It’s hard to notice something that is invisible, but it is indeed obvious that there has been no discussion of education in the Presidential campaign.
It’s not as if education is unimportant: education is a path to a better life and to a better society. It is the road to progress.
The differences between the two candidates are like night and day. Trump supports dismantling public education and giving out vouchers. Harris is committed to funding schools and universities.
Project 2025 displays Trump’s goals: to eliminate the Department of Education, to turn the programs it funds (Title 1, IDEA for students with disabilities) and turn them into unrestricted block grants to states, which allows states to siphon off their funding for other purposes. At the same time that the Trump apparat wants to kill the Ed Department, it wants (contradictorily) to impose mandates on schools to stop the teaching of so-called critical race theory, to censor books, and to impose rightwing ideology on the nation’s schools.
It’s too bad that the future of education never came up in either of the high-profile debates. The American people should know that Kamala Harris wants to strengthen America’s schools, colleges, and universities, and that Donald Trump wants to destroy them.
What struck me as most bizarre about Project 2025 was not its efforts to block-grant all federal funding of schools, nor its emphasis on privatization of K-12 schools. (Block-granting means assigning federal funding to states as a lump sum, no strings attached, no federal oversight).
No, what amazed me most was the split screen between the report’s desire to hand all power over education to states and communities, and the report’s insistence on preserving enough power to punish LGBT students, especially trans students and to impose other far-right mandates, like stamping out critical race theory. You know, either you let the states decide or you don’t. The report wants it both ways.
It’s also astonishing to realize that the insidious goal of the report is eventually abandon federal funding of education. That’s a huge step backward, taking us to 1965, before Congress passed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, whose purpose was to raise spending in impoverished communities. I essence, P2025 says that decades of pursuing equitable funding “didn’t work,” so let’s abandon the goal and the spending.
Here is the Brookings analysis:
Project 2025 outlines a radical policy agenda that would dramatically reshape the federal government. The report was spearheaded by the right-wing Heritage Foundation and represents the policy aims of a large coalition of conservative activists. While former President Trump has attempted to distance himself from Project 2025, many of the report’s authors worked in the previous Trump administration and could return for a second round. Trump, himself, said in 2022, “This is a great group, and they’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do.”
In other words, Project 2025 warrants a close look, even if the Trump campaign would like Americans to avert their gaze.
Project 2025’s education agenda proposes a drastic overhaul of federal education policy, from early childhood through higher education. Here’s just a sample of the Project 2025 education-related recommendations:
Dismantle the U.S. Department of Education (ED)
Eliminate the Head Start program for young children in poverty
Discontinue the Title I program that provides federal funding to schools serving low-income children
Rescind federal civil rights protections for LGBTQ+ students
Undercut federal capacity to enforce civil rights law
Reduce federal funding for students with disabilities and remove guardrails designed to ensure these children are adequately served by schools
Promote universal private school choice
Privatize the federal student loan portfolio
It’s an outrageous list, and that’s just the start of it.
We’ve reviewed the Project 2025 chapter on education (Chapter 11), along with other chapters with implications for students. We’ve come away with four main observations:
1. Most of the major policy proposals in Project 2025 would require an unlikely amount of congressional cooperation
Project 2025 is presented as a to-do list for an incoming Trump administration. However, most of its big-ticket education items would require a great deal of cooperation from Congress.
Proposals to create controversial, new laws or programs would require majority support in the House and, very likely, a filibuster-proof, 60-vote majority in the Senate. Ideas like a Parents’ Bill of Rights, the Department of Education Reorganization Act, and a federal tax-credit scholarship program fall into this category. Even if Republicans outperform expectations in this fall’s Senate races, they’d have to attract several Democratic votes to get to 60. That’s not happening for these types of proposals.
The same goes for major changes to existing legislation. This includes, for example, a proposal to convert funding associated with the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) to no-strings-attached block grants and education savings accounts (with, presumably, much less accountability for spending those funds appropriately). It also includes a proposal to end the “negotiated rulemaking” (“neg-reg”) process that ED follows when developing regulations related to programs authorized under Title IV of the Higher Education Act (HEA). The neg-reg requirement is written into HEA itself, which means that unwinding neg-reg would require Congress to amend the HEA. That’s unlikely given that HEA reauthorization is already more than a decade overdue—and that’s without the political baggage of Project 2025 weighing down the process.
The prospect of changing funding levels for existing programs is a little more complicated. Programs like Title I are permanently authorized. Eliminating Title I or changing the formulas it usesto allocate funds to local educational agencies would require new and unlikely legislation. Year-to-year funding levels can and do change, but the vast majority of ED’s budget consists of discretionary funding that’s provided through the regular, annual appropriations process and subject to a filibuster. This limits the ability of one party to make major, unilateral changes. (ED’s mandatoryfunding is more vulnerable.)
In sum, one limiting factor on what an incoming Trump administration could realistically enact from Project 2025 is that many of these proposals are too unpopular with Democrats to overcome their legislative hurdles.
2. Some Project 2025 proposals would disproportionately harm conservative, rural areas and likely encounter Republican opposition
Another limiting factor is that some of Project 2025’s most substantive proposals probably wouldn’t be all that popular with Republicans either.
Let’s take, for example, the proposed sunsetting of the Title I program. Project 2025 proposes to phase out federal spending on Title I over a 10-year period, with states left to decide whether and how to continue that funding. It justifies this with misleading suggestions that persistent test score gaps between wealthy and poor students indicate that investments like Title I funding aren’t paying off. (In fact, evidence from school finance reforms suggests real benefits from education spending, especially for students from low-income families.)
The phrase “Title I schools” might conjure up images of under-resourced schools in urban areas that predominantly serve students of color, and it’s true that these schools are major beneficiaries of Title I. However, many types of schools, across many types of communities, receive critical support through Title I. In fact, schools in Republican-leaning areas could be hit the hardest by major cuts or changes to Title I. In the map below, we show the share of total per-pupil funding coming from Title I by state. Note that many of the states that rely the most on Title I funds (darkest blue) are politically conservative.
[Open the link to see the map.]
Of course, the impact of shifting from federal to state control of Title I would depend on how states choose to handle their newfound decision-making power. Given that several red states are among the lowest spenders on education—and have skimped on programs like Summer EBT and Medicaid expansion—it’s hard to believe that low-income students in red states would benefit from a shift to state control.
What does that mean for the type of support that Project 2025 proposals might get from red-state Republicans in Congress? It’s hard to know. It’s worth keeping in mind, though, that the GOP’s push for universal private school voucher programs has encountered some of its fiercest resistance from ruralRepublicans across severalstates.
3. Project 2025 also has significant proposals that a second Trump administration could enact unilaterally
While a second Trump administration couldn’t enact everything outlined in Project 2025 even if it wanted to, several consequential proposals wouldn’t require cooperation from Congress. This includes some actions that ED took during the first Trump administration and certainly could take again.
Here are a few of the Project 2025 proposals that the Trump administration could enact with the authority of the executive branch alone:
Roll back civil rights protections for LGBTQ+ students
Roll back Title IX protections against sex-based discrimination
Dismantle the federal civil rights enforcement apparatus
Eliminate current income-driven repayment plans and require higher monthly payments for low-income borrowers
Remove protections from predatory colleges that leave students with excessive debt
Federal education policy has suffered from regulatory whiplash over the last decade, with presidential administrations launching counter-regulations to undo the executive actions of the prior administration. Take, for example, “gainful employment” regulations that Democratic administrations have used to limit eligibility for federal financial aid for colleges that leave students with excessive loan debt. A second Trump administration would likely seek to reverse the Biden administration’s “gainful employment” regulations like the first Trump administration did to the Obama administration’s rules. (Then again, with the Supreme Court striking down Chevron, which provided deference to agency expertise in setting regulations, the Trump administration might not even need to formally undo regulations.)
Other Project 2025 proposals, not explicitly about education, also could wreak havoc. This includes a major overhaul of the federal civil service. Specifically, Project 2025 seeks to reinstate Schedule F, an executive order that Trump signed during his final weeks in office. Schedule F would reclassify thousands of civil service positions in the federal government to policy roles—a shift that would empower the president to fire civil servants and fill their positions with political appointees. Much has been written about the consequences of decimating the civil service, and the U.S. Department of Education, along with other federal agencies that serve students, would feel its effects.
4. Project 2025 reflects a white Christian nationalist agenda as much as it reflects a traditional conservative education policy agenda
If one were to read Project 2025’s appeals to principles such as local control and parental choice, they might think this is a standard conservative agenda for education policy. Republicans, after all, have been calling for the dismantling of ED since the Reagan administration, and every administration since has supported some types of school choice reforms.
But in many ways, Project 2025’s proposals really don’t look conservative at all. For example, a large-scale, tax-credit scholarship program would substantially increase the federal government’s role in K-12 education. A Parents’ Bill of Rights would require the construction of a massive federal oversight and enforcement function that does not currently exist. And a proposal that “states should require schools to post classroom materials online to provide maximum transparency to parents” would impose an enormous compliance burden on schools, districts, and teachers.
Much of Project 2025 is more easily interpretable through the lens of white Christian nationalism than traditional political conservatism. Scholars Philip Gorski and Samuel Perry describe white Christian nationalism as being “about ethno-traditionalism and protecting the freedoms of a very narrowly defined ‘us’.” The Project 2025 chapter on education is loaded with proposals fitting this description. That includes a stunning number of proposals focused on gender identity, with transgender students as a frequent target. Project 2025 seeks to secure rights for certain people (e.g., parents who support a particular vision of parental rights) while removing protections for many others (e.g., LGBTQ+ and racially minoritized children). Case in point, its proposal for “Safeguarding civil rights” says only, “Enforcement of civil rights should be based on a proper understanding of those laws, rejecting gender ideology and critical race theory.”
These types of proposals don’t come from the traditional conservative playbook for education policy reform. They come from a white Christian nationalist playbook that has gained prominence in far-right politics in recent years.
At this point, it’s clear that the Trump campaign sees Project 2025 as a political liability that requires distance through the election season. Let’s not confuse that with what might happen during a second Trump administration.
Media Matters has done a thorough review of the contents of Project 2025, which was written as a playbook for the next Trump administration. It was released and posted on the web in 2023, without fanfare. As more people read it and expressed their indignation, Trump claimed he knew nothing about it. Ever heard of it. Didn’t know who wrote it.
But the authors of the plan included 140 people who had worked in the Trump administration. The plan was developed by the rightwing Heriage Foundation, whose president is Kevin Roberts, a friend of Trump’s.
He knew.
It’s the roadmap for the second Trump term in office.
For education, the main feature of Project 2025 is its strong support for school choice, especially vouchers. It is a formula for directing federal funds to public funding of private and religious schools, as well as home schooling. It’s the Betsy DeVos model. Its purpose is to end public schools.
The Economic Policy Institute is a nonpartisan think tank that leans left, which is a rarity in D.C., where billionaires shower their largesse on rightwing think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute. This is the EPI analysis of the devastating effect of vouchers on public schools. This is their purpose: the privatization of public funding for education.
Here is the EPI report:
Since the early 2000s, many states have introduced significant voucher programs to provide public financing for private school education. These voucher programs are deeply damaging to efforts to offer an excellent public education for all U.S. children—and this is in fact often the intention of those pushing these programs. In this post we argue that:
Public education is worth preserving—it should be seen as one of the most important achievements in our country’s history and crucial for the social and economic welfare of future generations.
The economic logic behind voucher programs is weak; it rests on ideological commitments to markets over public provision of goods and services, even in realms of activity where the virtues of markets do not hold—like public education.
Most damagingly, introducing significant voucher programs has gone hand in hand with steep declines in public school spending relative to states that have not adopted these policies.
This spending stagnation has had profound effects in generating larger “adequacy gaps” in school funding in voucher states.
Paradoxically, even while they take resources away from public schools, many newly introduced voucher programs could result in more total state spending in coming years.
This would be a particularly perverse result given the expansive research literature showing that vouchers do not improve educational outcomes. In essence, states that have introduced large-scale voucher programs are looking to substitute a more expensive and less effective system for educating kids than public education. The only reason for this policy thrust is ideology rooted in hostility to public education.
Background on public education and the voucher debates
Universal public education was perhaps the most important reason why the United States became the richest country in the world in the 20th century. As Claudia Goldin, the most recent Nobel Prize winner in economics, has written:
At the dawn of the twentieth century the industrial giants watched each other cautiously. The British sent high-ranking commissions to the United States and the United States sent similar groups to Britain and Germany. All were looking over their shoulders to see what made for economic greatness and what would ensure supremacy in the future… Earlier delegations focused on technology and physical capital. Those of the turn-of-the-century turned their attention to something different. People and training, not capital and technology, had become the new concerns…For the twentieth century to become the human capital century required vast changes in educational institutions, a commitment by governments to fund education, a readiness by taxpayers to pay for the education of other people’s children, a belief by business and industry that formal schooling mattered to them, and a willingness on the part of parents to send their children to school (and by youths to go). The transition occurred first in the United States and was accompanied by a set of “virtues” or principles, many of which can be summarized by the word “egalitarianism.”
In the 21st century, unfortunately, too many policymakers seem determined to squander this legacy by starving public education of money and legitimacy, often in the name of “school choice.” Their central claim (when they bother to make one with any clarity) is that public provision of goods or services is ineffective by definition and that a dose of private, market-like competition will lead to better schooling outcomes for the nation’s children.
This claim is weak on its logical face, as the conditions needed for market competition to lead to better outcomes clearly do not exist in the educational realm. Take just three obvious examples. First, unlike other goods and services, there is no option to forego education entirely. In other markets, if the private sector is doing a poor job at offering attractive options for a good or service, people can just consume other things. But the United States—rightly—mandates basic education for all kids. Second, competition works well when the cost of switching providers is small. If you get tired of prices or goods at Whole Foods, you can shop at Giant. By contrast, switching schools is an extraordinarily costly decision in time, administrative burden, and severed social networks. Third, competition works well in markets when a transaction only affects the buyer and seller—and not unrelated third parties. But if third parties are affected by a transaction (think of pollution affecting third parties when I decide to buy gasoline for my car), then private markets will fail to match costs and benefits. Universal schooling generates positive spillovers to society at large, meaning that individuals would be inclined to underinvest in education relative to the full benefits it provides.
The easiest way to boost educational outcomes is providing more public resources
To the degree any evidence is mobilized in support of the view that public education needs market-like disruption through “school choice” instruments like vouchers, it generally relies on outdated research claiming that public schools already have “enough” funding, and that additional resources would not generate better outcomes. If one believed that the level of public education resources was sufficient, then strategies aimed at changing the composition of these resources or how they were mobilized—say through privatization via vouchers—might make some sense.
But this is wrong on several fronts.
First, newer research with better methods confirms that more money for public schools does improve educational outcomes. And not only does more money improve schooling outcomes for children, it also has the largest beneficial effects on the performance of particularly disadvantaged students.
Such spending is not random and depends on a number of factors that are correlated with student success. For example, spending in a given district might rise as higher-income families move into the area and property values increase. These higher-income families might also be able to provide greater in home resources that will aid their children’s academic performance. Simple correlations between the level of district spending and student success might hence show a positive relationship, but the causality would not necessarily be running from district spending decisions to student success; both might instead be driven by a third variable, which is simply the level of family resources on average across the district.
Running the opposite direction, much school funding is explicitly compensatory, targeting students facing greater socioeconomic disadvantage to attempt to even out total resources (both in home and public) available to students for academic success. But if this greater spending targets students with fewer in home resources, it could show a negative relationship between levels of spending and student performance, but again will not be reflecting the causal effect of this spending.
The new research has overcome this key challenge in empirical assessments of the relationship between school spending and student outcomes: It found natural experiments that allow truly exogenous changes in school spending to be identified, and hence the effects on student achievement to reflect the causal effect of this spending. The exogenous changes that allowed for these examinations were largely court-ordered school finance reforms (SFRs).
For example, Jackson, Johnson, and Persico (2016)examined the impact of school finance reforms between 1972 and 2010, and found that a 10% increase in school spending for 12 years lead to increases in high school graduation rates, 7% higher wages, and 10% higher family incomes in adulthood for children from districts that saw the spending increase. Gains were concentrated among students in high-poverty households. Lafortune, Rothstein, and Schanzenbach (2018)similarly found that a $1,000 increase in per-pupil spending for low-income districts would reduce the test score gap between low- and high-income school districts within a state by roughly 0.18 standard deviations (SDs) following court-ordered SFRs, or by nearly 40% of the baseline gap.
In short, the evidence indicates that public schooling in the United States simply needs more resources to deliver even better student achievement—not some radical disruption in how it is delivered and by what institutions.
Second, vouchers don’t lead to better student achievement. Several high-quality studies have investigated the impact of recent voucher programs and have found notably worse outcomes for student achievement. In the first two years following Louisiana’s Scholarship voucher program, student achievement in language arts and math both decreased by as much as 0.34 SDs. In Ohio, under the Ed Choice program, students who went to private schools with a voucher performed worse than they would have had they remained in public schools. In Indiana, students that used the Indiana Choice Scholarship voucher program experienced an average achievement loss of 0.15 SDs in mathematics.
The promise of vouchers improving educational outcomes rests on assumptions that the private sector is always and everywhere more efficient than public providers of goods and services. But the private schools that expand or are created in response to the introduction of voucher programs are often of very poor quality. In the case of Milwaukee’s longstanding voucher programs, for example, researchers found that 40% of private voucher schools failed or closed down within the program’s first 25 years. Parents often belatedly realize that these schools are no improvement relative to public schools; this has lead a large share of students that took vouchers to return to public schools shortly after. In Milwaukee, nearly 20% of kids left voucher programs every year, with most coming back to public school.
Vouchers reduce public school resources, but introduce large new fiscal obligations overall
It would be bad enough if the introduction of vouchers simply funneled some students into poorly performing private schools for a stretch of time. But vouchers also affirmatively drain resources from the entire public education system—resources that would reliably produce better outcomes for children if they had stayed in public schools. Paradoxically, while vouchers are associated with significant drains from public school resources, they could actually boost the total fiscal cost of state support for education over time by shoveling more and more resources to (poorly performing, on average) private schools.
Arizona provides a cautionary tale. Arizona’s 2023 universal voucher program was forecast to cost $33 million in the first year and $65 million in the second. Instead, the program ended up costing $587 million in the first year and is projected to cost upwards of $708 million in 2024 fiscal year. Even smaller programs tend to be dramatically underestimated.
Part of this unexpected cost was the subsidy offered to parents who had already enrolled their kids in private schools: 75% of the first wave of applicants to the Arizona program were parents of students with no history of public school attendance, who could now tap taxpayer money to pay for their children’s private schools. Much of the cost of vouchers is essentially a subsidy for parents (many of them affluent) who never intended on using the public school system.
Other states have followed this pattern of introducing programs promised to be small and seeing them balloon in size. New Hampshire’s 2021 Educational Freedom Account was estimated to cost $300,000 in the first year and $3 million in the second, but in reality the bill cost $8.1 million in the first year, $14.6 million in 2022, and $25 million in the 2023-24 school year.
The rise of vouchers in the past 15 years represents an affirmative effort to erode public education by starving it of needed funding. Voucher proponents often want voters to think these programs simply broaden the suite of options enjoyed by parents and students. But the data tell a different story: Where significant voucher programs have been instituted, the resources available to public school children have decreased. Again, highly persuasive recent research shows that public school resources are crucial on the margin, and that more public resources reliably improve student achievement and economic outcomes later in life—while fewer public resources reliably harm education. Voucher programs that starve public resources for education are therefore deeply damaging.
Figure A shows state and local per-pupil funding levels in 2007 and 2021 (expressed in 2020 dollars) for states that passed substantial voucher programs during the period (defined as having >1% of enrolled students using vouchers by 2021) as well as for states without any voucher programs. In 2007, the average difference in per-pupil spending between these two groups of states was around $900 (higher in states that did not subsequently pass significant voucher programs). Between 2007 and 2021, voucher programs grew significantly in one set of these states. By 2021, states without voucher programs were spending $2,800 more per-pupil—essentially more than tripling the spending advantage they had before the rise of voucher programs in the 2010s and early 2020s.
The failure to increase per-pupil funding leads to the erosion of public education services in all forms: everything from school meals, extracurricular activities, mental health and counseling services, vocational and technical programs, and investments in teacher quality and pay. It is also worth noting that flat per-pupil educational spending—even in inflation-adjusted terms—is effectively a decline in the quality of education over time. Take the example of teachers: In a growing economy, simply keeping real pay constant for teachers means that their pay, relative to other skilled and credentialed professionals, is declining. This decline in relative teachers’ pay (even with absolute pay levels flat) will put downward pressure on the quality of the teaching labor pool, as more and more people who could have been excellent teachers decide to choose higher-pay occupations.
Stagnant spending in states with significant voucher programs has also left education funding in those states substantially below measures of funding adequacy. In school finance research, adequacy is defined as the level of funding needed in a district to ensure students reach an average level of student achievement. For the measure of adequacy used below, the outcome is achieving the national average of test scores. Adequacy measures account for needs that differ by district depending on influences like the socioeconomic status of the student population.
FIGURE A
Per-pupil state and local education spendingBy voucher program status, 2007 and 2021
States without voucher programsStates with voucher programs2007$11,211$10,3242021$12,820$10,054
Notes: States with substantial voucher programs, defined as having >1 percent of all students enrolled in 2021, include Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Louisiana, North Carolina, Ohio and Wisconsin. States with smaller voucher programs are excluded from analysis.
State constitutions mandate sufficient education funding for students to have access to an adequate education, regardless of students’ economic or social circumstances. For example, students in high-poverty districts will need more education funding than students in low-poverty districts to achieve the same outcome because they live in neighborhoods where there are fewer resources available to help them succeed. Several court cases in recent decades have found a constitutional responsibility for states to provide such adequate funding.
Figure B relies on total per-pupil spending data from the School Finance Indicator Database to assess the adequacy of school spending for states with large voucher programs and states without any voucher program, comparing the gap for students in medium-, high-, and highest-poverty districts in our two groups of states in 2021. A negative gap implies that state spending is inadequate, and students are not receiving the resources required to meet average academic achievement levels. Regardless of poverty status, states with substantial voucher programs in 2021 are not spending enough to meet students’ needs.
FIGURE B
Funding gap for adequate per-pupil spendingBy voucher program status, 2021
States without voucher programsStates with voucher programsMedium Poverty-$249-$4,000High Poverty-$2,202-$5,429Highest Poverty-$8,490-$11,859
Notes: States with substantial voucher programs, defined as having >1 percent of all students enrolled in 2021, include Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Louisiana, North Carolina, Ohio and Wisconsin. States with smaller voucher programs are excluded from analysis. Medium poverty is defined as district neighborhood poverty in the 3rd quintile (40-60th percentiles). High poverty is defined as district neighborhood poverty in the 4th quintile (60-80th percentiles). Highest poverty is defined as district neighborhood poverty in the 5th quintile (80-100th percentile).
For medium-poverty districts, the adequacy gap is negative, but quite small in schools without a voucher presence (roughly $220 per pupil). In medium-poverty districts of states with a significant voucher presence, however, the adequacy gap is negative and very large—with actual spending lagging adequacy measures by $3,750 per pupil. In high-poverty districts, even states without vouchers have large adequacy gaps—roughly $2,200 per pupil. But these gaps are double the size in states with significant voucher programs—roughly $5,400 per pupil. Finally, adequacy gaps are shamefully large in both states without vouchers ($8,500 per pupil) and in states with significant vouchers ($11,900), but the difference remains quite high.
These results clearly show that school financing is far from perfect in states without voucher programs, but is far worse in states that have introduced these programs.
Conclusion
Vouchers are not a cost-free policy that simply adds on another education option for children—they are instead an intentional attack on universal public education, one of the crown jewels of U.S. society. Vouchers make no coherent economic sense, and the evidence shows that vouchers harm student achievement and expose state budgets to large future obligations that are hard to forecast, even while they divert spending away from public education. Our analysis shows that states that have introduced significant voucher programs over the past decade and a half have experienced significant declines in per-pupil spending relative to states without voucher programs. In short, the data clearly show that choosing to implement vouchers programs takes funding away from public education. The public spending declines associated with the introduction of vouchers will reliably cause significantly worse educational outcomes and will harm kids in high-poverty neighborhoods more than kids in low-poverty neighborhoods.
The rise of vouchers is especially damaging given that we now know what does boost educational outcomes: more spending on public education. Leaving these potential gains on the table and promoting voucher programs instead of investing in public education demonstrates that kids’ education is not a priority.
As we head toward the November election, Policy Matters Ohio’s Bailey Williams exposes recent history that has been little reported. In The Great Ohio Tax Shift, Williams explores simply and clearly the data showing that Ohio’s new billion dollar private school tuition voucher expansion is not the only factor that has threatened public school funding. For two decades now, legislators have been cutting taxes and reducing investment in public services, including public schools. And Ohio’s legislature has increased the tax burden on Ohio’s poorest citizens and made life easier for our state’s wealthiest citizens.
Even though Ohioans have watched the legislature toss a tax cut into budget after budget instead of funding needed services, the cumulative effects Baily presents in the new report are astounding:
“Ohio families with the least resources—those making less than $24,000—pay more annual taxes on average today than they did before 2005.
The average household among the top 1 of Ohio earners, with incomes above $647,000, now contribute over $52,000 per year less than they once did.
The result is a loss of about $12.8 billion a year in revenue….
Ohioans of color are significantly more likely to pay a higher share of their incomes in taxes… while white Ohioans are more likely to have benefited….
71% of the total value of personal income tax cuts has gone to the richest 20% of households….
Changes to sales taxes, excise taxes, and business taxes have, on average, increased taxes for the bottom 99% of Ohio’s households.
Changes to sales taxes, excise taxes, and business taxes have, on average, allowed the richest 1% of Ohio tax filers to pay nearly $600 per year less than they did before 2005.”
Bailey reminds us why we pay taxes and explains what has been sacrificed in Ohio: “Through the state tax system, Ohio can ensure every child gets a world-class education, every community is vibrant and healthy, and every Ohioan, of every race and gender, has a secure economic foundation on which to build our futures. But for a generation, lawmakers have instead used tax policy to create loopholes for the wealthy and influential, and provide special treatment for powerful corporations… The politicians who write state tax policy often justify their decisions with promises that when billionaires’ pockets overflow with profits, the benefits will trickle down to working families. Year after year—now decade after decade—the consequences have been clear: The people with the lowest incomes are paying a little more, the wealthy are paying much less, and Ohio has too few resources to serve its purpose: creating a state where everyone has what they need to live a good life.”
Ohio’s legislature has reduced progressive taxation as it has reduced dependence on income taxes and increased regressive sales, excise and business taxes: “Ohio policymakers have made significant changes to personal income taxes over the two decades, lowering rates and making our tax structure more regressive. Since 2005, almost every biennial budget passed by the Ohio state general assembly has included some form of reduction to the personal income tax, generally through broad tax rate cuts and elimination of top tax brackets. Some changes have benefited low-paid Ohioans: Increasing the threshold at which households begin to pay taxes means households with income below $26,050 don’t pay state income tax…. The creation of a 30% Earned Income Tax Credit has helped low-paid Ohioans.” However, “Other regressive changes in the tax code have completely erased the meager benefits of income tax cuts for the lowest-paid Ohioans. In fact, the lowest-income 20% now pay more on average in taxes than they did before the legislature began its tax cutting spree in 2005. Sales, excise, and business taxes now cost that group more each year on average—more than cancelling out the annual average $122 in income tax cuts this group benefits from….”
Most Ohioans are not prepared to gather and analyze this kind of technical information. Thanks to Bailey Williams and Policy Matters Ohio for this technical analysis. We have spent this year learning about the fiscal implications of the Legislature’s voucher expansion in the current biennial budget; now we are better prepared to understand why, in addition to perpetual voucher expansion, it has been such a struggle to press the Legislature to enact Ohio’s new public school funding formula, the Fair School Funding Plan, to rectify years of inadequate and inequitably distributed public school funding. Legislators have insisted on a slow, three-budget phase-in of the new formula and even now have been unwilling to commit to completing the full launch of the new plan in the budget they will begin negotiating in January. Many of us have realized that the Fair School Funding Plan’s delayed rollout has derived from perennial tax cutting in addition to the enactment of what’s turning out to be an annual billion dollar voucher explosion. Williams’ analysis, released last week, provides information essential to our grasping the complex fiscal realities that will be part of the upcoming state budget debate.
Please open the link to get the full picture of the tax-cutting that has helped the richest Ohioans, hurt the poorest, and undermined public services.
Garry Rayno is a veteran journalist in New Hampshire who covers the legislature for inDepthNH.org. His education reporting is excellent. In this post, he describes the Republicans’ refusal to fund public schools adequately, although they have launched a voucher program that is sure to drain the state imof hundreds of millions of dollars annually.
The latest round for education funding lawsuits enters the judicial ring this week in Rockingham County Superior Court and will be argued over the next two weeks.
The second half of the Rand suit goes before judge David Ruoff and — much like the ConVal suit — hinges on whether the state is providing ample money to provide an adequate education for its students, which is essentially the same question before the courts three decades ago with the Claremont suit.
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Under the two Claremont rulings, the state is required to provide an adequate education to its students, define what constitutes an adequate education, pay for it with constitutional taxes and ensure school districts are providing it.
That sounds pretty simple, but you have to dig a little deeper to understand why the issue has not been settled in the intervening 30 years.
As ConVal argued, the state believes currently that $4,100 per student is the cost of an adequate education, and the state largely pays that cost with the Statewide Education Property Tax, portions of existing taxes and Sweepstakes revenues.
According to the latest figures from the Department of Education the statewide average for educating a single student is $20,322, or $24,756 when all expenditures are included such as transportation, capital expenses and interest, out-of-district tuitions, etc.
In the ConVal ruling, which is on appeal with the other half of the Rand suit to the Supreme Court, Ruoff set the state’s obligation for the cost of an adequate education at $7,356 and said it is probably closer to $9,900 per student.
In any event the lower figure is almost double what the state pays and would cost the state an additional $500 million.
In the Rand case, the plaintiffs also want the court to determine if the additional money school districts receive for higher costs for educating special education students, or from low-income households or do not speak fluent English, for example is enough to cover those costs as well.
In their suit, the plaintiffs claim the state funding is inadequate to cover those “differentiated aid” costs as well.
When the funding formula was originally developed in the late 1990s, many of the lawmakers sitting on the committee were from the state’s largest cities like Manchester, Rochester and Nashua and weighted the formula to help their communities and that has not changed much since as communities like Manchester, Nashua, Rochester and Somersworth receive a greater percentage of state aid than most other communities.
They are larger and have larger populations of children in poverty, with disabilities and children whose native language is not English, but other communities like Claremont, Berlin, Newport, Pittsfield, Franklin and Milan have problems raising money for education as well without the same percentage of state aid.
But that is not the crux of the Rand suit, which is by failing to pay all of its constitutionally obligated cost of an adequate education, city and town taxpayers have to make up the difference with local property taxes.
As most people know by now, there are property wealthy communities like Moultonborough, Tuftonboro, Wolfeboro, New Castle, Rye, Portsmouth, Hampton, Sunapee, New London, Newbury, etc. that collect more than they need through the Statewide Education Property Tax to pay for the state’s contribution of $4,100 per student and have money left over.
Ostensively all those communities and all the other communities in New Hampshire pay the same tax rate for the Statewide Education Property Tax.
But when the statewide tax receipts in a community do not cover the $4,100 per student threshold, local property taxes have to make up the difference, and those property tax rates vary from community to community.
If the communities have to pay for an adequate education, then the state is using local property taxes to satisfy its obligation, which would mean they are really state taxes.
And the constitution requires that all state taxes be proportional and reasonable and that is the problem, because widely varying tax rates do not meet the constitutional requirement.
And the other aspect of the lawsuit is that the cost of an adequate education is much higher than $4,100 and if that is true, and Ruoff has ruled once that it is, than the state has an even greater obligation, meaning most every community is using local property taxes to pay the state’s share of an adequate education.
The state aid to education totals $817.84 million for the current school year, while the total spent on public education from kindergarten to 12th grade is estimated to be about $3.8 billion for all education related costs, not just adequate education.
The federal government sends hundreds of millions of dollars to the state but there is no simple total of federal funds going to public education in New Hampshire to be found on the Department of Education’s website.
But if the state paid even half the cost of the total amount spent on public education, its obligation, given federal funds, is considerably more than what it currently pays and may be nearly double that amount.
The stakes are extremely high for the state at a time when state revenues are declining, exacerbated by years of rate cuts and repeals.
The state has steadfastly refused to approve any new money source for education outside the statewide property tax which was moving the same dollar from the local side of the property tax ledger to the state’s side although making it more proportional across the state.
However, that did little to reduce property taxes in property poor communities or increase the educational opportunities for students in the property poor districts.
The state has argued since the two Claremont decisions were written 30 years ago that the definition of an adequate education and how to fund it is up to the legislative and executive branches, which it is, except when fundamental rights are being violated.
Recently, the Attorney General’s Office spent a great deal of time arguing what the plaintiffs seek would violate the constitutional separation of powers provision.
The question is where do you draw the line? Does the legislature in failing to address the inequities for property taxpayers and students exercising its rights to control the purse and set policies, or is it contempt of court?
Or does the court have the final say when fundamental constitutional rights are violated?
Before pondering those questions there are two weeks of arguments by the plaintiffs and the state. The state told the court last spring the plaintiffs have failed to “meet their heavy burden of demonstrating that the current funding formula is in clear and substantial conflict with the [sic] Part II, Article 83,” in seeking a summary judgement and asked not to go forward with this week’s hearings.
The court rejected that request quickly and there will be two more weeks to parse the fundamental issue of whether the state’s children have a fundamental right to an adequate education and how the state would pay for it to be on center stage in the public arena once again.
K-12 education has captured its share of headlines over the last few years. Schools—and, specifically, local school boards—became a lightning rod for anger about the disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. From the first weeks of the pandemic, Republicans accused Democratic leaders of being too slow to reopen schools. That accusation gained potency as evidence mounted that schools hadn’t been the vectors of COVID-19 transmission that experts initially feared. Sensing vulnerability, Democrats became reluctant to engage on K-12 issues, and Republicans such as Glenn Youngkin showed that Democrats wouldn’t put up much of a fight if education became a battlefield for culture war conflicts. The result was a dizzying, maddening stretch where schools were embroiled in controversies over critical race theory and transgender students’ rights when education leaders needed to focus on pandemic recovery.
Now, as memories of the pandemic recede, the politics of education are changing. Democrats are talking more about schools, emboldened by the selection of a former schoolteacher, Tim Walz, as Vice President Harris’s running mate. Republicans, for their part, have harnessed discontent with public schools into an aggressive push for private school voucher programs that threaten America’s public education systems.
The platforms of the Democratic and Republican parties, along with the education-related portions of Project 2025, provide a glimpse of where K-12 education might be headed.
The Democratic platform
The Democrats’ 2024 platform is light on specifics, with more attention to the current administration’s accomplishments and the would-be Harris administration’s support for some broadly defined goals (e.g., reducing chronic absenteeism). To some extent, the lack of specifics stands in contrast to both the Democrats’ 2020 platform—which, for example, pledged a tripling of Title I funds for high-needs schools—and more detailed 2024 proposals for early childhood education (e.g., free, universal pre-K) and higher education (e.g., free community college).
The 2024 platform does contain relevant, specific ideas outside of its “Education” section. For example, Democrats propose rebates for school districts that purchase electric school buses—an idea grounded in research on the harms of students’ exposure to toxins. They also offer specific proposals to reduce gun violence (amid a scourge of school shootings) and to strengthen civil rights protections for LGBTQ+ children and students of color (frequent targets of culture war attacks).
Notably, some of the platform’s clearest statements on education describe what Democrats oppose. That includes private-school voucher plans and policies hostile to transgender youth that have become increasingly popular among Republican leaders.
The Republican platform
Republicans’ 2024 platform is also light on policy specifics. The platform has a few ideas that have long been cornerstones of GOP education politics. That includes ending teacher tenure—an idea that would require local or state action and confront fierce opposition from teachers’ unions.
The platform has language about resisting political indoctrination in schools—while seeming to propose some indoctrination of its own. This includes proposals to “support schools that teach America’s Founding Principles and Western Civilization” and “promote Fair and Patriotic Civics Education.” Along similar lines, former President Trump recently described a bewildering plan to create a credentialing body to “certify teachers who embrace patriotic values, support our way of life, and understand that their job is not to indoctrinate children.”
Substantively, the most important part of the Republican education platform might be its support for universal school choice. In about a dozen states, Republicans have recently created or expanded education savings account (ESA) programs that make public funds available to pay for private school or other educational expenses. Critics of these programs—myself included—argue that they violate our basic traditions, benefit the wealthy at the expense of others, and are not well supported by research.
Project 2025
If the Republican platform is light on policy proposals, Project 2025 certainly is not.
Along with my colleagues Rachel Perera and Katharine Meyer, I recently wrote a more detailed piece that analyzes Project 2025’s education proposals. Project 2025 proposes severe cuts to the resources and protections available to the country’s poorest, most marginalized children. For example, it proposes to eliminate the Head Start program (for young children in poverty), discontinue federal Title I funding (for schools that serve low-income children), and kneecap IDEA (federal legislation that supports students with disabilities). It’s especially harsh on transgender children, with proposals aimed at reorienting civil rights enforcement around “rejecting gender ideology and critical race theory” and stripping Title IX protections from transgender students.
In other words, Project 2025 sets its sights on the programs that serve America’s neediest students. It would essentially terminate the federal government’s long-running role in addressing inequities that arise in locally governed school systems.
Notably, many key Project 2025 proposals would require an unlikely degree of congressional cooperation. This includes some of the highest-profile proposals, such as eliminating the U.S. Department of Education (a vaguely defined idea that’s unlikely to materialize in its most extreme form). Still, a second Trump administration couldenact some Project 2025 proposals unilaterally. That includes rolling back civil rights protections and replacing civil servants in the U.S. Department of Education with political appointees after reinstating Schedule F.
Taking stock
It’s fair to say that Democrats’ plans for federal education policy are modest. Democrats aren’t proposing a markedly stronger role for the federal government. On K-12 education, Democrats remain in a mostly defensive posture as they offer a more “conservative” agenda that protects against the GOP’s increasingly radical efforts.
Just what those GOP plans might be—and just how radical they are—depends on whether the true Trumps X administration plan is the Republican platform, Project 2025, or some combination of the two. That remains to be seen
In an unprecedented move that shatters the historic wall of separation between church and state, Ohio has passed legislation to fund the construction and renovation of religious schools. It also directly violates the explicit language of the Ohio state constitution.
ProPublica reports on the latest move to defund public schools and divert money to religious schools.
The state of Ohio is giving taxpayer money to private, religious schools to help them build new buildings and expand their campuses, which is nearly unprecedented in modern U.S. history.
While many states have recently enacted sweeping school voucher programs that give parents taxpayer money to spend on private school tuition for their kids, Ohio has cut out the middleman. Under a bill passed by its Legislature this summer, the state 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 in providing the grants, according to the measure’s chief architect, Matt Huffman, is to increase the capacity of private schools in part so that they can sooner absorb more voucher students.
“The capacity issue is the next big issue on the horizon” for voucher efforts, Huffman, the Ohio Senate president and a Republican, told the Columbus Dispatch.
Huffman did not respond to ProPublica’s requests for comment.
Following Hurricane Katrina and the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, some federal taxpayer dollars went toward repairing and improving private K-12 schools in multiple states. Churches that operate schools often receive government funding for the social services that they offer; some orthodox Jewish schools in New York have relied on significant financial support from the city, The New York Times has found.
But national experts on education funding emphasized that what Ohio is doing is categorically different.
“This is new, dangerous ground, funding new voucher schools,” said Josh Cowen, a senior fellow at the Education Law Center and the author of a new book on the history of billionaire-led voucher efforts. For decades, churches have relied on conservative philanthropy to be able to build their schools, Cowen said, or they’ve held fundraising drives or asked their diocese for help.
They’ve never, until now, been able to build schools expressly on the public dime.
“This breaks through the myth,” said David Pepper, a political writer and the former chairman of the Ohio Democratic Party. Pepper said that courts have long given voucher programs a pass, ruling that they don’t violate the constitutionally mandated separation of church and state because a publicly funded voucher technically passes through the conduit of a parent on the way to a religious school.
With this latest move, though, Ohio is funding the construction of a separate, religious system of education, Pepper said, adding that if no one takes notice, “This will happen in other states — they all learn from each other like laboratories.”
The Ohio Constitution says that the General Assembly “will secure a thorough and efficient system of common schools throughout the state; but no religious or other sect, or sects, shall ever have any exclusive right to, or control of, any part of the school funds of this state.”
Yet Troy McIntosh, executive director of the Ohio Christian Education Network — several of whose schools received the new grants — recently told the Lima News that part of the reason for spending these public dollars on the expansion of private schools is that “we want to make sure that from our perspective, Christian school options are available to any kid who chooses that in the state.”
Ohio started funding vouchers in Cleveland only. They were supposed to “help poor kids escape failing public schools.” Initially, vouchers were only for kids already enrolled in public schools and only for kids from low-income families.
When they were implemented in the 1990s, vouchers in Ohio, like in many places, were limited in scope; they were available only to parents whose children were attending (often underfunded) public schools in Cleveland. The idea was to give those families money that they could then spend on tuition at a hopefully better private school, thus empowering them with what was called school choice.
Over the decades, the state incrementally expanded voucher programs to a wider and wider range of applicants. And last year, legislators and Gov. Mike DeWine extended the most prominent of those programs, called EdChoice, to all Ohio families.
Now, vouchers subsidize the children of families who never attended public schools, including affluent families. They have become a welfare program for families who previously paid their full tuition. As in every other voucher state, most students who take vouchers were already enrolled in private and religious schools.
Encouraged by Americans for Prosperity, a Koch brothers political advocacy group, the Ohio legislature added the religious school funding bill to the state budget.
Led by Huffman, Republicans slipped at least $4 million in grants to private schools into a larger budget bill. There was little debate, in part because budget bills across the country have become too large to deliberate over every detail and, also, Republicans have supermajorities in both chambers in Ohio.
According to an Ohio Legislative Service Commission report, the grants, some of them over a million dollars, then went out to various Catholic schools around the state. ProPublica contacted administrators at each of these schools to ask what they will be using their new taxpayer money on, but they either didn’t answer or said that they didn’t immediately know. (One of the many differences between public and private schools is that the latter do not have to answer questions from the public about their budgets, even if they’re now publicly funded.)
The total grant amount of roughly $4 million this year may seem small, said William L. Phillis, executive director of the Ohio Coalition for Equity & Adequacy of School Funding. But, he noted, Ohio’s voucher program itself started out very small three decades ago, and today it’s a billion-dollar system.
“They get their foot in the door with a few million dollars in infrastructure funding,” Phillis said. “It sets a precedent, and eventually hundreds of millions will be going to private school construction.”
The total grant amount of roughly $4 million this year may seem small, said William L. Phillis, executive director of the Ohio Coalition for Equity & Adequacy of School Funding. But, he noted, Ohio’s voucher program itself started out very small three decades ago, and today it’s a billion-dollar system.
“They get their foot in the door with a few million dollars in infrastructure funding,” Phillis said. “It sets a precedent, and eventually hundreds of millions will be going to private school construction.”
The only statewide evaluation of Ohio’s EdChoice voucher program was published in 2016. The evaluation was funded by the choice advocacy group, The Thomas B. Fordham Foundation. TBF has a special relationship to Ohio Republicans in the legislature because it originated in Ohio and maintains an office in Ohio. It also authorizes charter schools in Ohio.
The evaluation concluded that students who left to use vouchers in a private school performed worse than their peers who remained in public schools.
So, the Republican supermajority has known for at least eight years that vouchers don’t “save” poor kids; in fact, those kids are likely to fall farther behind. Now that the Republicans have adopted universal choice, they know that they are helping kids who are already enrolled in private and religious schools. So now, it’s a logical step to throw in millions more for construction and renovation of voucher schools.
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.
Scholars at Brown University and Stanford University recently released a study concluding that spending more on schools reduces child mortality.
The paper is titled “Priceless Benefits: Effects of School Spending on Child Mortality.”
The authors are: Emily Rauscher of Brown University; Greer Mellon, Postdoctoral Research Associate, Brown University; Susanna Loeb, Stanford University.
The authors’ summary:
The academic and economic benefits of school spending are well-established, but focusing on these outcomes may underestimate the full social benefits of school spending. Recent increases in U.S. child mortality are driven by injuries and raise questions about what types of social investments could reduce child deaths. We use close school district tax elections and negative binomial regression models to estimate effects of a quasi-random increase in school spending on county child mortality. We find consistent evidence that increased school spending from passing a tax election reduces child mortality.
Districts that narrowly passed a proposed tax increase spent an additional $243 per pupil, mostly on instruction and salaries, and had 4% lower child mortality after spending increased (6-10 years after the election). This increased spending also reduced child deaths of despair (due to drugs, alcohol, or suicide) by 5% and child deaths due to accidents or motor vehicle accidents by 7%. Estimates predicting potential mechanisms suggest that lower child mortality could partly reflect increases in the number of teachers and counselors, higher teacher salaries, and improved student engagement.
Suggested citation: Rauscher, Emily, Greer Mellon, and Susanna Loeb. (2024). Priceless Benefits: Effects of School Spending on Child Mortality. (EdWorkingPaper: 24-1008). Retrieved from Annenberg Institute at Brown University: https://doi.org/10.26300/s7t7-j992
Emily Rauscher Professor of Sociology Brown University Box 1916 Providence, RI 02912 emily_rauscher@brown.edu
Greer Mellon Postdoctoral Research Associate Population Studies and Training Center and Annenberg Institute Brown University greer_mellon@brown.edu
Susanna Loeb Professor of Education Stanford University 482 Galvez Mall Stanford, CA 94305 sloeb@stanford.edu
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