The National Coalition for Public Education published valuable information contrasting the actual cost of vouchers to overly optimistic projections by their advocates. In every state that has adopted vouchers, most vouchers are used by students already enrolled in private schools. In states such as Florida and Arizona, vouchers are “universal,” meaning there are no income limitations or other restrictions on their accessibility. In essence, vouchers provide public dollars to subsidize the tuition of students in private and religious schools. They are a welfare program for the affluent.
The NCPE concluded:
When lawmakers consider expanding or creating private school voucher programs, their projections often drastically underestimate the actual costs. They sell a false promise that vouchers will save money, do not budget adequate funds, and then wind up with million dollar shortfalls, necessitating cuts from public education and even tax increases.
Some voucher advocates incorrectly claim that if the amount of the voucher is less than the average expenditure spent to educate a student in public school, the state will save money. Existing voucher programs prove this false.
First, it costs less than the average expenditure to educate some students, and much more to educate others who need additional support and services–like those with disabilities, English language learners, and low-income students. The students who are most expensive to educate, however, tend to remain in public schools because they cannot find a private voucher school willing to accept them. Yet, because of the voucher program, the public schools are left with fewer resources. Furthermore, in a voucher program, the state now pays tuition for private school students who never attended public schools, which is an altogether new cost for taxpayers.
This all adds up to more, not less, spending.
Here are several examples of the skyrocketing costs of voucher programs:
ARIZONA’S VOUCHER IS COSTING 1,346% MORE THAN PROJECTED, CONTRIBUTING TO A $400 MILLION BUDGET DEFICIT.
- The fiscal note attached to Arizona’s universal voucher program projected the program would cost the state about $65 million in 2024 and $125 million in 2025. But once students’ applications started to come in, state leaders realized these estimates were woefully inadequate. The Arizona Governor’s Office now estimates that the price tag is more than 1,346% higher at a cost of $940 million per year. This is one of the main causes of a $400 million budget shortfall in the state’s general fund, which funds the state’s public schools, transportation, fire, police, and prisons.
THE FLORIDA VOUCHER IS ALREADY MORE THAN $2 BILLION OVER BUDGET IN YEAR ONE.
- The Florida Senate projected that its voucher expansion would cost $646 million. But independent researchers estimated that the program would actually cost almost $4 billion, and actual costs are already approaching that amount—$3.35 billion in the first year. In just one county, Duval, school officials report a $17 million budget shortage due to funds lost to the vouchers.
WEST VIRGINIA’S VOUCHER DRAINS MORE THAN $20 MILLION FROM PUBLIC SCHOOLS PER YEAR.
- During the 2024 – 2025 school year, the West Virginia voucher program is expected to funnel $21.6 million away from the state’s public schools–enough to pay the salaries for 301 professional teachers and 63 school service workers. As a result of the voucher and other declines in enrollment, multiple school districts are already warning residents that they need to impose property tax increases in order to continue to pay current teachers’ salaries.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Some years ago, Diane pointed out that people generally like their local schools, but are less trusting in other schools. I wonder how this fits into the voucher issue?
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It is fundamentally impossible to satisfy the greed of corporate enterprises and the politicians they keep in their employ.
Follow the money
And you can bet
It flows in circles
Pocket to pocket
And down the toilet.
BURMA SHAVE
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Vouchers are a way to undermine public schools while providing little to no academic benefit to students. They are largely politically driven by red state governors that are leading the charge to dismantle public education. Fiscally, they represent reckless public policy, and more states are finding that the math to benefit ratio does not add up. Red state governors are often supportive of vouchers because like Trump’s tariffs they represent a way to benefit the affluent at the expense of working class. When states remove or raise income limits on vouchers, public school budgets dwindle when affluent parents get tuition subsidies for schools that parents are already able to fund. It is literally a way to rob Peter to pay Paul, and these so-called conservative governors know it. The public school budgets that working families depend are drained to fund the subsidies for the well-to do as vouchers have a parasitic relationship with public school budgets. Vouchers like tariffs are another “pass along” scheme to transfer wealth from working families to the affluent. Both tariffs and vouchers represent regressive economic policy. https://www.epi.org/blog/state-and-local-experience-proves-school-vouchers-are-a-failed-policy-that-must-be-opposed-as-voucher-expansion-bills-gain-momentum-look-to-public-school-advocates-for-guidance/
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NYC: Yes, . . . but the other deeper intentions are about curriculum–centrally, religious and/or political indoctrination rather than principled research-drawn from critical-scientific, professional, and peer-reviewed studies, history drawn from known principles of historical study, and governed by the questions about what’s actually going on, rather than run through a racist sieve grounded in: “here’s what you can think.”
A concrete example of intrusions onto curriculum comes from the Koch network who has their right-wing tentacles in many university economics programs, and even fund their own on-campus bells-and-whistles programs, as in George Mason University in Virginia, where the students finally started a movement to “UNKOCH our campus.” And then there is the banning books . . . it’s not an airy abstraction. It’s already real and will go forward if not stopped–by informed citizens who want to live in and support their democracy. CBK
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And beyond simple vouchers we now have Ohio giving taxpayer money to private/religious schools to help them BUILD new buildings and EXPAND their campuses.
Ohio has cut out the middleman. It is now providing MILLIONS of dollars in grants directly to religious schools, most of them Catholic, to renovate buildings, build classrooms, improve playgrounds and more.
The goal is to increase the capacity so they can sooner absorb more voucher students.
https://www.propublica.org/article/ohio-taxpayer-money-funding-private-religious-schools
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