million transactions in the Empowerment Scholarship Account (AKA, voucher) program.

The 12News reporters then shared a list of 190 private schools in Arizona that are raking in the voucher money, which is how we’re able to shed some light on how the game is playing out in Southern Arizona.

As we went through the list, one thing became glaringly apparent: Christian schools are dominating the voucher game.

Just look at the Southern Arizona schools that brought in the most voucher money since 2022:

  1. Salpointe Catholic High School: $15.2 million
  2. Pusch Ridge Christian Academy: $8.8 million
  3. Yuma Lutheran School: $7.9 million
  4. Desert Christian School: $7.1 million
  5. Yuma Catholic High School: $6.3 million
  6. Saints Peter and Paul Catholic School:$5.9 million
  7. St. Elizabeth Ann Seton School: $5.9 million
  8. Lourdes Catholic School: $5.4 million
  9. Southwestern Christian School: $5.3 million
  10. Calvary Chapel Christian School: $5.2 million (they also have campuses outside Southern Arizona)

Every single one is affiliated with a Christian denomination.

It’s the same pattern throughout the state. Christian schools got the lion’s share of the voucher money, while only two secular private schools brought in enough voucher money to crack the top 50.

Just going by the names of the schools, we counted 52 “Christian” schools, 37 “Catholic” schools, 15 “Lutheran” schools, four “Baptist” schools and three “Adventist” schools, plus a smattering of “parish,” “Bible” and “chapel” schools.

______________
Gene V Glass

Emeritus Regents’ Professor, Arizona State University

Editor, Education Review edrev.asu.edu

Categories Arizona, History, Privatization, Religion, Separation of church and state

Stephen Dyer: Charter Schools in Ohio Are Failing When Compared to District Schools. Does Anyone Care?

By dianeravitch
September 17, 2026 //
2

Stephen Dyer, a former legislator, keeps count. His blog is called 10th Period:

Ohio’s charter schools have underperformed for years, as compared to district public schools, but Republican legislators and state officials don’t care. Charter schools open, fail, close, and are replaced by more charter schools. Public money sustains them regardless of their poor performance.

Dyer wrote:

So if you’re paying $1.6 billion a year for an education sector whose graduates make 20% less upon graduation than public school graduates, can we really call that an option? Or is it just a waste of money. 30 years. $20 billion. And THIS is what we get in return? Outrageous.

I have now written this post in one form or another for 20 years.

Ohio Charter Schools get smoked on state report cards by Ohio School Districts.

I know, Charter School honks, you only want your performance to be compared with the Big 8 urban districts — Akron, Canton, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Dayton, Toledo and Youngstown. 

See, here’s the problem: 53% of the kids in Ohio charter schools come from those 8 districts. 

That means 47% do not.

You can’t take $1.5 billion in state aid from kids attending all but a handful of school districts and then demand your performance be compared with 8 of those 607 districts — the 8 that are typically among the state’s lowest performing¹.

Here’s what this piss-poor Charter School performance looks like in charts:

The second chart kind of says it all. 

Even though Charters received less than 1 in 4 of all the stars given, they received 2 out of every 3 1 Stars (F), all of the 1.5 Stars (D-) and about 2 out of every 3 2.5 Stars (C-).

Meanwhile, districts outperformed their overall grade share in every A, B and C category. Just a horrific performance by Charter Schools, considering they’ve had 30 years, $20 billion, just a fraction of the government oversight and incredible legislative and gubernatorial protection to achieve these gawd awful results.

In only 3 categories are more than 40% of Charter School grades C or higher: Overall (53%), Gap Closing (52.2%) and Progress (79%). 

On the District side, the only categories where less than 86% of their grades are C or higher are Early Literacy (66%) and Progress (58%). That’s right. In all categories, the vast majority of School District grades are C or higher. 

Take it easy, Charter Honk. 

Just because Charters do better on the Progress rating² does not mean they’re better schools. Why can I say that with confidence? 

Because Charters do so fantastically worse on the 6 other measures, including a stunning 58% 1 Star ratings on College, Career, Work and Military Readiness!

That CCWMR rating seems to be keeping in line with my post from this morning outlining how Charter School graduates make 20% less over their lifetimes than traditional public school graduates, which costs them hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Look, guys. All I can do is keep pointing all this out and hope that elected officials in Columbus stop drinking the Charter School Kool-Aid at some point.

To recap, here’s all we’ve found out over the last couple weeks about these things:

  • They receive 2 out of every 3 of failing grades on the most recent state report card
  • More than 1 in 3 are on the state’s lowest-performing building list.
  • More than 9 in 10 “Dropout Recovery” charters are on the list.
  • About 1 in 5 charters have been on the list since 2018.
  • More than 1 in 2 charter schools that have ever opened in Ohio are now closed.
  • They received more than 1/2 of all F grades ever given to schools on Ohio’s Report Card, despite representing about 10% of all Ohio school buildings.
  • They spend almost double the share of their funding on non-instructional administrators that Ohio’s traditional public schools spend.
  • They receive more than double the state funding that a traditional Ohio public school student receives.
  • They spend more, on average, per pupil than a traditional Ohio Public School District, even though charters can’t collect local revenue (except for a handful in Cleveland).
  • They produced the single largest taxpayer ripoff scam in Ohio history, largely enabled by Sen. Jon Husted, and are constantly being busted for fraud and other corrupt practices.
  • Charter School students are about 7 percent of the state’s school population, but receive 12 percent of the state’s funding for schools.
  • That funding (along with EdChoice vouchers) is preventing the state from fully funding its own formula to provide resources to the state’s 1.5 million traditional public school students.
  • More than 1 in 10 Ohio charter schools are on the state’s suspected test cheating list and 7 out of every 10 schools suspected of cheating on their state tests are charter schools.
  • More than 1 in 4 of the state’s “high performing” charter schools are on the state’s suspected test cheating list.
  • They have cost charter school graduates between $247 million and $321 million since 2018 and will cost them between $1.8 billion and $6.7 billion over their collective lifetimes.

Will any of this finally break through?

I guess we’ll find out in a couple months.

1.

I also don’t compare public school building performance with charters because the money for charters comes out of the same money pot meant for kids in districts. So the money comes out of the state aid to every building in a district — the lowest-performing and highest-performing ones. That’s why I’ve always only compared performance between districts and charters. Because if charters are going to be a worthwhile public policy endeavor, then they have to be worth taking state money away from kids in the state’s highest-performing buildings, not just the ones in the lowest-performing ones. I would argue that taking any state money from any public school kids, regardless of report card rating, to fund charters and unconstitutional private school tuition subsidies is public policy disaster. But that’s another argument for another day. 

2.

About 43% of school district grades that are C or higher are Cs. Nearly 1/2 of all charter grades that are C or higher in Progress are Cs.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Failure, Funding, Ohio, Privatization, School Choice
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