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Senator Kelly Introduces Bill to Roll Back Federal Vouchers

By dianeravitch
April 22, 2026 //
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Peter Greene wrote in Forbes about a Democrat-led effort to eliminate the federal voucher program from Trump’s “One Big Ugly Bill,” the one that takes from the poor and gives to the richest. Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona led the opposition to this program. Kelly knows how vouchers have harmed the state budget and public schools in Arizona.

Greene wrote:

One portion of the President Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” was a federal school voucher program that any state could join. But before that plan can go into effect, a new Senate bill has been proposed that would undo the vouchers entirely.

Senators Mark Kelly (D-AZ), Mazie Hirono (D-HI) and an additional 28 senators have introduced the Keep Public Funds in Public Schools Act. The act would strike IRS Code Section 25, the portion of the IRS code that was inserted to create the federal school voucher program, eliminating that program.

The new voucher program was sold as a tax credit program. It would allow taxpayers to claim a $1,700 tax credit by diverting that payment from the IRS to a scholarship granting organization that would then award at least $1,530 of that donation to a student (the rules governing the program allow SGOs to keep 10% of the donated funds). 

Kelly cites his home state of Arizona as a cautionary tale, where taxpayer-funded school vouchers have become costly: “Since 2022, our state’s universal voucher program has diverted and drained money from public schools; last year alone cost Arizona taxpayers nearly $1 billion. Instead of investing in classrooms, special education services, or school safety, lawmakers pushed massive tax giveaways and created a parallel education system that lacks transparency and accountability.”

12News and reporter Craig Harris have run a series of reports showing much of that money has gone to questionable and disallowed purposes, including dirt bikes, custom tires and luxury hotel stays. Choice advocates such as EdChoice have pushed back, but have had difficulty debunking Harris’s results. 

“In Arizona, we’ve already seen how universal vouchers are leading to rampant fraud and benefiting people who already had the means to send their kids to private school, while decimating public education for everyone else,” said Kelly.

On X, Secretary of Education Lindas McMahon noted that Kelly surely knows “the Education Freedom Tax Credit does not take a single dollar away from public schools — it brings new, private money into education.” 

When Kentucky’s similarly-structured tax credit scholarship program was challenged in court, the state made a similar argument that the program did not use any public taxpayer funds. But when the Kentucky Supreme Court ruled against the program, they rejected that argument. “The money at issue cannot be characterized as simply private funds,” they wrote, “rather it represents the tax liability that the taxpayer would otherwise owe.”

When it comes to granting tax credits, the federal government has one power that states do not. Most states require a balanced budget; the state needs to find a way to cover the money it lost by offering credits rather than collecting on the tax liability. The federal government can just add the uncollected taxes to its deficit tab.

Kelly noted in an interview, “It is a deficit bomb, this federal program.”

The Joint Committee on Taxation, a nonpartisan entity that assists Congress on tax legislation, estimated that the credit could cost $25.9 billion between 2025 and 2034 or around $3 billion to $4 billion a year. That would mean potential income of $300-$400 million for SGOs; several organizations are preparing to launch national SGOs to work with the federal voucher program.

In addition to Kelly and Hirono, the Keep Public Funds in Public Schools Act is cosponsored by Senators Michael Bennet (D-CO), Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), Cory Booker (D-NJ), Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-DE), Chris Coons (D-DE), Tammy Duckworth (D-IL), Dick Durbin (D-IL), John Fetterman (D-PA), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), Martin Heinrich (D-NM), Tim Kaine (D-VA), Andy Kim (D-NJ), Angus King (I-ME), Ben Ray Luján (D-NM), Ed Markey (D-MA), Jeff Merkley (D-OR), Chris Murphy (D-CT), Alex Padilla (D-CA), Jack Reed (D-RI), Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Adam Schiff (D-CA), Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), Tina Smith (D-MN), Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Peter Welch (D-VT), and Ron Wyden (D-OR).

Categories Accountability, Arizona, Democracy, Education Reform, Privatization, Religion, Separation of church and state, U.S. education, Vouchers

Arizona: State Supt. Intervenes to Save Failing Charter School owned by Multi-Millionaire

By dianeravitch
April 14, 2026 //
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In Arizona, the state charter board did the right thing: it planned to close an online charter school with a long record of failure. But the owner of the charter school was a big Republican donor. And he was a multi-millionaire, who had been richly rewarded by his ownership of Primavera. He had a meeting of the minds with the State Superintendent of Schools, Tom Horne. Horne is a strong believer in choice. Suddenly, Primavera’s grades were recalculated and closure of the piggy bank was off the table.

Veteran reporter Craig Harris told the story for Channel 12:

PHOENIX — For more than a year, Arizona’s largest online charter school, Primavera, and its multi-millionaire owner, Damian Creamer, faced the very real possibility of being shut down. 

Plagued by poor academic performance and mounting scrutiny, the State Charter Board had already taken multiple steps toward revoking the school’s charter in 2025.

But in a surprising turn of events, Primavera has been given a lifeline — thanks to an intervention from Republican State Schools Chief Tom Horne.

The decision sparked frustration among board members who had spent months working toward closure.

Longtime board member James Swanson, reflecting the general mood of the 11-member board.

He said the board acted within its authority to hold Primavera accountable after students recorded “D” letter grades for three consecutive years ending in 2024.

Board Chairwoman Jessica Montierth echoed that sentiment after the 9-2 vote, noting the significant time and effort invested in the case. 

“Our authority is based on following through with policy and procedure, and that’s what we have done,” she said, adding that the outcome was difficult to accept given the circumstances.

The controversy surrounding Primavera intensified following a 12News investigation early last year. 

The 12News Investigates report in February 2025 revealed that the school’s owner, Creamer, had paid himself $24 million since 2017.

At the same time, the school consistently underperformed academically as the Charter Board gave Primavera its worst annual rating four times: Falls Far Below Standard. Two times, Primavera got the second-worst rating: Does Not Meet Standard. 

The free-wheeling at Primavera is a byproduct of Arizona’s loosely regulated charter school industry that allows owners to make as much money as possible for years with public funds. 

But in March 2025, the Charter Board formally voted to begin the process of shutting the school down after it received three consecutive annual “D” letter grades.

Creamer, who did not attend Tuesday’s meeting, previously attributed the low grades to administrative errors. 

He argued that Primavera should have been evaluated under alternative school standards rather than traditional ones. 

And he appealed directly to Horne, after having the support of Republican leaders who also lobbied the Charter Board on his behalf. 

“We’re so grateful for Tom Horne,” Creamer, a major GOP donor, said during a press conference in mid-March 2025. “For working with us so that we can correct this administrative error.”

Horne twice that month said he wasn’t going to intervene. 

“My first priority for all public schools is academic success,” Horne said in March 2025. “It is important that charters and district schools alike are held accountable for the quality of education they provide. The Board’s action demonstrates that these are not just words, but actions. Primavera is being held accountable and losing its ability to operate because of poor academic results.”

Horne, however, later allowed Primavera to privately meet with his staff and present new records to his office.

The board accused Horne of taking the “unprecedented steps of retroactively reclassifying Primavera from a traditional school to an alternative school, reopening prior-year data, and allowing the submission of additional information.”

That was key because traditional charter schools are evaluated under higher academic measures, while alternative schools, which typically serve higher-risk or non-traditional student populations, are evaluated with different performance expectations.

It’s unclear when Horne, who is currently in a tight re-election campaign against Treasurer Kimberly Yee for the GOP nomination, made all of the changes. 

But Charter Board officials on Tuesday said Horne’s intervention resulted in the Department of Education indicating the school would have received three Alternative “C” grades instead of three “D” grades under the traditional model. 

The board, in a statement, said this “after-the-fact rewrite of Primavera’s academic performance fundamentally changed the facts underlying the Board’s case long after enforcement had begun, effectively removing the Board’s ability to proceed under its established authority.”

Remember, “it’s all about the kids! No child should be trapped in a failing charter school! Parents know best!”

Categories Accountability, Arizona, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Ethics, Failure, For-Profit, Fraud

Arizona: Home-Schoolers Used Voucher Money to Pay for Condoms, Jewelry, Video Games, Dog Training

By dianeravitch
March 9, 2026 //
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An audit of Arizona voucher funds for home-schools demonstrated that 20% of the purchases by parents were unallowable, spent on consumer items that had nothing to do with education, unless you consider condoms “educational.”

Of some 384,000 transactions from December 2024 to September 2025, about 84,000 were spent on non-educational purposes.

One way to stop this misuse of public funds is to bar those who misspend public funds from participating.

Alexandra Hardle of The Arizona Republic reported:

Audit data shows over 20% of vendor purchases made with Empowerment Scholarship Account dollars could be barred under the program’s guidelines.

The program, run through the Arizona Department of Education allows expenses for homeschooled students under $2,000 to be automatically approved by the department and later audited. But that audit could come months later, a process that Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne has blamed on understaffing.

The program was initially designed primarily for students with disabilities but was expanded to be available for all students in 2022. Many homeschooled students are eligible to receive about $7,000 per year through the program, though money allocated to special needs students can be much higher.

Records released by the Arizona Attorney General’s Office show Arizonans have spent millions of dollars on expenses that appear to fall afoul of the program’s guidelines. A risk-based audit performed by the Department of Education found that 20% of purchases were “unallowed.” A risk-based audit is a financial audit that examines where problems are most likely to happen. In this case, the audit examined a random sample of purchases made through the ESA program.

When the department’s risk-based audit detects “unallowed” purchases, it then performs a full audit of the account to review the account holder’s other purchases. Of the accounts that received a full audit, 46% of the purchases made by those account holders were “unallowable.”

Attorney General Kris Mayes, a Democrat seeking reelection this fall, in a January letter to the Department of Education asked for tighter guardrails on expense approval.

“ADE must do more on the front end to prevent unallowable purchases, and it must do so immediately,” Mayes said in her letter.

Horne declined to comment to The Arizona Republic, saying his office would soon send a letter in response to Mayes.

The Department of Education’s ESA handbook outlines all expenses that cannot be paid for by the program. While many of these expenses slip through the cracks, Horne said in September the department has already recovered about $600,000 during the auditing process.

But Mayes criticized the policy of automatically approving some purchases and auditing them later. That’s given people a “road map for how to game the system,” Mayes said.

What were the ‘unallowable’ ESA purchases discovered in the audit?

One of the heftier purchases was $7,500 in video gaming equipment.

Parents also paid themselves for homeschooling, which is prohibited under the program. One parent paid themselves $5,700, while others kept the payments to below $2,000.

Other expenses forbidden by the ESA handbook included coffee machines, $2,000 in Visa gift cards, a $1,700 diamond necklace and dog training. There were also trips to Mexico, a Kohl’s gift card, scuba diving equipment, swimming pools, condoms and lubrication.

Categories Accountability, Arizona, Ethics, Fraud, Funding, Home Schooling, Vouchers

Andy Spears: Vouchers in Arizona Are a Morass of Fraud

By dianeravitch
February 24, 2026 //
8

Andy Spears of The Education Report tells the sad tale of unbridled fraud in Arizona’s voucher program.

In 2018, voters in Arizona overwhelmingly rejected expansion of the state’s voucher program. Despite the decisive vote against vouchers, the legislature made vouchers available to every student, regardless of income or need.

Today about 7-8% of the state’s students use vouchers at an annual cost nearing $1 billion a year.

Most of the voucher students never attended public schools. In other words, the universal voucher program is mostly subsidizing the tuition of students already enrolled in private and religious schools.

He writes:

Save Our Schools Arizona reports on the rampant fraud in that state’s school voucher scheme:

Arizona Republican leaders and Superintendent Tom Horne have long insisted that fraud in Arizona’s ESA voucher program is minimal. “One percent or less,” Horne often has said — but 12News has obtained new public records from Horne’s AZ Dept. of Education (ADE) that tell a very different story. Documents show unallowable purchases — spending explicitly banned under ESA voucher program rules — may account for about 20 percent of transactions. That’s one in five.

In 2025, 12News Investigates revealed parents used ESA voucher funds for non-educational purchases, including: diamond rings, smart TVs, gift cards, large appliances, luxury clothing, and lingerie.

These purchases are among more than 100 prohibited items listed in the ESA Parent Handbook. Accounts that make such purchases are supposed to be suspended or removed from the program by the ADE. However, according to 12News, “the spending continues as Horne contends his department uses risk-based auditing that will eventually catch wrongdoing.”

84,000 unallowable purchases??? 12News found an ADE memo covering ESA voucher spending from December 2022 through last September found that of 385,000 ESA purchases reviewed by Horne’s ADE, nearly 84,000 were deemed unallowable — or more than 20 percent of all transactions that should have been refused by the ADE!

Categories Accountability, Arizona, Education Industry, Fraud, Vouchers

Arizona: Legislation Would Criminalize Librarians Who Recommend Banned Books

By dianeravitch
February 13, 2026 //
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Arizona GOP legislators are introducing legislation that would carry criminal penalties for librarians who recommend sexually explicit books.

ArizonaCentral.com reports:

Children and teenagers’ access at public libraries could be significantly restricted if a bill at the Arizona Legislature were to become law.

Every year for the past four years, Republican lawmakers in Arizona have tried to build upon a 2022 law banning school employees from sharing material they defined as “sexually explicit” with anyone under 18.

The definition goes beyond the colloquial use of “sexually explicit” to include material that textually describes sexual intercourse or even touching someone’s “clothed … buttocks.”

The latest proposal would expand the ban to encompass every public library in Arizona, making it a Class 5 felony, punishable by up to 2.5 years in prison, for a librarian or library contractor to “refer” or “facilitate … access” to so-called sexually explicit material to minors. That penalty also would apply to public school employees.

A similar law in Idaho has resulted in adult-only libraries in some cities.

Legal experts have said the bill would apply to classics like “Romeo and Juliet,” the Bible or even the encyclopedia, likely in violation of the First Amendment. Plus, criminal penalties that wade into the speech of government employees, such as librarians, are likely unconstitutional, said First Amendment expert Eugene Volokh.

Republican Sen. Jake Hoffman of Queen Creek, the architect of the efforts, has described the effort as a common sense way to protect children’s innocence and claimed the bill’s criminal penalties are needed to force resistant government employees into compliance.

The Republican-majority House and Senate have multiple times advanced Hoffman’s bills to the governor’s desk. Democrat Katie Hobbs has vetoed them, calling them an “attack on public schools” and “little more than a thinly veiled effort to ban books.”

But the future of Hoffman’s library bill could change with a different governor. Hobbs faces re-election in 2026, and at least one of the Republican candidates for governor, U.S. Rep. Andy Biggs, already has told The Arizona Republic he would support the legislation, which he called “common sense” and “a smart way to protect our kids.”

If the Republican legislators think they are “protecting the innocence of children,” they are looking in the wrong places. They should turn their attention to the easily accessible content on television and the Internet, which may be far more salacious and far more graphic than the language in books. At least with books, kids are learning to read.

Categories Arizona, Censorship, Librarians, Libraries

Josh Cowen: Why Should the Public Pay Tuition at Religious Schools?

By dianeravitch
February 12, 2026 //
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Over the past few years, vouchers have been endorsed by state legislatures even though the public overwhelmingly opposes them. Nearly a score of state referenda have been held, and in every single state, voters rejected vouchers. Even voters in red states said NO to vouchers.

Voters don’t want to pay for tuition at private and religious schools. But legislators ignore their votes. In Arizona, voters rejected vouchers by 65-35%. But the legislature passed a voucher bill anyway, and the cost to subsidize these nonpublic schools is $1 billion a year.

Today’s evangelists for subsidizing religious schools have chosen to ignore the admonitions of the Founding Fathers, who made clear their opposition to state-funded religion. When Thomas Jefferson wrote about “separation of church and state,” he was referencing a widely held principle.

Josh Cowen recently wrote about this issue on his Substack blog:

Since the U.S. Supreme Court rolled back fifty years of national reproductive freedom in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization in 2022, the Christian Right has turned to another long-held priority: an eventual Court ruling that states must fund religious education.

Over the past few weeks, efforts to create religious charter schools have seen new life. Charter schools are public schools operated outside of the traditional district framework. They can be independently managed by a non-profit or, in some states, for-profit management group, or they can be part of larger networks of charter providers. There are roughy 8,000 charter schools across the country, serving nearly 4 million students.

Blurring Public and Private

In mid-2025, a case called St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School v. Drummond deadlocked at the Supreme Court, 4-4. It returned back to Oklahoma, where that state’s highest court had invalidated efforts by a Catholic-run provider to operate a virtual charter school. Had the Court ruled in St. Isidore’s favor, it would have effectively created the nation’s first church-run public school.

But Justice Amy Coney Barrett recused herself, reportedly because her best friend, a law professor named Nicole Garnett, had worked extensively on the legal defense for the Catholic charter school (Side note: while I’m glad Barrett recused herself, notice that the one conservative woman on the Court has held herself to a higher ethical standard than right-wing guys like Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito).

The Court’s 4-4 ruling was less a definitive position and more an artifact of the small, insular nature of conservative—and especially Catholic conservative—American legal networks.
Now, efforts to create a Jewish charter school in Oklahoma, and Christian public schools in Colorado and Tennessee are taking new shape.

Technically, these cases operate in a separate stream of legal theory from school voucher jurisprudence. Vouchers are simply taxpayer subsidies for private schools—either through the tax code or directly through state funds. And since 2002’s Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, their application to religious schools has been constitutional. Three voucher-related cases since 2017—Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia v. Comer (2017), Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue (2020) and Carson v. Makin (2022, 3 days before Dobbs)—have extended protections to religious schools in state voucher systems.

Basically, once states use public dollars to subsidize private providers of a certain social service (such as education), they can’t limit those providers to non-religious organizations.

But for now, state’s don’t have to provide voucher funding to parents. It’s just that if they do fund vouchers, they must allow vouchers to be spent at religious schools too.

This connects to the question of religious charter schools because although charter schools are legally public entities, the organizations operating them in most cases are private. In theory, the arrangements governing these groups are similar to situations where a school district contracts with a private transportation company for their buses, or a cleaning company for their buildings. Except that with charter schools, the contracted party typically provides instructional materials and even often supplies the teachers.

What right-wing activists want is for the Supreme Court to say that states can’t prevent religious organizations from running public schools as part of a charter agreement
And in that, they are taking one tactical approach in a broader legal and political strategy to simply require states to fund religious instruction.

Establishment and Free Exercise

Spurred partly by new “education savings accounts” spreading in red states (aka vouchers, with additional allowable expenses beyond tuition), a vast network of conservative Christian homeschoolers is pushing for new legal rights. Including mandatory subsidies for their homeschools.

And Betsy DeVos, the billionaire and former U.S. Education Secretary, has made no secret of her desire to see the Supreme Court overturn more than a century of state “Blaine Amendments” prohibiting public dollars spent on religious schools. That would basically force all states to pay for some form of religious instruction.

All of this is possible in large part due to the efforts of Leonard Leo, the Catholic super-fixer of right-wing judicial politics all-but-responsible for the Court’s current conservative majority. Leo has made clear that following Dobbs, state-funded religious education is his next major project in the federal judiciary. And he’s enlisting the Alliance Defending Freedom (the main litigation group in Dobbs) to help lead the way. Beyond garden-variety culture warring, this is partly what the sustained effort to holler about LGBTQ and especially trans-students in public schools is about.

Meanwhile, brand new guidance from what’s left of the U.S. Department of Education is informing public schools across the country that federal dollars will now be tied to expansive interpretations of the right for school personnel to pray during the day in schools. So long as they do not technically compel students to pray at lunch or at the start of the school day, teachers and school leaders may choose to lead their students in prayer.

The end-game here is to de-emphasize the first part of the First Amendment—the Establishment Clause prohibiting government from establishing a single religion—and to emphasize the second part, the Free Exercise Clause.

The argument pushed by DeVos, Leo, ADF and their allies is that by providing taxpayer support only for secular public schools, states are putting undue hardship on families who see religious education as a fundamental part of their free exercise of faith but must pay out-of-pocket for it.

What’s at Stake

It’s possible—even necessary—to object to all this without attacking faith. I’m a Christian man myself, looking forward to the season of reflection of Lent that begins next week.

But church-based public schools are the plan on the Right. And although it’s mostly a battle that will take place in the courts, it’s also a battle that’ll take place in legislatures and in the court of public opinion. And those venues are determined by elections and by political organizing.

When I argue that Democrats have to get serious about improving public schools as part of defending public schools, I’m not just making an argument about campaign strategy (though I’m making that argument too).

What’s at stake here is that the American Right is obsessed with schools, and with carving more and more dollars out to subsidize religious education. And that’s going to be what happens without countering that objective with a bold, sustained vision for educational opportunity for every child.

Categories Accountability, Arizona, Funding, Privatization, Religion, Separation of church and state, Vouchers

A Conversation with Norman B of Tampa NPR About My Memoir

By dianeravitch
January 16, 2026 //
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Norman Batley hosts a podcast called “Life Elsewhere with Norman B.” He is based in Tampa, Florida. The program is widely distributed through WMNF and NPR. He asks great questions, and I was thrilled to be invited to be on his show.

I hope you will listen.

Categories Arizona, Civil Rights, Education Industry, Education Reform, Equity, Ethics, Evil, Ravitch, Diane, School Choice

Pulitzer Prize Board Fights Trump Lawsuit with Great Demand: Full Disclosure

By dianeravitch
December 22, 2025 //
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Trump filed a lawsuit against the board of the Pulitzer Prizes in 2022, demanding that it retract any prizes awarded to reporters from The New York Times and The Washington Post who covered the investigation into Trump’s relationship with Russia in his first term.

Trump refers to the episode and the FBI’s investigation as the “Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax.”

The Pulitzer board issued the following response:

A Statement from the Pulitzer Prize Board

The Pulitzer Prize Board has an established, formal process by which complaints against winning entries are carefullyreviewed. In the last three years, the Pulitzer Board has received inquiries, including from former President Donald Trump, about submissions from The New York Times and The Washington Post on Russian interference in the U.S. election and its connections to the Trump campaign–submissions that jointly won the 2018 National Reporting prize.

These inquiries prompted the Pulitzer Board to commission two independent reviews of the work submitted by those organizations to our National Reporting competition. Bothreviews were conducted by individuals with no connection to the institutions whose work was under examination, nor any connection to each other. The separate reviews converged in their conclusions: that no passages or headlines, contentions or assertions in any of the winning submissions were discredited by facts that emerged subsequent to the conferral of the prizes.

The 2018 Pulitzer Prizes in National Reporting stand.

The case has dragged on. Recently the board of the Pulitzer Prizes announced a new twist. It has asked Trump to provide full records of his medical history, his psychological tests, and his income tax returns since 2015.

Trump might rethink this particular lawsuit. Other groups sued by the litigious Trump should scrutinize the Pulitzer board’s strategy.

Categories Accountability, Arizona, Corruption, Ethics, Extremism, Fraud, Freedom of the Press, Trump

Andy Spears: Florida “Lost” 30,000 Students Who Took Voucher Money

By dianeravitch
December 11, 2025 //
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Andy Spears is a veteran education journalist who tracks policy and finances across the South, but most often in Tennessee, where he lives. He has recently been following waste, fraud, and abuse in voucher programs in Arizona and Florida, learning lessons that Tennessee could learn from.

Spears wrote on his Substack blog The Education Report that Arizona passed the $1 Billion mark in annual spending on vouchers, most of which pays tuition for students already enrolled in nonpublic schools, and some of which is collected by very rich kids. Voucher money is spent on all sorts of things, not just tuition, including vacations, diamonds, lingerie, home appliances, television sets, vacations, and gift cards.

Arizona State Attorney General Kris Mayes announced that she is opening a review of voucher spending, especially the State Department of Education’s policy of rubber-stamping expenses under $2,000.

Spears also reported on Florida’s slipshod accounting of voucher students:

Where are Florida kids in school? Are they being counted as voucher students on a private school’s roster while actually attending a public school? Is the money following the student, or is it making a stop in the bank account of a private operator with little accountability?
In this story about a private school that accepted voucher funds for 80 students it never saw or educated, there’s an even bigger revelation.

In this story about a private school that accepted voucher funds for 80 students it never saw or educated, there’s an even bigger revelation.

Sen. Don Gaetz, R-Crestview, said that at any given moment the state does not know where 30,000 students are in terms of school categories — traditional public or voucher-supported private or home schools — together worth $270 million in education support.

30,000 kids. $270 million. And a state audit says the Florida Department of Education doesn’t seem to know what’s going on.

State legislators last week reviewed a state audit that found the school choice scholarship program in Florida exhibited “a myriad of accountability problems.”

Oh, and that original story – also pretty alarming. Apparently, a school claimed 80 students who lived 130 miles away – students they’d never seen or educated.

According to the decision, during the 2023-2024 school year, Little Wings submitted invoices to Step Up for Students, an organization administering state vouchers, for students previously enrolled at Touched by an Angel school, 130 miles away in Lake City.

The owner of the school that took voucher funds while not providing education to kids said she was not aware that is illegal.

Harris testified that during the 2023-2024 school year, her school received state scholarship funds for students that did not physically attend the school and that she did not know it was illegal to do so.

Florida’s school voucher scheme has private school operators billing for students who do not attend their school. It can’t keep track of as many as 30,000 students at a time. Hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars are not properly tracked or accounted for

This is what proponents of “school choice” want – unlimited “choice” options, which means unlimited ways for unaccountable private operators to get their hands on loads of taxpayer cash.

Categories Arizona, Education Reform, Funding, Vouchers

Andy Spears: New Group in Tennessee Seeks to Eliminate Public Schools

By dianeravitch
November 11, 2025 //
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Andy Spears is a veteran education journalist with a Ph.D. in education policy and a specialization in school finance. He lives in Nashville, but covers the national scene.

Spears writes:

In this post, he reports on an ominous development in Tennessee. A new organization in Tennessee has declared its intention to lure nearly 500,000 students out of public schools and into charter schools and voucher schools. The collapse in funding for public schools is likely to end public schools altogether.

Spears writes:

While state leaders consider expanding the state’s private school coupon program, a new nonprofit takes a bolder approach. A group calling itself Tennessee Leads registered with the Secretary of State as a 501(c)(4) issue advocacy organization with the goal of effectively ending public education in Tennessee by 2031.

The group was registered on October 14th and lists a business address of 95 White Bridge Road in Nashville. This is a nondescript business building in West Nashville.

The Registered Agent for Tennessee Leads is listed as “Tennessee Leads.” The group’s website says an IRS nonprofit application is pending.
In short, it is not yet clear who is backing this movement.

However, the group is not shy about its goals.

We support legislation to significantly increase the availability of Education Freedom scholarships, aiming to provide 200,000 scholarships annually by 2031. This initiative is designed to empower parents with more choices for their children’s education.

And:

Our efforts include advocating for the expansion of public charter schools, with a goal to increase student enrollment from 45,000 to 250,000. This initiative seeks to offer diverse educational opportunities and foster innovation in teaching.

If achieved, these two goals combined would take nearly half of all K-12 students in the state out of traditional public schools.

The group doesn’t really say the current model isn’t working – they just say they like “choice.”
The state’s current private school coupon scheme (ESA vouchers) has 20,000 students.

Moving that to 200,000 would cost at least $1.5 billion per year and take significant funds from local public schools.

Other states that rapidly expanded school vouchers saw huge budget hits to both state and local government.

[See Andy Spears’ post about Arizona’s universal school vouchers, which he refers to as “private school coupons for rich families.”]

[See his post on Indiana vouchers, where the costs rose neatly tenfold in less than a decade. The Indiana voucher is also a coupon for the rich to cash in at private schools. He predicts that Tennessee will be shelling out $1.4 billion a year for well-off kids to attend private schools by 2035.]

He writes that vouchers are a mess in Florida, because thousands of students are “double-dipping,” collecting voucher money while attending public schools.

[See his article on double-dipping and the voucher mess in Florida.]

He continues:

Florida relies on two official student counts each year — one in October and another in February — to allocate funding to school districts through the Florida Education Finance Program (FEFP). But after the October 2024 Count, major red flags appeared. Nearly 30,000 students (at an estimated cost of almost $250 million) were identified as both receiving a voucher and attending a public school. In some districts, almost all (more than all in one district) of their state funding had been absorbed by voucher payouts.

So, the Tennessee Leads plan would lead to a rapid decrease in state funds available for public schools – or, a significant increase in local property taxes – possibly, both.

It’s also not clear how Tennessee Leads plans to build charter school capacity to house an additional 200,000 students. Unless the plan is to just hand existing public schools over to charter operators – you know, like the failed Achievement School District model.

Oh, and there’s something else.

Tennessee Leads wants all schools to use Direct Instruction at all times for all students.

We advocate for the implementation of Direct Instruction methodologies across all public schools, ensuring that teaching practices are grounded in research and proven to be effective in enhancing student achievement.

Except studies on Direct Instruction suggest the opposite – that it does not improve student learning – in fact, it may be harmful to student academic and social growth.
Here’s more from a dissertation submitted by an ETSU student:

No statistically significant results (p = .05) were found between the year before implementation and the year after implementation with the exception of one grade level. Furthermore, no significant differences were found at any grade level between students participating in Corrective Reading and students not participating in Corrective Reading on the 2003-2004 TCAP Terra Nova test.

To be clear, Direct Instruction is highly-scripted learning – down to the pacing, word choice, and more – the “sage on the stage” delivers rote learning models and students are told exactly how to “do” certain things – the “one best way” approach with little room for student discovery.

More on this:

A remarkable body of research over many years has demonstrated that the sort of teaching in which students are provided with answers or shown the correct way to do something — where they’re basically seen as empty receptacles to be filled with facts or skills — tends to be much less effective than some variant of student-centered learning that involves inquiry or discovery, in which students play an active role in constructing meaning for themselves and with one another.

That is: Scripted learning/Direct Instruction is not evidence-based if the evidence you’re looking for is what actually improves student learning.

It holds true not only in STEM subjects, which account for a disproportionate share of the relevant research, but also in reading instruction, where, as one group of investigators reported, “The more a teacher was coded as telling children information, the less [they] grew in reading achievement.”

It holds true when judged by how long students retain knowledge,7 and the effect is even clearer with more ambitious and important educational goals. The more emphasis one places on long-term outcomes, on deep understanding, on the ability to transfer ideas to new situations, or on fostering and maintaining students’ interest in learning, the more direct instruction (DI) comes up short.8

One wonders who, exactly, wants to advance an extreme privatization agenda while also mandating that those students remaining in traditional public schools are subjected to a learning model proven not only not to work, but also shown as likely harmful in many cases.
Eventually, an IRS determination letter will be issued, or the Registered Agent will be updated on the Secretary of State’s site. Or, perhaps, the “about us” section will offer some insight into the actors who would end public schools in our state.

On the day after this post appeared, Spears learned that a well-known political consulting firm was behind the proposal for Tennessee Leads. The firm had previously worked for the Tennessee Republican Party and for Governor Bill Lee. He wrote a new post.

It’s not at all clear why Governor Lee and his fellow Republicans are so enamored of charters and vouchers. Tennessee was the first state to win Race to the Top funding from the Obama administration. It collected a grand prize of $500 million. With that big infusion of new funding for “reform,” the public schools should be reformed by now. But obviously they are not.

Worse, Tennessee put $100 million into a bold experiment that was supposed to demonstrate the success of charter schools. The state created the Educational Achievement Authority, hired a star of the charter movement to run it, and gathered the state’s lowest-performing public school into a non-contiguous all-charter district. The EAA promised that these low-scoring schools would join the state’s top schools within five years. Five years passed, and the targeted schools remained at the bottom of the state’s rankings.

In time, the legislature gave up and closed the EAA.

Similarly, the evidence is in in vouchers. In every state that had offered them to all students, the vast majority are scooped up by affluent families whose kids never attended public schools. When public school students took vouchers, they fell far behind their public school peers.

Are Republican leaders immune to reading evidence?

Categories Arizona, Disruption, Education Industry, Failure, Florida, Funding, Hoax, Indianapolis, Inequality, Privatization, Republicans, Tennessee, Vouchers
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