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.
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.
Here is why there is widespread support for school choice.
“Nikole Hannah-Jones’s much-discussed New York Times article about the New York City public schools’ decadelong failures to educate her daughter drew a telling response from the head of the national union that represents the city’s teachers. “I was so saddened,” Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, commented on the Bluesky social-media site. “Public schools must be places parents want to send their kids; where educators want to teach & where kids thrive. That is our North Star. We must learn what went wrong & address it so all students have what they deserve.”
But Ms. Hannah-Jones’s article makes clear “what went wrong.” Her daughter, Najya, and her classmates “were languishing in classrooms with educators who did not take their academic potential seriously and largely refused to teach.” And the failure to educate “poor Black children” isn’t limited to Najya’s school or even to the Hannah-Joneses’ city: “There was nothing exceptional about what I witnessed at P.S. 307. I had observed and reported on similar educational malfeasance in Detroit, in Durham, in St. Louis, in Tuscaloosa, in Birmingham.” Ms. Hannah-Jones writes.
If Ms. Weingarten wants to “learn what went wrong,” she should start by looking in the mirror. Her union is the primary reason New York’s public schools fail to educate so many children, especially poor black children.
Ms. Hannah-Jones chronicles a wide range of unprofessional practices at Najya’s school. Teachers refused to check homework or administer mandatory assessments. They were contemptuous of their students, thinking they had no ability to learn. They made up grades. They stopped calling on Najya in class, making her “so frustrated that, waving her hand furiously, she began to blurt out the answers.” They repeatedly ignored Ms. Hannah-Jones’s efforts to find out how her daughter was doing. Some were absent for long periods. Kids were left without substitute teachers and allowed to run wild and assault one another.
A debacle of this scope can’t be explained away by a lack of money or overwhelmed teachers—the usual excuses rolled out to defend failing schools by shifting blame to “the system.” Najya’s school is extremely well-resourced, spending more than $50,000 per pupil each year, and it has a low student-teacher ratio. More important, the transgressions Ms. Hannah-Jones documents had nothing to do with resources. They were intentionally harmful acts by uncaring teachers, who disrespected their students and refused to do the most basic and undemanding parts of their jobs. They didn’t even try.
This kind of persistent, comprehensive and unchecked behavior can persist only in the absence of accountability. These teachers knew there would be no consequences because their jobs are protected by policies and practices artfully designed by their union.
Teachers unions are built around two nonnegotiable principles: that teachers must be tenured for life and that their compensation can’t be based on performance. Taken together, they inflict enormous harm on schools like Najya’s. When teachers are paid the same regardless of ability, the good ones almost always go to high-performing schools serving motivated students. Those who “cannot get hired at a ‘better’ school,” as Ms. Hannah-Jones puts it, end up in schools like Najya’s. These schools, having started with less talented and conscientious teachers, are then stuck with them despite the intolerable practices Ms. Hannah-Jones repeatedly observed in Najya’s school.
Although fully aware of these harms, the unions remain implacable. Ms. Weingarten’s predecessor Albert Shanker, the most revered and powerful teachers-union leader in history, eventually came to appreciate the problem but couldn’t get his own union to change course. In a 1993 speech before the Pew Forum, he said: “The key is that unless there is accountability, we will never get the right system. As long as there are no consequences if kids or adults don’t perform, as long as the discussion is not about education and student outcomes, then we’re playing a game as to who has the power.”
No union leader since Shanker’s death in 1997 has adopted his position. They have kept playing the power game, a game they can’t lose and the kids can’t win.
Despite her devastating critique, Ms. Hannah-Jones remains focused on the problem and not the solution. She ignores the question of teacher accountability and fails to mention charter schools, an option showing real promise for the children she champions. For her, there are only two kinds of schools in New York—rich white ones and poor black ones—a description that inexplicably omits the almost 300 nonunionized charter schools in the city that educate 150,000 predominantly black and Latino children from low-income families.
Almost every one of these charter schools significantly outperforms Najya’s school. Some, like the 59 Success Charter Schools, match and even do better than the city’s highest-performing public schools. That’s because these charter schools hold themselves and their teachers accountable for the performance of their students. Despite these good results—or rather because of them—the teachers unions, supported by lawmakers fearful of their power, have put a limit on the number of charter schools allowed in the city.
Ms. Hannah-Jones has performed a public service by sharing the heartbreaking story of her daughter’s education and exhorting the rest of us to confront one of our nation’s greatest failings—the abysmal education being provided to the large majority of poor black children. But she leaves it to readers to identify the root cause: the teachers unions.
The unions have no answer to her exposé. On the one hand, they can’t defend the behaviors she documents without showing themselves to be cynical and uncaring. On the other hand, having created and enforced the rules that enabled those behaviors, they can’t condemn them either. Worse yet, given Ms. Hannah-Jones’s acknowledgment that these behaviors are commonplace and widespread, any condemnation by the union would create significant risk for its members.
That’s why Ms. Weingarten is playing dumb and other union leaders are silent. As they always do, the unions will ignore the problem, let time diminish the memory and force of Ms. Hannah-Jones’s article, and continue to play their power games to the detriment of poor black children in America. Shame on the rest of us if we allow that to happen.”
Mr. Klein was New York City’s schools chancellor, 2002-11.
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Martha,
Nikole Hannah jones did NOT seek out a charter school. She specifically wanted her daughter in a PUBLIC SCHOOL.
In the past 20 years, at least 5,000 charters schools have closed.
If unions were the problem, why are scores lowest in non-union states.
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Nikole Hannah-Jones is wrong blaming teachers’ unions.
Teachers’ unions don’t decide the Ed Code for each state or the requirements for teacher credentials.
The blame is on elected and appointed officials at the district, state and federal levels who pass rules and/or legislation that makes it harder for teachers to teach.
And too many elected officials are influenced by deep pocket corporate and special interest (some may be driven by racism) campaign donations.
I think the focus should start with teacher training. The U.S. ‘needs” a national standard. Every teacher should earn a master’s degree that focuses on how to teach, and the BA/BS should be centered on the skill area where they will teach.
Why a national standard?
Because there are fifty different standards that decide what it takes to become a teacher.
Teacher Certification Requirements by State
There must be one option for teacher training. There should not be a buffet of choices for what program teacher should take to earn their credential to teach.
The easiest and worst choice is Teach for America.
The most difficult and challenging best choice is Urban Residencies.
Finland, Singapore, and Canada consistently rank as having the world’s best national standards and systems for public school teacher training and professional preparation. [1, 2]
Review education policies – Education GPS – OECD: Teacher initial education
The second step is to get politics and greed out of public education. Lead from the bottom-up starting with teachers; not the top down from elected officials, billionaires, and CEOs.
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Nikole H-J doesn’t blame teachers’ unions. Joel Klein does.
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Martha is a rabid, robotic anti teacher union apparatchik. What about all the very successful schools with unionized teachers, as in NJ. Is Martha suggesting that if we could only get rid of teacher unions and/or unionized teachers, everything would be wonderful?! Total baloney.
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I wonder if Ms. Hannah-Jones ever considered the notion that perhaps her daughter is not a good match for one of the selective schools in New York City. Many students apply to these highly competitive schools, but not all make the cut.
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