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Indiana: Republicans Have Systematically Undermined Public Schools, Where 87% of Students Are Enrolled

By dianeravitch
August 13, 2026 //
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Indiana once took pride in its public schools. Not any more. Since the Republican Party took charge of state government, public schools have been neglected and underfunded.

Veteran educator Vernon Smith was elected to the state legislature after his retirement. He wrote this article, which appeared in the Chicago Tribune.

He wrote:

Sixteen years ago, Republicans assumed full control of Indiana’s state government, holding the governor’s office and winning majorities in the House and the Senate. Since achieving this trifecta, the Republican supermajority has systematically cut funding and programs that made this state work for the people who live here.

Nowhere has this been more apparent than the state’s complete neglect of public schools for nearly two decades. Since taking power, the Republican supermajority has done everything in its power to undermine public education, and Indiana’s children are worse off for it.

Let me explain where years of Republican education policy have gotten us. Last month, the Network for Public Education released a report revealing Indiana ranks 45th out of 50 states in support of public education. Last year, only 31.2% of students showed proficiency on both the math and ELA sections of the ILEARN test. More than half of fourth graders can’t read proficiently, and nearly seven-in-ten eighth graders aren’t proficient in math.

A record number of school districts across the state — nearly 40 — have turned to ballot referenda to secure the money they need this year because the state won’t properly fund them and has cut their local funding sources. These are the results of Republicans chipping away at Indiana’s public school funding for years.

Consider where their priorities lie. More than 87% of Hoosier children attend traditional public schools. Yet year after year, the supermajority pours its energy and political capital into expanding charter schools and private school vouchers for the children of families who were, in most cases, never going to need the state’s help in the first place. The legislature has made it clear: they have no issue abandoning working-class Hoosiers in favor of giving an extra leg up to the most fortunate among us.

When Indiana first opened the door to charter schools and voucher programs, lawmakers sold it as a lifeline for children of color and children in poverty whose assigned schools were failing them. But once the door was propped open, my Republican colleagues expanded it year after year, extending vouchers to families making well over six figures. If this were truly about rescuing kids who’d been failed by the system, it would have stayed targeted at the kids who needed rescuing. Instead, it grew into a subsidy for everyone but the working-class families the program was designed to serve.

None of this is by accident. The supermajority was warned by Democrats, education professionals and concerned Hoosiers of the consequences that their policies would inflict on our schools. It is the direct, foreseeable and self-inflicted result of almost two decades of choices made by men and women who have mistaken their own supermajority for a mandate to neglect the children they were elected to serve.

Districts across the state are being forced to ask voters to approve referenda to raise their own local property taxes just so schools can keep the lights on and pay their teachers. Let’s not pretend this educational belt-tightening is born of necessity. Indiana has nearly $4 billion in surplus and reserve funds, which is more than enough to return to our previous, robust support of public education. Our schools and the children attending them are being asked to make do with less while the state sits on more money than it knows what to do with.

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I do not say this lightly, and I do not say it out of partisan loyalty. I say it as a man who spent nearly 20 years as a school principal and six years as a teacher before I ever spent a day in the Statehouse. I have seen firsthand what happens when a school has what it needs, and I have seen what happens when it doesn’t.

I am telling you, plainly: Indiana’s Republican supermajority has had 16 years to prove it knows the difference too. It does not. If it did, we would not rank 45th in the nation for public school support. We would not be watching our children fall further behind their peers in other states while the people entrusted with fixing it offer nothing but superficial, special-interest-backed policies that don’t address the underlying issues.

This is where years of unchecked Republican domination have gotten us: two decades of failure and of backs turned on the generation that makes up the future of this state, this nation and the world beyond.

For 16 years, they have stood before us and promised that this would finally be the year public education in Indiana gets fixed. And for 16 years, they have failed to deliver on that promise. The only question left is how much longer Hoosiers are willing to take their word for it and allow more children to fail academically

Categories Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Extremism, Funding, Indiana, Privatization, Republicans, Vouchers

Carol Burris: The Hoax of “School Choice”

By dianeravitch
July 29, 2026 //
8

I posted the link to Carol Burris’s terrific article about school choice yesterday but was unable to copy the text. Carol sent the text to me.

Here it is:

Advocates of a rightwing, billionaire-funded campaign to replace public education with a privatized education marketplace have been candid about their goals and disciplined in pursuing them. A new reportfrom the organization I lead, the Network for Public Education, provides an accounting of how far state lawmakers across the nation, in both red and blue states, have advanced this campaign and have put at grave risk access to the current system of education that is free and available to all families.

For nearly a decade, the Network for Public Education has issued statehouse-by-statehouse report cards holding legislators accountable for how they treat public schools and the children who depend on them. And over the years, we have seen a ramp up in school privatization and continuous neglect of public school students and teachers.

This 2026 Report Card is our most expansive to date, evaluating all fifty states and the District of Columbia across four categories: privatization of public education, protections for homeschooled students, school funding, and conditions for teaching and learning based on thirty-nine factors. Some of those factors include charter school expansion, discrimination, and student-to-teacher ratio. 

In 2022, when we issued our second report card, ten states achieved 80 percent or more of a possible 102 points. By 2024, the number of states achieving 80 percent of all possible points had dropped to four. Two years later, only two states, Nebraska and Vermont, hit the 80 percent mark.

Over the past four years, privatization efforts have seen heightened success across the country.  Voucher programs (which began in the mid-1990s) have expanded from twenty-seven programs in 2022 to seventy-three programs in thirty-four states as of 2026, with multiple programs in several states. Vouchers pay for tuition at both secular and religious schools, and in some states, the purchase of goods and services by homeschoolers and microschoolers. Schools accepting vouchers also typically face little of the academic, financial, or civil rights accountability required of public schools, and many can reject or expel students based on disability, religion, sexual orientation, or academic record. And because voucher amounts frequently fall short of full private school tuition, the benefits flow disproportionately to families who could already afford private school without public dollars.

Charter schools, which began in 1992 as experimental schools controlled by school districts, have been privatized to include large chains of schools, some of which span across multiple states. Nearly one in five charter school students attends a charter run by a for-profit corporation. It is an unstable sector of schooling, with more than one in four closing by year five. 

Only Nebraska and Kentucky are now the only remaining states free of both charter schools and state voucher programs. But the 2026 report card reveals a troubling and consistent pattern beyond the expansion of school privatization. The states most aggressively redirecting public funds toward private alternatives—charter schools, voucher programs, and home schools—are the same states that fund privatization at the direct expense of investment in public schools.

In fact, our analysis found a strong and statistically significant negative relationship between the expansion of privatization and other indicators of public school support. Privatization and public school disinvestment, it turns out, go hand in hand.

Seventeen states earned a grade of F, meaning they failed to meet even 40 percent of the thirty-nine standards we set for responsible stewardship of public schools. Standards that included equitable school funding, teacher satisfaction, protections for homeschooled students, and class size. Florida ranked dead last, scoring just fourteen out of 102 possible points, with Arizona following closely behind. These are not struggling states making hard choices with thin budgets. They are states that have made deliberate decisions to defund neighborhood schools while directing public money toward private alternatives with minimal oversight, weak accountability, and documented records of fraud and mismanagement.

The appeal of “school choice,” in which families are permitted to use state funds that would’ve been otherwise spent on public education on non-traditional programs like charter or private schools, is easy to understand. The promise of options and tailored education sounds reasonable in the abstract. But in practice, choice works best for families with the time, information, and flexibility to navigate it, and whose children the private school is willing to choose. For a family in rural Florida or a child with complex disabilities whose needs most private schools won’t accommodate, the marketplace of options is theoretical. The public school is the only institution legally required to educate every child who walks through the door. When it is weakened through funding cuts, the diversion of students and dollars, or a hollowed-out teaching workforce, the consequences fall hardest on the children least able to find alternatives.

Meanwhile, many of these states that have expanded privatization are the same states that fail to uphold school policies that support teaching and learning.

You cannot systematically eliminate teachers’ job protections, freeze wages, and inject heavy political pressure into classrooms, then be surprised when talented people leave the profession. States like Arizona and Florida, which we rank at the bottom for teacher working conditions, are the same states reporting severe shortages of teachers and the highest rates of underqualified instructors. That is a direct consequence of policy choices, not a demographic inevitability.

The top of the rankings offers a useful counterpoint. States like Nebraska and Vermont demonstrate that it is possible to adequately fund public schools, support teachers as professionals, and resist privatization pressure. The distance between them and the bottom-ranked states reflects not differences in wealth or circumstance, but differences in political priorities.

None of this means public school systems are beyond criticism. They have real failures and persistent inequities worth addressing. But the solution is not to defund the institution and redirect money to private alternatives that face no equivalent accountability. Charter schools limit enrollment. Voucher schools can turn away students. Education savings accounts, which give taxpayer funds to parents to buy private services in lieu of public schooling, can be misused with little consequence. Public schools cannot do any of these things—and that constraint is precisely what makes them worth protecting.

What happens next depends on whether parents, teachers, and the communities built around our public schools engage with the same urgency as forces on the right wing who work to dismantle them.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Failure, Funding, Hoax, Privatization, School Choice, Vouchers

Tennessee: Big Money Backing Marsha Blackburn for Governor

By dianeravitch
July 28, 2026 //
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Andy Spears reports that the Walmart billionaires are supporting MAGA Marsha Blackburn in the race for Governor of Tennessee.

The Waltons of Arkansas are totally committed to eroding public schools and privatizing public funding, so Blackburn is promising to expand state support for vouchers.

Spears writes:

The youngest son of Walmart founder Sam Walton is now on the Marsha Blackburn bandwagon.

The latest campaign financial report indicates that pro-Blackburn Team Tennessee PAC received $100,000 from Walton in the last reporting period.

The Walton family has long supported private school discount coupons – otherwise known as school vouchers. These schemes divert funds from working-class families to wealthy families to use as tuition discounts at private schools. 

Walton joins payday predators Advance Financial, Pennsylvania billionaire and privatization advocate Jeff Yass, the CEO of Jimmy John’s, and General Motors in supporting Blackburn and her reverse Robinhood economic and education agenda. 

Blackburn has pledged to further expand Tennessee’s $300 million school voucher scheme if the 74-year-old career politician wins the Governor’s race. 

Tennessee’s Race to the Bottom: In a Corvette with a Driver Fueled by Jimmy John’s

Categories Billionaires, Education Industry, Elections, Privatization, Tennessee, Vouchers

The Century Foundation: Federal Voucher Program Will Increase Segregation

By dianeravitch
July 24, 2026 //
1

It is a well-established fact that the school choice movement was created in the South in the 1950s to protect segregation. After the Brown decision of 1954, whites resisted desegregation with e Rey strategy they could dream of. One such was to offer vouchers to every student to attend the school of their choice. The predictable result was to protect segregated schools.

In this century, voucher promoters sell them as parental choice, “saving poor kids from failing public schools,” etc.

But unless an effort is made to enrcuage racial integration, choice will lead to segregation.

Halley Potter of The Century Foundation wrote this report. I urge you to open the link and read it in full.

Potter wrote:

In rural Northampton, North Carolina, a private Christian school called Northeast Academy is 99 percent White in a county that’s 40 percent White. It receives about half of its tuition from taxpayers, through the state’s private school voucher program. Northeast is one of a number of private schools known as “segregation academies,” because they were founded during desegregation so that White parents could avoid having their children educated in an integrated setting.

Segregation academies ought to be a thing of the past, but they could experience a resurgence—paid for with taxpayer dollars—under the new federal private school voucher scheme enacted as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBA). Bringing back segregation academies using taxpayer dollars is part of the Trump administration’s radical two-pronged approach to undermine public education. The first tactic in the Trump administration’s plan to undercut public school systems is to dramatically reduce the federal role in education by dismantling federal programs, reducing oversight, attempting to cut federal funding for K–12 schools, and working to close the U.S. Department of Education. The second tactic is actively working toward privatization through an unprecedented federal private school voucher program.

How the Voucher Plan Would Work . . .

In July 2025, OBBA established a new federal tax credit—known as the Education Freedom Tax Credit—that, in effect, serves as a private school voucher program. The program allows individuals, beginning January 1, 2027, to contribute up to $1,700 per year toward private entities known as scholarship granting organizations (SGOs) and receive a dollar-for-dollar return of their money in the form of a federal tax credit. SGOs then would then be able to decide how to distribute the funds as scholarships to applicant students for them to spend on education. There is no cap on the size of such scholarships, and no limit on the number of individuals that can claim the tax credit. While recipient students may be able to use scholarship funds to pay for some things like tutoring or activity fees at public schools, because public schools are essentially free, it is anticipated that the vast majority of these funds will go toward private school enrollment.

There are very few requirements of SGOs in the statute, and it appears that any organization in a participating state that meets the criteria will be allowed to participate. SGOs must give scholarships to ten or more students who do not all attend the same school, must spend at least 90 percent of the income on scholarships, must give priority to students who received scholarships the previous year and to siblings, cannot earmark funds for a particular student, and must ensure that students come from families earning no more than 300 percent of the area median gross income. Essentially everything else will likely be up to the SGO, as the program’s regulations are not expected to add additional guardrails. It appears an SGO could, for example, be set up to fund scholarships to Christian schools only. Because private schools are not subject to all of the same civil rights laws as public schools, SGOs could also likely discriminate against students based on disability or sexual orientation.

While starting the process with individual donations gives the program the veneer of a charity operation, this is a ruse. All this does is mask who is truly bearing the cost of the program. In actuality, the donors to SGOs bear no cost, as they are later fully reimbursed by the federal government through the dollar-for-dollar tax credit. The federal government—using taxpayer dollars sent to the supposed donors—bears the entire cost of the program. Estimates of the cost to taxpayers range from around $4 billion to over $50 billion annually.

Moreover, the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s language regarding the tax credit program is very misleading. Their fact sheet states: “A recent report estimates that the Education Freedom Tax Credit will generate an additional $24 billion in education funding annually.” That makes it sound like this is a revenue-creating program rather than one that bears a huge federal cost.

States and the District of Columbia have to decide annually whether or not to opt out of or into the voucher program. As of July 6, 2026, twenty-nine states had indicated that they plan to opt in for the first year of the program. However, federal regulations guiding the program are not expected until September. Further complicating matters, at least eighteen states will have new governors and the District of Columbia will have a new mayor when the program launches in 2027 because of term limits, and that number could be as high as thirty-six after this fall’s elections.

. . . To Increase Segregation and Undermine Public Education

One of the dangers of private school voucher programs—alongside their well-demonstrated negative effects on students’ academic outcomes, civil rights violations, and destabilization of public school funding—is that they can exacerbate racial and socioeconomic segregation.

Diverse learning environments that bring students of different racial and socioeconomic backgrounds together are one of the most powerful educational tools we have. Integrated schools help encourage critical thinking, boost academic achievement, and build the skills for working across lines of difference that are essential for our democracy. The growth of private school voucher programs threatens to roll back progress on integration, limit educational opportunity, and further fracture the educational landscape by race and class.

As state leaders and advocates weigh whether or not to opt into the federal voucher program, they should consider the evidence on how the program could deepen inequality and further racial and socioeconomic divides. New analysis in this piece shows that in some metro areas in states that are still deciding whether to opt out of or into the federal voucher program, private schools already drive more than 40 percent of the racial segregation in schools.

The Segregationist History of Private School Vouchers

Private school enrollment nationwide is disproportionately White and wealthy. As of 2021, 9 percent of American schoolchildren attended private schools. Sixty-five percent of private school students are White, compared to 45 percent of public school students. Private school students are about twice as likely as public school students to come from higher-income households, and private school attendance is concentrated among the highest earners.

Private school voucher programs were started by segregationists across the South in the 1950s and 1960s as part of efforts by Southern leaders engaged in “massive resistance” to avoid integrating their schools in the wake of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling. Many communities opened all-White private schools, which became known as segregation academies. Local governments slashed public school funding and instead created public subsidies for these private schools—including voucher programs to reimburse tuition as well as tax credits.

The courts eventually struck down many of those voucher programs tied to segregation academies, but current voucher programs still show troubling patterns of segregation. Roughly 300 private schoolsthat were founded as segregation academies still receive money from publicly funded voucher programs. Most voucher money goes to students who are already attending private schools, and data has shown that private schools tend to raise their tuition after the introduction of voucher programs. For example, when Iowa started a new voucher program in 2023–24, two-thirds of vouchers went to students who were already attending private schools. By 2026, tuition at some of the state’s largest private high schools had grown by as much as 50 percent. It is important to note that vouchers typically do not cover the full cost of tuition, making private schools still out of reach for most low-income families, and so the voucher programs tend to function mostly as cost-reducing schemes for wealthier families sending their children to private schools. In Arizona, for example, half of all voucher recipients come from the wealthiest quartile of zip codes.

There are some private school voucher programs that target low- to middle-income students and enroll mostly students of color, such as the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, the oldest operating school voucher program in the United States. However, research shows that even students in these programs, which arguably have the highest potential for integration, by and large did not give students greater access to integrated schools.

Furthermore, some voucher programs that started out serving mostly students of color have now seen an increase in White students in recent years. When North Carolina’s private school voucher program launched in 2014, for example, a majority of students receiving vouchers were Black, and just 27 percent were White; however, as the program expanded incrementally from one serving only low-income students to one with no income limits, the percentage of vouchers going to White students grew to 73 percent, in a state where only 51 percent of school-aged children are White. A 2024 investigation by ProPublica into North Carolina’s private school voucher program found thirty-nine schools that fit the profile of segregation academies that were receiving public money through voucher programs.

The new federal private school voucher program specifies that participation is open to families earning up to 300 percent of area median gross income, which means it would be open to roughly 90 percent of students nationwide. With near universal eligibility, the federal program could easily be susceptible to similar patterns of segregation, disproportionately benefiting White students and furthering segregation between public and private schools.

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, Extremism, Privatization, Racism, School Choice, Segregation, Separation of church and state, Vouchers

Nevada: Charter Schools Are the Trojan Horse of Privatization

By dianeravitch
July 21, 2026 //
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Kelly Edgar taught music in Clark County, Nevada (Las Vegas) for 25 years. She recently wrote this article in The Nevada Independent about the dangers of charter schools.

She wrote:

Charter schools have been touted as the solution to our “failing public schools.” To be fair, the original intention was good. Those who founded the charter school movement envisioned it as a way to collaborate with public schools by finding creative solutions for students who weren’t thriving in traditional educational settings. 

But that’s not what’s happening today. Since retiring from the Clark County School District in 2024, I’ve developed my own theory: Between the dismantling of the Department of Education and free market ideologues wanting in on public school tax dollars, it’s now clear that the goal of privatizing education has been decades in the making. And charter schools are the stepping stones to get the job done.

Most people assume that charter schools are public schools because they’re free to attend and publicly funded. However, unlike traditional public schools, many are managed by private, for-profit companies — such as Academica in Nevada — and they filter enrollment via applications and lotteries.

Moreover, they do not have publicly elected school boards. In other words, we have no say on how our tax dollars are spent in charter schools because oversight is lax. Yet a charter school principal, a charter school founder and members of Moms For Liberty (which has direct ties to the school privatization movement) can sit on our school board.

Public education certainly has its challenges. I devoted decades to working inside the system and spent my final years sounding the alarm about overcrowded classrooms, insufficient resources, district leaders with ulterior motives and a lack of teacher autonomy. 

What I didn’t realize was that we were being sabotaged by the very people selling taxpayers the solutions. 

According to a July 2026 report by the Network for Public Education, there’s a direct correlation between academic achievement and per-pupil funding. States that support public schools outperform those that do not. So why is Nevada’s education system still ranked 48th in the nation despite “historic education funding” being passed in 2023?

Because you can’t pour water into a leaky bucket and expect it to hold. The funding was a start, but it wasn’t enough to compensate for the fact that Nevada also aggressively redirects public funds toward “private alternatives” such as charter schools. As the Network for Public Education puts it, “Privatization and disinvestment go hand in hand.”

The groundwork for all this was laid when the President Ronald Reagan’s administration, ahead of his 1984 re-election campaign, convinced Americans that we were A Nation at Risk, public schools were to blame and only Reagan could save us. This report simmered with “apocalyptic rhetoric” and the media seized on it like a dog with a bone because nothing grabs attention better than lines such as “the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity.” 

What A Nation at Risk and major news outlets failed to mention, however, was a statistical sleight of hand called Simpson’s paradox. Students weren’t actually doing worse; more students, not just the privileged few, were taking the Scholastic Aptitude Test. In fact, President George Bush’s own commissioned study concluded that on nearly every measure, scores held steady or improved. But those findings were suppressed, and politicians on both sides of the aisle doubled down on the same flawed premise that public schools were failing America.

Rather than addressing systemic poverty, which we know affects educational outcomes, politicians and corporate philanthropists wasted billions of dollars micromanaging teachers and student learning with policies and programssuch as No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top and Common Core.

And when public schools didn’t crumble under those “reforms” as anticipated, the Council for National Policy (CNP), a conservative network, manufactured a new crisis: convincing the American people that teachers are indoctrinating their children with radical, anti-American ideologies.

The impact of this conspiracy on teacher morale has been brutal. We went from being treated as professionals to villains overnight, pouring ourselves into our work just to be disparaged by the media and pundits who would never survive a day in our shoes.

But sadly, breaking us was the point so they could justify defunding public education, sell parents on charter schools and other private alternatives under the guise of “school choice,” and “save” Americans from the crisis they created.

In 2017, the council provided the Trump administration with a blueprint to return education to “free-market private schools, church schools, and home schools as the normative American practice.” This “Education Reform Report” became the foundation of Chapter 11 of Project 2025. 

And while we haven’t seen every part of their mandate unfold in Nevada, there are red flags. Clark County schools are seeing their lowest enrollment numbers in decades, with many parents opting for alternatives, citing “lax classroom discipline” and “poorly performing public schools.” One would assume lower enrollment could have been an opportunity for the district to address parents’ concerns by decreasing class sizes and offering more individualized attention. But instead, the district was forced to declare a reduction in force that affects 60 licensed professionals because when students leave, the funding follows the child. 

And where are those tax dollars going? To Academica-managed schools, and more ideologically driven ones such as Founders Classical Academy, run by Hillsdale College, whose leadership has ties to the CNP network that wrote the privatization blueprint. 

The Clark County School District is not alone. Data indicate that by 2031, public school enrollment is projected to decline nationwide. 

This begs the question: If by 2031, more students are enrolled in charter schools, then aren’t charter schools just glorified public schools without the safeguard of public oversight? 

That absence of oversight is key when profit is the goal. It’s in the best interests of management companies to keep costs down. This inevitably leads to shrinking school budgets and compromising standards through raising class sizes, lowering pay and hiring less experienced teachers. And our students? Commodities. 

Which brings us back to square one. But this time, instead of pulling our children out of one free school to attend another free school, parents will be forced to either pay for private education or send their children to a potentially substandard charter school. As we face rising inflation and artificial intelligence replacing jobs, private school tuition is out of reach for most families.

The paradoxes of “school choice” can’t be ignored. Public schools educate every child who walks through the door, including those who need more trauma-informed care, more expensive interventions or who face severe learning challenges. These are often the same students that the “choice schools” didn’t have room for. Comparing the educational outcomes of a school that accepts every child to one that does not is, frankly, illogical, especially since the system is rigged against us: per-pupil funding follows the child while proposed federal budget cuts gut the very resources our students need most: Title I and Title II funding, Individuals with Disabilities Education Act protections and ample resources for arts education and mental health services. 

Healthcare in this country is run for profit, yet we have the highest maternal mortality rate of any high-income nation. We don’t blame doctors or hospitals. We point to the economic disparities built into a broken system. Let’s not repeat the same mistake with our children’s education.

Kelly Edgar taught in the Clark County School District for 25 years, specializing in music education.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Disruption, Education Industry, Ethics, For-Profit, Nevada, Privatization, School Choice

Why Ohio Got a Terrible Grade on the NPE Report

By dianeravitch
July 7, 2026 //
0

Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, was the author of the recent report Public Schooling in America: Our 2026 Report Card on the States. The subtitle: THE BEST AND THE WORST STATEHOUSES FOR SUPPORTING PUBLIC SCHOOLS AND THEIR STUDENTS.

She wrote recently to explain why Ohio received a low grade:

Ohio lost more points on privatization in the NPE Report Card than any other state — more than Florida, more than Arizona. Its charter and voucher policies are among the most expansive and least accountable in the nation. The only reason Ohio does not rank at the very bottom is that it continues to fund its public schools at a relatively adequate level. That margin is shrinking.

The charter sector tells a particularly troubling story. Half of all charter schools in Ohio are operated by for-profit companies — an unusually high share even by national standards. Yet nearly half of all charter schools that have ever opened with enrollment in the state have since closed, a closure rate of 49 percent. These are not isolated failures. They reflect a system designed with too few guardrails and too little accountability.

A significant portion of these for-profit schools are credit recovery operations and online schools — low-cost, maximum-profit models held to lower academic standards than traditional public schools. Nearly one in three charter students in Ohio — 30 percent — attends a virtual school or an institution where instruction is delivered primarily online.

What explains so much low-quality supply? Ohio’s authorizing structure is a central culprit. The state permits multiple authorizers, including nonprofits that collect millions in authorizing fees and have a financial incentive to approve and retain schools regardless of performance.

Ohio also has more voucher programs than any other state in the country — eight in total — further diverting public dollars away from the students and communities that depend on public schools.

If Ohio continues on its current trajectory, the consequences are predictable: further erosion of public school funding, further decline in the rankings, and fewer educational options as the neighborhood public school choice disappears. 

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Corruption, Education Industry, Equity, Ethics, Extremism, For-Profit, Funding, Ohio, Privatization, Vouchers

Steve Nelson: Don’t Trust the Federal Voucher Program

By dianeravitch
June 30, 2026 //
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Steve Nelson was headmaster of a prestigious private school in Manhattan, yet is a strong believer in public schools. Now retired, he holds to the principle that public money belongs to public schools, and only to public schools. If parents make a private choice for their own child, they are obliged to pay for it.

He writes here about the newly passed federal voucher program:

The latest, most manipulative and dangerous assault on American education is largely flying under the radar. Endorsed by such luminaries as former Ed Secretary Arne Duncan and Colorado governor Jared Polis, the soon-to-be rolled out federal school choice plan has gotten little public scrutiny, perhaps because the daily flash bangs tossed by the Trump administration keep folks distracted.


I encourage you to read this NYT article and then consider my post a rebuttal.


The program’s architects have brewed a kettle of artificial sweeteners to persuade policy makers that this is really a win-win-win proposition.
For example, they argue that vouchers for private schools will not reduce funding for public schools because the vouchers will be paid for by donations to non-profits. The donations, up to $1,700 per person, will be 100% deductible. Sound harmless? Well, not really. Every buck funneled into this program is a buck diverted from other programs as a result of reduced tax revenue; which means the rest off us will pay for the vouchers once this sleight of hand completes its circular play.


The other “oh-my-gosh-ain’t-this-swell?” gimmick is that public schools can tap the funds for a few after school services, thereby realizing additional revenue. What is unmentioned is that the voucher scheme will result in students leaving the public system and per capita funding will reduce overall revenue for many schools. As any reasonably informed observer knows, a school cannot reduce expenses in proportion to enrollment losses.


As is already the case in many states, this scam allows affluent folks to access voucher funds to take to the private school of their choice. Stunning, I know, that wealthy families win agaIn.


Beneath the heaps of cleverly contrived bullshit, the purpose of this scheme is unambiguous. Conservatives constantly rage against those damn “government schools,” which they accuse of indoctrinating kids into socialism, atheism, and white self-loathing caused by all those DEI programs. In truth, of course, most “government schools” are having enough trouble managing huge classes, hungry kids, and the enervating expectations of the accountability crowd.


This “choice” program will also allow many parents to choose a school that doesn’t expose their darlings to too many brown and Black children. America’s schools have become steadily re-segregated in recent years. White flight will get a fresh pair of wings with this program.

So, beneath the thin, shiny veneer, this massive con job is designed to kill public education and redistribute money and children to unaccountable charter schools, storefront religious schools, online money-suckers and other varietals that might appeal to the average News Nation viewer. Trump famously said he likes the uneducated, and this Education Freedom program will swell their ranks.

The current conservative movement, led by people who are generally operating behind the scenes, does not care a great deal for democracy. They support an autocrat wannabe and have enabled a steady attack on democratic institutions.


Public education is the institution best equipped to sustain a thriving democracy. It is among the only systematic ways of forging a common culture out of a wonderfully diverse population. Most Americans, including the less rabid MAGA troops, say they bemoan the deep divides in our nation. Then they cheer the possibility of sending their children to a school that deepens the divide by indoctrinating them into a perverse understanding of our history and values.


Amidst the more spectacular offensives of the current era, this issue may seem less urgent, but it is more urgent, not less. Most of the Trump era unraveling of decency and democracy can be re-raveled within a few election cycles. Our public education system is nearing the point of no return. Once gone, it’s too late. I cannot envision any politician or policy maker demanding or persuading parents to leave the school they chose for a “government school.” What’s left of the public system will warehouse children in poor neighborhoods, whose parents have insufficient power, energy or resources to do anything about.


An objective look at American schools today shows that we are not far from that point now.

Categories Education Industry, Privatization, School Choice, Trump, Vouchers

Jan Resseger: Privatization Causes Catastrophic Damage to Public Schools

By dianeravitch
June 24, 2026 //
2

Jan Resseger, stalwart champion of public schools, is alarmed by the damage that privatization inflicts on public schools, attended by the vast majority of children. She describes the erosion of public schools as “a national wave of educational injustice that has reached crisis proportions.”

Resseger writes:

On Monday, the Network for Public Education (NPE) released an urgently important report, Public Schooling in America: Measuring Each State’s Commitment to Democratically Governed Schools. The report ranks the states on their protection of the institution of public schools that serve the mass of our children and adolescents and the degree to which school privatization is undermining that promise.

In what I found to be the report’s most shocking statistic, 19 states now provide Education Savings Account (ESA) vouchers and ten of those states give ESA vouchers to “virtually every family regardless of income or need.” An ESA is a virtual debit card that parents whose children do not attend public schools can use to pay for any kind of privatized education or for materials and services the parents claim to be using to homeschool their children. What this really means is that many of these states are basically just giving money away to parents to use as they please without appreciable regulations or oversight.

The Network for Public Education (NPE) confirms “a troubling and consistent pattern.  The states most aggressively redirecting public funds toward private alternatives—charter schools, voucher programs, and education savings accounts—are the same states most neglectful of their public schools, their teachers, and their students.  Our analysis found a strong, statistically negative relationship between the expansion of privatization and public school support…. Privatization and disinvestment, it turns out, go hand in hand.”

What is the scale of the problem? “Thirty-four states and the District of Columbia now fund one or more private school voucher programs, and nineteen states operate Education Savings Account (ESA) programs… The charter school sector presents parallel concerns. Forty-seven states have charter school laws, and in the majority of them, private unelected boards govern schools with no term limits and no formal accountability to the communities they serve… The consequences fall hardest on the children least able to seek alternatives: those in poverty, those with disabilities, those in rural communities, and those whose families lack the time or resources to navigate a fragmented marketplace of educational options. Public schools remain the only institutions in American life constitutionally obligated to welcome every child, regardless of circumstance. They are governed by elected boards, funded by public taxes and accountable to the communities they serve…”

The report examines four related threats.

Privatization     Vouchers are one form of school privatization.  The Network for Public Education reminds readers that vouchers trace back to the combination of racism and libertarian ideology. The first voucher schools supported segregation academies in the years immediately following Brown v. Board of Education, and NPE’s report explains that even today, “Study after study has found that school choice programs generally increase segregation,” with vouchers “enabling outright discrimination with public money.” Thirty-four states have at least one voucher program; in total states operate 73 voucher programs, “including some that allow families to double-dip, applying for funding from multiple programs.” Besides their traditional school voucher programs, some states have education savings accounts (“the most damaging and irresponsible of all voucher programs”). Some states have tuition tax credit ‘scholarship’ programs with tax credits for parents and others who contribute to scholarship granting organizations (SGOs) which are tapped by parents to pay for private schools and other educational expenses.  “(S)ome states also give individual tax credits (TTCs) for educational expenses at private schools or homeschools.” Thirty-one states have now also opted in to the federal tuition tax credit program created in the “One Big Beautiful” Bill.

What about the effects of the vast growth of private school vouchers? Because few states set income limits on the families who can qualify for the vouchers, they primarily benefit children from wealthy families. The vouchers “result in the defunding of public schools,” fail to protect the rights of disabled students, often fail to admit LGBTQ students, fail to provide any proof that students are thriving academically, fail require teachers to be certified, and fail to require background checks for teachers. Many states are spending on each voucher a large percentage of what they spend per-pupil on each public school student, and many vouchers are going to children who were always enrolled in the private school where the voucher will reimburse the families who have been paying tuition.

Publicly funded, privately operated charter schools are the second primary form of school privatization. Kentucky’s supreme court recently found that state’s charter school funding unconstitutional, and Nebraska, South Dakota, and Vermont have never had charters. Forty-seven states and the District of Columbia all have passed laws that enable the operation of charter schools.  Additionally, “a growing sector operates entirely online—and is largely run by for-profit corporations”—often displaying flagrant “financial opportunism” and “fraud.” And, “Like voucher schools, charter schools are subject to fewer regulations and less oversight than neighborhood public schools. As with voucher schools, this has resulted in significant concerns regarding accountability, accessibility, fiscal responsibility, and academic quality… In 39 states, for-profit companies are permitted to manage nonprofit charter schools. One common arrangement—known as a ‘sweeps’ contract—allows a for-profit management company to handle a school’s day-to-day operations while receiving the bulk of its public funding in return… This practice is especially prevalent in six states—Arizona, Florida, Michigan, Nevada, Ohio, and West Virginia….”

Protections for Homeschooled Children     “Homeschooling… is now the fastest-growing education sector,” fed by Education Savings Account vouchers.  However, “even as homeschooling growth has accelerated, laws to protect the homeschooled child have not. Through the relentless pressure exerted by the Homeschool Legal Defense Associations… even the most modest legislation designed to protect homeschooled children from educational or physical neglect and abuse has been opposed with breathtaking ferocity.”  The report details how states fail to require that parents let states know they are homeschooling children; fail to protect students from sexual abuse or violence; and fail to demand some kind of evidence that students are progressing academically.

Conditions that Promote Teaching and Learning     Along with the massive growth of  privatization, “Right-wing political forces have mounted a coordinated campaign against public education—eroding trust in neighborhood schools, creating hostile working conditions for teachers, and withdrawing support from the students who depend on them….  (N)umerous states have enacted laws that make the lives of transgender students significantly more difficult, while not fully protecting… LGBTQ students from bullying and discrimination.  Nearly half of all states still permit corporal punishment in schools.”  Class size has been increased, collective bargaining to ensure adequate teachers’ salaries has been undermined, and other conditions to attract highly qualified teachers have been undermined.

School Funding     NPE declares: “Research has firmly established a positive correlation between per-pupil (public school) spending and student learning.”  “This report tells a clear and troubling story.  Across the country, statehouses are making deliberate choices—choices that defund neighborhood schools, strip teachers of dignity and professional standing, leave vulnerable children without protection, and redirect billions of public dollars to private alternatives that are too often beyond public control… They are the predictable results of an ideological campaign decades in the making, whose architects have been candid about their ultimate goal: the elimination of public education as Americans have known it… States that most aggressively expand vouchers and charter schools are the same states that underfund their public schools, underpay their teachers, and provide the weakest protections for students… States with the most expansive ESA programs have produced the most egregious fraud… States that strip teachers of collective bargaining rights are the same states with the lowest teacher attractiveness ratings…the overlap is not coincidental.  Privatization and disinvestment are two sides of the same coin.”

The report grades each of the states overall for their protection of the public schools.”Seventeen states earned an F for their lack of support of public schools, students and educators while embracing privatization.” A second privatization grade identifies the states where schooling has been most damaged by privatization.  In both categories, Florida earns the lowest “F” grade, while Arizona’s grade is almost as bad.

NPE’s new report traces the impact of today’s national wave of school privation and the overall impact on our nation’s largest institution—a fifty-state system of public education. It cannot trace the convoluted history of any one state’s legislative and sometimes legal battle around school finance. It cannot examine the specific politics in any particular state that have contributed to the spread of today’s wave of privatization—of the role of gerrymandering, of particular regional funders of  state legislators’ political campaigns or the lobbyists who surround the statehouse. And it cannot examine the role of disparities caused by racial and economic injustice any particular state’s school funding.

The fact that such a report cannot possibly explore state-by-state detail, however, does not reduce the report’s significance. The Network for Public Education accomplishes an urgently important goal: identifying a national wave of educational injustice that has reached crisis proportions.  NPE concludes:

“Public schools are not merely institutions that deliver academic instruction. They are the places where children of every background, ability, faith, language, and circumstance are welcomed—not as paying customers, but as members of a community with an equal right to learn. They are governed by publicly elected boards, funded by public taxes, and accountable to the public in ways that no charter management company, no ESA vendor, and no private religious school is required to be… When public schools are weakened—through funding cuts, through the diversion of students and dollars, through the erosion of the teaching profession—the consequences fall hardest on the children least able to seek alternatives…  For those left behind in underfunded, understaffed public schools… (there) is no choice at all.”

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Equity, Funding, Network for Public Education, Privatization, School Choice, Vouchers

“The Grades Are In!” Support Our Public Schools!

By dianeravitch
June 23, 2026 //
3

The organization called “In the Public Interest” is a valuable source of information on the creeping (or galloping) privatization of public goods and services. Headed by Donald Cohen, ITPI keeps tabs on takeovers by billionaires and equity services of public services that we all need and squeezing a profit out of them.

ITPI reported on the report created by the Network for Public Education to evaluate state support for public schools.

We’ve long argued that increased funding for alternatives to public education usually comes at the expense of public education. While some politicians have insisted that it’s a “yes, and,” not an “either/or” proposition, we’ve known that, since the 1960s, the long game has been to slowly defund public schools while increasing high-stakes consequences through reliance on standardized testing and sanctions against schools and educators to justify further defunding. As schools are increasingly labeled as “failing,”  privatization in the guise of “school choice” becomes the only alternative. 

Now a new, comprehensive study from our friends at the Network for Public Education (NPE), a nonprofit public education advocacy organization, brings the receipts. 

Public Schooling in America: 2026 Report Card studied all 50 states, plus DC, reviewing nearly forty factors across four categories: Privatization, Protections for Homeschooled Students, School Funding, and Conditions for Teaching and Learning.

The study makes a clear case that the more states invest in private education alternatives, the less they invest in public education.

“The data confirm what we have long suspected: privatization and disinvestment go hand in hand,” says Carol Burris, Executive Director of NPE and the report’s author. “These are not states struggling with limited resources. They have made deliberate choices to abandon their public schools while directing billions in public dollars to private alternatives.”

The full report, a must-read for anyone who cares about education in the United States, is available here, or you can start with the executive summary here.

Donald Cohen
Executive Director

Categories Budget Cuts, Education Industry, Funding, Network for Public Education, Privatization, School Choice, Supporting public schools

Non-Stop Criticism of Public Schools Contributes to Privatization

By dianeravitch
June 16, 2026 //
6

The National Center on Education Policy frequently publishes reports, studies, and articles about important issues in education. This one makes a point that I have long believed: the rhetoric of “failing public schools” is intended to advance the privatization of public school funding, specifically, charter schools, voucher schools, and home schooling.

All of these are worse alternatives than public schools, but the media has lapped up the negative message.

The reality is that academic performance (test scores) is highly correlated with socioeconomic status. There are schools that are in need of smaller class sizes, physical upgrades, and intense professional support. But most parents are highly satisfied with their children’s public school and its teachers. Public schools offer more options than charter schools or religious schools. And most public schools are successful.

This study is titled: “The Cycle of Disinvestment in Public Schools: How Public-School Criticism Drives Policy and Disinvestment.” The study was written by Huriya Jabbar and Daniel Espinoza. The link is at the bottom of this post.

They say in the abstract:

Critiques of public education have intensified, and while some reflect real needs for improvement, many are manufactured crises that portray schools as broadly failing. Centered on claims of underachievement, inefficiency, inequality, lack of choice, and indoctrination, these narratives often ignore counterevidence on poverty’s impact, the benefits of increased funding, and the harms of large-scale voucher programs. Though targeted reforms are warranted, sweeping failure claims erode public support and fuel a cycle of disinvestment—reduced funding and enrollment that weaken schools and invite further criticism—advancing privatization and deepening inequality at a moment of heightened political and fiscal threats to public education.

Suggested Citation: Jabbar, H. & Espinoza, D. (2026). The cycle of disinvestment in public schools: How public school criticism drives policy and disinvestment. Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center. Retrieved [date] from 
http://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/disinvestmen

Categories Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Privatization, Propaganda, Separation of church and state, Vouchers
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