Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders wrote an article for The New York Times calling for Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to resign. Since Sanders was chairman of the Senate Committee overseeing HHS, he argues with facts, not just indignation.
He writes:
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services, is endangering the health of the American people now and into the future. He must resign.
Mr. Kennedy and the rest of the Trump administration tell us, over and over, that they want to Make America Healthy Again. That’s a great slogan. I agree with it. The problem is that since coming into office President Trump and Mr. Kennedy have done exactly the opposite.
This week, Mr. Kennedy pushed out the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention after less than one month on the job because she refused to act as a rubber stamp for his dangerous policies. Four leading officials at C.D.C. resigned the same week. One of those officials said Mr. Kennedy’s team asked him to “change studies that have been settled in the past” apparently to fit Mr. Kennedy’s anti-vaccine views. This is not Making America Healthy Again.
Despite the overwhelming opposition of the medical community, Secretary Kennedy has continued his longstanding crusade against vaccines and his advocacy of conspiracy theories that have been rejected repeatedly by scientific experts.
It is absurd to have to say this in 2025, but vaccines are safe and effective. That, of course, is not just my view. Far more important, it is the overwhelming consensus of the medical and scientific communities.
The American Academy of Pediatrics, the country’s largest professional association of pediatricians, representing over 67,000 doctors who treat our children every day, calls immunizations “one of the greatest public health achievements,” which prevents tens of thousands of deaths and millions of cases of disease.
The American Medical Association, the largest professional association of physicians and medical students, representing over 270,000 doctors along with 79 leading medical societies, recently said that vaccines for flu, R.S.V. and Covid-19 are “the best tools to protect the public against these illnesses and their potentially serious complications.”
The World Health Organization, an agency with some of the most prominent medical experts around the globe, recently noted that over the past 50 years, vaccines have saved at least 154 million lives and reduced the infant deaths by 40 percent.
Against the overwhelming body of evidence within medicine and science, what are Secretary Kennedy’s views? He has claimed that autism is caused by vaccines, despite more than a dozen rigorous scientific studies involving hundreds of thousands of children that have found no connection between vaccines and autism.
He has called the Covid-19 vaccines the “deadliest” ever made despite findings cited by the W.H.O. that Covid shots saved over 14 million lives throughout the world in 2021 alone.
He has ridiculously questioned whether the polio vaccine has killed more people than polio itself did even though scientists have found that the vaccine has saved 1.5 million lives and prevented around 20 million people from becoming paralyzed since 1988.
He has absurdly claimed that “there’s no vaccine that is safe and effective.”
Who supports Secretary Kennedy’s views? Not credible scientists and doctors. One of his leading “experts” that he cites to back up his bogus claims on autism and vaccines had his medical license revoked and his study retracted from the medical journal that published it.
Many of his supporters are from Children’s Health Defense — the anti-vaccine group he founded and profited from — and a small circle of loyalists that have spread misinformation and dangerous conspiracy theories on vaccines for years.
The reality is that Secretary Kennedy has profited from and built a career on sowing mistrust in vaccines. Now, as head of H.H.S., he is using his authority to launch a full-blown war on science, on public health and on truth itself.
What will this mean for the health and well-being of the American people?
Short term, it will be harder for Americans to get lifesaving vaccines. Already, the Trump administration has effectively taken away Covid vaccines from many healthy younger adults and kids, unless they fight their way through our broken health care system. This means more doctor’s visits, more bureaucracy and more people paying higher out-of-pocket costs — if they can manage to get a vaccine at all.
Covid is just the beginning. Mr. Kennedy’s next target may be the childhood immunization schedule, the list of recommended vaccines that children receive to protect them from diseases like measles, chickenpox and polio. The danger here is that diseases that have been virtually wiped out because of safe and effective vaccines will resurface and cause enormous harm.
Two years ago, when I was the chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, I held a hearing with the major government officials responsible for protecting us from a new pandemic, including the head of the C.D.C. Without exception, every one of these agency heads said that, while they could not predict the exact date, there will be a future pandemic and we must be much better prepared for it than we are today.
Unfortunately, Secretary Kennedy’s actions are making a worrisome situation even worse by defunding the research that could help us prepare for the next pandemic. This month, he canceled nearly $500 million in research for the kinds of vaccines that helped us stop the Covid pandemic. At the same time, Mr. Kennedy is cutting funding to states to prepare and respond to future outbreaks of infectious diseases. This is unacceptable.
America’s health care system is already dysfunctional and wildly expensive, and yet the Trump administration will be throwing an estimated 15 million people off their health insurance through a cut of over $1 trillion to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act. This cut is also expected to result in the closing of or the decline in services at hundreds of nursing homes, hospitals and community health centers. As a result of cuts to the Affordable Care Act, health insurance costs will soar for millions of Americans. That is not Making America Healthy Again.
Secretary Kennedy is putting Americans’ lives in danger, and he must resign. In his place, President Trump must listen to doctors and scientists and nominate a health secretary and a C.D.C. director who will protect the health and well-being of the American people, not carry out dangerous policies based on conspiracy theories.
The Network for Public Education Action sent out the following alert. Please use the form to send a letter to your members of Congress.
Dear Friend of Public Schools.
They said they wouldn’t cut Title I. They lied.
Majority House leaders just dropped their FY26 education bill, slashing $12.1 billion (15%) in K-12 funding for public education. It guts the very programs that keep our public schools running — while boosting charter start-up/expansion to $500,000,000.
What they’re cutting:
Title I:–27% slashed — funding that provides targeted education services like remedial reading to students with maximum impact in high-poverty schools in cities and rural communities.
English Language Acquisition Grants: Gone.
Title II-A (teacher training & support): Eliminated.
“Despite outsized investment, America’s public schools continue to fail children and families.” That’s what they think of your neighborhood school.
Why this matters
Cuts of this magnitude will crowd classrooms, strip student supports, widen inequities, and push more schools into crisis — especially in rural and high-need communities.
Do these two things now
1) Email your Representative:
Use our action link to send a pre-written message in 15 seconds: Send your email now.
2) Call your Representative:
Find your member’s phone number here. Below is a script you can use right now: “Hello, I’m a constituent from [Representative’s name] district. I’m calling to urge the Representative to oppose the House education funding bill that cuts Title I by 27% and reduces K12 funding by 15%. These cuts will harm students and teachers in our district. Please vote NO and support full funding for public schools — not half-a-billion in funding for charter expansion while our classrooms are being cut. Thank you.”
Now spread the word
Forward this alert to friends, family, and colleagues.
Do not wait. Congress is back today (September 2). Let’s flood their inboxes and phone lines. The House’s education funding bill is a betrayal of America’s children.
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Nine former directors of the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control wrote a joint opinion piece for The New York Times. These are men and women devoted to public health who served in both Republican and Democratic administrations. They agree that what Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is doing to the Department of Health and Human Services is outrageous and dangerous.
They write:
We have each had the honor and privilege of serving as director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, either in a permanent or an acting capacity, dating back to 1977. Collectively, we spent more than 100 years working at the C.D.C., the world’s pre-eminent public health agency. We served under multiple Republican and Democratic administrations — every president from Jimmy Carter to Donald Trump — alongside thousands of dedicated staff members who shared our commitment to saving lives and improving health.
What the health and human services secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has done to the C.D.C. and to our nation’s public health system over the past several months — culminating in his decision to fire Dr. Susan Monarez as C.D.C. director days ago — is unlike anything we had ever seen at the agency and unlike anything our country had ever experienced.
Mr. Kennedy has fired thousands of federal health workers and severely weakened programs designed to protect Americans from cancer, heart attacks, strokes, lead poisoning, injury, violence and more. Amid the largest measles outbreak in the United States in a generation, he’s focused onunproven treatments while downplaying vaccines. He canceled investments in promising medical research that will leave us ill prepared for future health emergencies. He replaced experts on federal health advisory committees with unqualified individuals who share his dangerous and unscientific views. He announced the end of U.S. support for global vaccination programs that protect millions of children and keep Americans safe, citing flawed research and making inaccurate statements. And he championed federal legislation that will cause millions of people with health insurance through Medicaid to lose their coverage. Firing Dr. Monarez — which led to the resignations of top C.D.C. officials — adds considerable fuel to this raging fire.
We are worried about the wide-ranging impact that all these decisions will have on America’s health security. Residents of rural communities and people with disabilities will have even more limited access to health care. Families with low incomes who rely most heavily on community health clinics and support from state and local health departments will have fewer resources available to them. Children risk losing access to lifesaving vaccines because of the cost.
This is unacceptable, and it should alarm every American, regardless of political leanings.
Fifteen years ago, I wrote a book about the the danger that school choice and testing posed to public schools. Its title: The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education. I named a few of the billionaires funding the attacks on public schools, teachers, and unions–Bill Gates, Eli Broad, and the Walton family–calling them “The Billionaire Boys Club.” Little did I know that they were the tip of the billionaire iceberg.
My hope in 2010 was that public school supporters would block the privatization of their schools. Public schools are as American as apple pie. I wanted the public to wake up, rally around their public schools, and repel the hedge fund managers and billionaires who were funding the privatization movement.
I was too optimistic.
The attacks escalated, fueled by the political power that money buys. The major media bought the corporate reform narrative hook, line, and sinker.
Neoliberal corporate reform brought us high-stakes standardized testing, A-F ratings for schools, charter schools, school closings, and rating teachers by the test scores of their students. And cheating scandals. All to get higher test scores, which never happened.
Now, Jennifer Berkshire asks on her blog The Education Wars whether it’s all over for public schools. Jennifer appreciates the importance of public schools as community builders and civic institutions that serve the common good.
I won’t lie. If you’re a member of Team Public Education, as I am, it has been a tough summer. And if you, like me, have been sounding the alarm about the dangers of school privatization, it’s impossible to ignore the sense that the future we’ve been warning about has arrived. Five years ago, education historian Jack Schneider and I wrote a book called A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door: the Dismantling of Public Education and the Future of School that culminated in a sort of “Black Mirror” chapter called “education a la carte.” In it, we described how the ultimate vision of school privatization advocates wasn’t simply to shift the nation’s youngsters into private schools, but to ‘unbundle’ education into a vast array of products for consumers to purchase on Amazon-like exchanges. Lest you think we were exaggerating, turn your attention to Florida, where, as Sue Woltanski documents, project unbundle has arrived with a vengence.
Florida, as usual, is slightly ahead of the curve. But the accelerating collapse of public schools in the state, chronicled in this recent New York Times story, pushed along by the now universal school voucher program, will soon be coming to a state near you. The NYT piece, by the way, was just one of many ‘are public schools over?’ stories to drop in recent weeks. The Washington Postversion headed to peer in the window of the GOP vision for education. Spoiler: it entails replacing public schools with “a marketplace of school options.” Then, of course, there was the annual PDK survey of attitudes towards public education, which found both sinking approval of the nation’s schools (with the usual exception for local schools) and rising warmth towards the idea of private school vouchers. As legal scholar Derek Black put it, “The deep well of faith in public education has a disastrous leak.”
To understand what’s happening, I’m going to pause here to spend some time with yet another of the ‘are public schools through?’ stories, Chandler Fritz’s eye-opening new feature for Harper’s, “The Homemade Scholar.” Fritz, a teacher and writer who pens the “Arizona Room” newsletter, took a job at a private religious microschool in order to get a close up view of Arizona’s education marketplace, what he describes as “a new frontier in American education.” I recommend paying attention to this piece because 1) Fritz is a terrific writer and 2) he provides real insights into the appeal of vouchers, or as they’re billed in AZ, education savings accounts—something my own writing rarely reckons with.
Fritz finds a grab bag of reasons that students and parents are drawn to this particular microschool, most of which will be familiar to you: a hunger for ‘customization,’ the desire for religious instruction, the appeal of a small setting, conservative backlash against public education. But there’s another reason we don’t hear as much about—the opposition to the standardized testing that shapes every aspect of what’s left of our public schools. Fritz’s piece is long (the audio version clocks in at nearly an hour), and infuriating in parts, but his observations regarding the attitudes of these ‘education consumers’ towards standardized tests get straight to the point: they hate them.
Bad math
A similar theme pops up in Dana Goldstein’s recent portrayal of the impact of vouchers on schools in Florida’s Orange County. While three quarters of the schools in the district earned an ‘A’ or a ‘B’ on the state’s school accountability report card, parents are eager to free their kids from the burden of taking the state tests, something Florida education watchdog Billy Townsend has been tartly observing for years. Now, I mention opposition to standardized testing here because, even in our deeply divided times, it is a cause that unites parents across virtually any line of division. If you don’t believe me, head down to Texas, where, in addition to re-gerrymandering the state’s electoral maps, legislators have also been pretending to address the popular revolt against the STAAR Test.
But there’s another reason to revisit the antipathy to testing. While you’ve been distracted by the relentless tide of bad and worse news, what’s left of the education reform movement has been busy reemerging, zombie style, seemingly without having learned a single thing about why it flopped in the first place. There are overt signs of the zombie’s return—like Democrats for Education Reform trying to rally the party around a vision of education ‘abundance,’ or Andrew Cuomo, flailing in the NYC mayoral race, now rebranding himself as the education reform candidate with a pledge to shut down failing schools and replace them with new ‘schools of promise.’ Then there’s the pundit-level narrative taking shape in which education reform was working just great until the teachers unions ruined everything and/or Democrats lost their nerve.
This version of events, encapsulated in this recent David Brooks column, goes like this:
School reform was an attempt to disrupt the caste system, to widen opportunity for the less privileged. Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama angered core Democratic constituencies like teachers unions in order to expand opportunity down the income scale. But now Democrats have basically given up. Joe Biden didn’t devote much energy to education reform. Kamala Harris ran for president without anything like a robust education reform agenda.
Brooks goes on to cite Michael Petrilli on the ‘Southern surge,’ the rise in test scores in Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana and Tennessee (but not Florida) that has education reformers so excited. Kelsey Piper, authoress at the brand new outlet the Argument, is excited too. In her back-and-forth with leftist policy analyst Matt Bruenig over the question of whether giving parents cash benefits poor children, Piper comes down squarely on the side of fixing the schools.
I think school reform after school reform has served every conceivable interest group except students (who do not vote) and so have failed to meaningfully increase literacy and numeracy, even though we now have a road map for how to genuinely let every child thrive.
If you guessed that the ‘road map’ referred to here is Mississippi, you would be correct. Mississippi, by the way, is a national leader in child poverty levels, an honor that the state, which just eliminated its income tax, seems determined to hold on to.
Proxy war
Such ‘if only the band would get back together’ takes somehow miss what a flop much of our recent version of education reform turned out to be. Here’s a partial list. The backlash to Common Core on the right didn’t just help to usher in Donald Trump but played a role in transforming the GOP from the party of big business (which was all in on pushing the Common Core standards) to one dominated by aggrieved populists. And the over selling of college tapped into a well of resentment so deep that the entire system of higher education is now threatened. Then there is the relentless push to narrow the purpose of school down to standardized testing and workforce prep, a bipartisan cause that, as I argue in a forthcoming essay in the Baffler, has now been abandoned by the right in favor of education that prizes ‘virtue’ over vocation, even as many Democrats continue to beat the ‘career readiness’ drum.
I’m not the only one to point this out, by the way. Teacher-turned-writer Nora De La Cour makes a compelling case that the appeal of so-called classical charter schools is due in part to the damage done to public education by neoliberal education reform. Students at these rapidly spreading classical schools encounter the ‘great books.’ Their public school peers get “decontextualized excerpts in corporate-produced test prep materials,” writes De La Cour.
Which brings me to the main point of this piece. (Finally!) Part of what’s so frustrating about our current moment is that by leaning into a deeply unpopular vision for public schools—test them, close them, make them compete—a certain brand of Democrat is essentially incentivizing parents to seek out test-free alternatives. Consider too that we’re in the midst of a fierce intraparty debate over what Democrats need to do to win. For the education reform wing of party, the answer to the question is to go hard at teachers unions and double down on school accountability, while also embracing school vouchers.
While this vision is inherently contradictory, it’s also a loser with voters. There may be no single less appealing sales pitch than ‘we’re going to close your school.’ Just ask former Chicago mayor Rahm Emmanuel, who was so unpopular in the city’s minority neighborhoods after shuttering 50 schools that he couldn’t run for reelection. As voucher programs expand rapidly, we’re about to enter a new era of school closures. If you don’t believe me, just check out this statement from a CATO Institute spox in response to that WaPo story on Arizona:
It’s tough for some families when their school—public or private—closes. Kids miss their friends, teachers worry about their jobs, parents have to adjust their transportation plans. But stories bemoaning public schools losing enrollment due to school choice policies are missing the point. Should parents who want a different option for their children be forced to stay in their assigned school in order to prop it up? Of course not. Public schools had a virtual monopoly on enrollment for decades, but no school can serve the unique needs of all the children who happen to live near it. As we continue down the path of more educational freedom, some schools will rise to the challenge and others will close. We shouldn’t sacrifice children’s futures in an effort to save schools that aren’t meeting their needs.
Close readers will note the moving goal posts—that we’ve moved from school choice as a means of escaping ‘failing schools’ to escaping any kind of school. But the bottom line is that we’re just supposed to accept that ‘education freedom’ means that lots of schools will be closing. Or take the ‘back to the future’ sales pitch for microschools, in which parents “form pods in church basements, barns, and any space they can find. Teachers are launching microschools in their garages.” This vision of what proponents like to call ‘permissionless education’ is one many parents, indeed entire communities, will find difficult to make sense of. It also seems like a gimme for Democrats who are trying to differentiate themselves from the right’s hostility to public schools.
I want to end on a hopeful note, because I’ve depressed us all enough by now, but also because there are some hopeful signs out there. While the education reform zombie may be reemerging, well funded as ever, a growing number of Democrats are showing us what it sounds like to run as an unabashed advocate for public schools. There’s Graham Platner, the challenger to Susan Collins in Maine, who calls out the endless attacks on public schools and teachers as “the tip of the assault on all things public.” Or how about Nathan Sage in Iowa, who puts the defense of public education at the center of his populist platform:
Public schools are the heart of our Democracy, and Republicans are tearing them down brick by brick, while treating our heroic public school teachers like dirt. They are underfunding our public schools and are diverting billions of taxpayer dollars to private schools and into the pockets of billionaires behind them.
To this list I could add Josh Cowen and Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, or Catelin Drey in Iowa, who, if she pulls off a win in today’s special election to fill a state senate seat in a district that Trump carried by 11 points, will end the GOP’s supermajority in that chamber. Drey, by the way, is running as a pro-public-education-candidate and an outspoken opponent of Iowa’s controversial universal school voucher program. Plenty of influential Democrats will insist that that message is a loser. That the way for Democrats to win is to run against public schools—to talk about what failures they are, why we need to get tougher on them, and how maybe we don’t actually need them after all. I think they’re wrong, and that voters agree.
Drey did win in Iowa, decisively, proving that a pro-public education stand is a winning message. Drey won 55% of the vote in a district that Trump carried. Her victory broke the Republican supermajority in the state senate.
This article was written by William Burns, who retired after serving as CIA Director. It was addressed to other career officers who were abruptly fired by Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency.
The article is titled: “A Letter to America’s Discarded Public Servants: You all deserved better.”
Burns likened the mass dismissals to the McCarthy era when China experts were falsely accused of being Communists and ousted, leaving the U.S. without their years of knowledge and experience. He warned of the dangers of suppressing dissent.
For three and a half decades as a career diplomat, I walked across the lobby of the State Department countless times—inspired by the Stars and Stripes and humbled by the names of patriots etched into our memorial wall. It was heartbreaking to see so many of you crossing that same lobby in tears following the reduction in force in July, carrying cardboard boxes with family photos and the everyday remains of proud careers in public service. After years of hard jobs in hard places—defusing crises, tending alliances, opening markets, and helping Americans in distress—you deserved better.
The same is true for so many other public servants who have been fired or pushed out in recent months: the remarkable intelligence officers I was proud to lead as CIA director, the senior military officers I worked with every day, the development specialists I served alongside overseas, and too many others with whom we’ve served at home and abroad.
The work you all did was unknown to many Americans, rarely well understood or well appreciated. And under the guise of reform, you all got caught in the crossfire of a retribution campaign—of a war on public service and expertise.
Those of us who have served in public institutions understand that serious reforms are overdue. Of course we should remove bureaucratic hurdles that prevent agencies like the State Department from operating efficiently. But there is a smart way and a dumb way to tackle reform, a humane way and an intentionally traumatizing way.
If today’s process were truly about sensible reform, career officers—who typically rotate roles every few years—wouldn’t have been fired simply because their positions have fallen out of political favor…
And if this process were truly about sensible reform, you and your families wouldn’t have been treated with gleeful indignity. One of your colleagues, a career diplomat, was given just six hours to clear out his office. “When I was expelled from Russia,” he said, “at least Putin gave me six days to leave.”
No, this is not about reform. It is about retribution. It is about breaking people and breaking institutions by sowing fear and mistrust throughout our government. It is about paralyzing public servants—making them apprehensive about what they say, how it might be interpreted, and who might report on them. It is about deterring anyone from daring to speak truth to power.
Polk County Public Schools expressed relief July 25 after learning that the Trump Administration would release about $20 million in funding that it had withheld for weeks.
The district issued a news release, noting that the previously frozen grants in four categories directly fund staff positions and services supporting migrant students, English-language learners, teacher recruitment and professional development, academic enrichment programs and adult education.
The relief, though, was only partial. When the district eight days earlier took the unusual action of issuing a public statement warning of “significant financial shortfalls,” it cited not only the suspended federal grants but also state policies.
Legislative allocations for vouchers — scholarships to attend private schools or support home schooling — combined with increased funding for charter schools “are diverting another $45.7 million away from Polk County’s traditional public schools,” the district’s news release said.
The statement reflected warnings made for years by advocates for public education that vouchers are eroding the financial stability of school districts.
“The state seemingly underestimated the fiscal impact that vouchers would have,” Polk County Schools Superintendent Fred Heid said in the July 17 news release. “As a result, the budget shortfall has now been passed on to school districts resulting in a loss of $2.5 million for Polk County alone. We now face having to subsidize state priorities using local resources.”
Florida began offering vouchers in the 1990s, initially limiting them to students with disabilities and those in schools deemed as failing. Under former Gov. Jeb Bush, the state expanded the program in 2001 to include students from low-income families.
The number of students receiving vouchers rose as state leaders adjusted the eligibility formula. In 2023, the Legislature adopted a measure introducing universal vouchers, available to students regardless of their financial status.
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All of Polk County’s legislators voted for the measure: Sen. Ben Albritton, R-Wauchula; Sen. Colleen Burton, R-Lakeland; Rep. Melony Bell, R-Fort Meade; Rep. Jennifer Canady, R-Lakeland; Rep. Sam Killebrew, R-Winter Haven; and Rep. Josie Tomkow, R-Polk City.
Allotment for vouchers swells
The vouchers to attend private schools are known as Florida Empowerment Scholarships. The state also provides money to families through the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship and the Personalized Education Program, which financially supports home-schooled students.
The money for vouchers comes directly from Florida’s public school funding formula, the Florida Education Finance Program.
Families of students receiving such scholarships have reportedly used the money to purchase large-screen TVs and tickets to theme parks, spending allowed by Step Up For Students, the nonprofit that administers most scholarships.
The state allotment for vouchers has swelled from $1.6 billion in the 2021-2022 school year to about $4 billion in fiscal year 2024-2025, according to an analysis from the Florida Policy Institute, a nonprofit with a progressive bent.
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In Polk County, 5,023 students claimed vouchers in the 2021-2022 school year, according to the FPI report. Those scholarships amounted to just over $41 million.
The figures rose in 2022-2023 to 6,124 students and nearly $58 million. The following year, the total was 7,854 students and nearly $72 million.
In the 2024-2025 school year, 11,297 students in Polk County received vouchers totaling more than $97 million, FPI reported.
A calculation from the Florida Education Finance Program projects that nearly $143 million of Polk County’s state allotment for education will go to Family Empowerment Scholarships in the 2025-2026 school year, a potential increase of about 47%. The total reflects 16.3% of Polk County’s state funding.
Statewide, the cost of vouchers has risen steadily and is projected to reach nearly $4 billion in the 2025-26 school year.
Florida’s State Education Estimating Conference report from April predicts that public school enrollment will decline by 66,000 students over the next five years, or about 2.5%. Over the same period, voucher use is projected to increase by 240,000.
The state projected that only about 27% of the new Family Empowerment Scholarship recipients would be former public school students.
Subsidizing wealthy families?
Since the state removed financial eligibility rules for the scholarships in 2023, voucher use has soared by 67%, the Orlando Sentinel reported in February. And the majority of scholarships have been claimed by students who were already attending private schools.
By the 2024-25 school year, more than 70% of private school students were receiving state scholarships, the Sentinel reported. The total had been less than a third a decade earlier.
The Sentinel published a list of private schools, with the number of students on state scholarships from the years before and after the law took effect.
Among Polk County schools, Lakeland Christian School saw a jump from 40 to 89, a rise of 122.5%. The increases were 102.7% for All Saints Academy in Winter Haven and 60.3% for St. Paul Lutheran School in Lakeland.
The scholarships available to Polk County students for the 2025-2026 school year are $8,209 for students in kindergarten through third grade; $7,629 for those in grades four through eight; and $7,478 for students in ninth through 12th grades. Those figures come from Step Up for Students.
There have been news reports of private schools boosting their tuition rates in response to the universal voucher program. Lakeland Christian School’s advertised tuition for high school students has risen from $14,175 in 2022-2023 to $17,975 for the current school year, a jump of 26.8%.
Stephanie Yocum, president of the Polk Education Association, decried the trend of more state educational funding going to private schools.
“In the 2023-24 school year, 70% of Florida’s universal vouchers went to students who already were in private schools,” Yocum said. “Seventy percent of those billions and billions and billions of dollars are going to subsidize already wealthy families, and our state continues to push welfare for the wealthy, while they are siphoning off precious dollars from our students that actually attend a public school, which is still the supermajority of children in this state.”
Critics of vouchers point to Arizona, which instituted universal school vouchers in 2022. That program cost the state $738 million in fiscal year 2024, far more than Arizona had budgeted, according to a report from EdTrust, a left-leaning advocacy group.
Arizona is facing a combined $1.4 billion deficit over fiscal years 2024 and 2025, EdTrust reported. The net cost of the voucher program equals half of the 2024 deficit and two-thirds of the projected 2025 deficit, it said.
Meanwhile, there is a move toward a federal school voucher program. The “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” that Congress adopted in early July uses the federal tax code to offer vouchers that students could use for private school tuition or other qualifying education expenses.
The Senate revised the initial House plan, making it not automatic but an opt-in program for each state. The Ledger emailed the Florida Department of Education on Aug. 4 asking whether the state plans to participate. A response had not come by Aug. 6.
The federal program could cost as much as $56 billion, EdTrust reported. Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers’ union, called the program “a moral disgrace,” as NPR reported.
Canady: Let parents choose
Proponents of vouchers say that it is essential to let students and parents choose the form of education they want, either through traditional public schools, charter schools, private schools or homeschooling.
Canady, who is in line to become state House Speaker in 2028, defended the increase in scholarship funding.
“In Florida, we fund students — not systems,” Canady said by text message. “Parents have the freedom they deserve to make the decisions that are best for their own children. There are a lot of great school options — public district, public charter, private, and homeschool.”
She added: “In Florida, decisions about which school a child will attend are not made by the government — parents are in control.”
Canady has taught at Lakeland Christian for nearly 20 years and is director of the school’s RISE Institute, which encompasses research, innovation, STEM learning and entrepreneurship. She began her career teaching at a public school.
None of Polk County’s other legislators responded to requests for comment. They are Rep. Jon Albert, R-Frostproof; Rep. Jennifer Kincart Jonsson, R-Lakeland; and Albritton, Burton and Tomkow.
Canady noted that 475 fewer students were counted in Polk County Public Schools for funding purposes in the 2024-2025 than in the previous year.
“That reflects the choices that families have made,” Canady wrote. “During the same time, the Florida Legislature increased teacher pay by more than $100 million dollars and continues to spend more taxpayer money on education than ever before.”
She added: “Education today looks different than it did decades ago, and districts around the state are all adapting to the new choice model. Funding decisions should always be about what is good for students and honor the choices that families make.”
The 475 net loss of students in Polk’s public schools last year is far below the increase of 3,443 in Polk students receiving state scholarships.
Questions of accountability
Yocum said that public school districts face certain recurring costs that continue to rise, no matter the fluctuations in enrollment resulting from the use of vouchers.
“You’ll still have the same — I call them static costs, even though those are going up — for maintenance, for buildings, for air conditioning, for transportation,” Yocum said. “All of those costs still exist. But when you start to siphon off dollars that public schools should be getting to run a large-scale operation of educating children, then we are doing more and more with less and less.”
Yocum also raised the question of accountability. The Florida Department of Education carefully controls public schools, largely dictating the curricula they teach, overseeing the certification of teachers and measuring schools against a litany of requirements codified in state law.
Public schools must accept all students, including those with disabilities that make educating them more difficult and costly.
By contrast, Yocum said, private schools can choose which students to accept or reject. The schools are free from much of the scrutiny that public schools face from the Department of Education.
The alert that Polk County Public Schools issued on July 17 mentioned another factor in its financial challenges.
“PCPS is facing an immediate $2.5 million state funding shortfall due to what state officials have described as dual-enrollment errors that misallocated funding for nearly 25,000 Florida students,” the statement said.
That seemed to refer to a “cross check” that the Florida Department of Education performs twice a year, said Scott Kent of Step Up for Students. The agency compares a list of students on scholarships with those reported as attending public schools.
If a student appears on both lists, the DOE freezes the funding. Step Up for Students then contacts the students’ families and asks for documentation that they were not enrolled in a district school, Kent said.
“This is a manual process that can be time-consuming, as the state and scholarship funding organizations want to ensure accuracy and maintain the integrity of the scholarship programs,” Kent said by email. “The DOE currently is checking the lists before releasing funds to Step Up to pay eligible students.”
In the 2025 legislative session, the Florida Senate passed a bill that would have clarified which funds are dedicated to Family Empowerment Scholarships, a way of addressing problems in tracking students as they move between public and private schools. But the bill died, as the state House failed to advance it.
Yocum said the House rejected transparency.
“They want it to look like they’re funding public schools at the level that they should be funding it, where, in reality, more and more of our dollars are running through our budgets but being diverted to corporate charter, private schools and home schools that have no accountability to our tax dollars,” she said.
Effect of charter schools
The warning from the Polk County school district mentioned funding for charter schools as part of a “diversion” of $45.7 million traditional public schools.
Charter schools are publicly funded schools that operate independently. Polk County has 36 charter schools covering all grades. Those include two charter systems: Lake Wales Charter Schools with seven schools, and the Schools of McKeel Academy with three.
Some other charter schools are affiliated with national organizations, including for-profit companies.
Yocum lamented the passing of public funds through the school district to charter schools, though specified that she had no criticism of the McKeel or Lake Wales systems.
“We’re talking about the corporate-run charters that are in it to make money,” she said. “We keep seeing billions and billions of our state dollars diverted to those money-making entities that do not make decisions in the best interest of children. They make decisions in the best interest of their bottom line.”
Canady sponsored a bill in 2023 establishing the transfer of hundreds of millions of dollars from traditional public schools to charter schools’ capital budgets by 2028. It passed with the support of all Polk County lawmakers, and Gov. Ron DeSantis signed it into law.
The Florida Legislature passed a bill in the 2025 session (HB 1105), co-sponsored by Kincart Jonsson, that requires public school districts to share local surtax revenues with charter schools, based on enrollment share.
The bill, which DeSantis signed into law, also makes it easier to convert a public school into a charter school, allowing parents to initiate the change without requiring cooperation from teachers. It also authorizes cities or counties to transform public schools with consecutive D or F grades into “job engine” charter schools.
Trump and his compliant allies in Congress took pride in the One Big Ugly Bill that they passed in early July. But it offers reasons for shame, not pride. The Trump bill finances tax cuts for the richest Americans by cutting food for schoolchildren and Medicaid for millions of children.
The Republican budget bill locks in benefits for the rich and hunger for children of the poor.
Imagine laughing, applauding, and feeling proud of this heartless bill! I
President Donald Trump, joined by Republican lawmakers, signs the One, Big Beautiful Bill Act on July 04, 2025 in Washington, DC. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the bill will cut federal spending on SNAP by around $186 billion over the next decade. Samuel Corum—Getty Images
Hunger in America’s public schools is a real problem, and it is heartbreaking. As the head of the largest union of educators in the country, I hear stories almost daily of how kids struggle and how schools and teachers step up to fill the gaps. It’s the school community in Kentucky filling a Blessing Box with foods to help fellow students and families who don’t have enough. It’s the teacher in Rhode Island who started a food “recycling” program to ensure no food goes to waste and to give students access to healthy snacks like cheese sticks, apples, yogurt, and milk.
School meals are more than a budget line item. They are lifelines that help millions of students learn and grow. But as families across America prepare for the new school year, millions of children face the threat of returning to classrooms without access to school meals.
President Donald Trump’s newly-signed tax bill, which Republicans overwhelmingly voted to pass, slashes food assistance benefits via the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) by an estimated $186 billion over the next decade—thelargest cut in American history. These devastating reductions will result in an estimated 18 million children losing access to free school meals.
The cuts shift the cost of school lunches to the states, costing them more than they can afford when they are already grappling with tighter budgets and substantial Republican-led Medicaid cuts.Twenty-three governors warned these cuts will lead to millions of Americans losing vital food assistance.
It’s hard to understand if you’ve never faced hunger, but millions of American children do not have access to enough food each day. In a recent survey of 1,000 teachers nationwide, three out of every four reported that their students are already coming to school hungry.
Our children can’t learn if they are hungry. As a middle-school science teacher for more than 30 years, I have seen the pain that hunger creates. It’s the student who skips breakfast so she can give it to her little brother. It’s the student who misbehaves because his stomach is rumbling. It’s the students who struggle in class after a weekend where they didn’t have a single full meal. Educators see this pain everyday, and that’s why they go above and beyond—buying classroom snacks with their own money—to support their students.
Free school meals represent commonsense and cost-effective public policy. They don’t just prevent hunger, they help kids succeed. Decades of research reviewed by the Food Research & Action Center shows that when students participate in school breakfast programs, behavior, academic performance, and academic achievement go up and tardiness goes down. When I stand in a room of bright and curious children, it breaks my heart that some of them are going without the food they need to learn and thrive—not because America can’t afford to feed them, but because adults in Washington decided they’d rather spend the money on tax breaks for the ultra-wealthy.
The cuts from the Republican tax bill will hit hardest in places where families are already struggling the most, especially in rural and Southern states where school nutrition programs are a lifeline to many. In Texas, 3.4 million kids, nearly two-thirds of students, are eligible for free and reduced lunch. In Mississippi, 439,000 kids, 99.7% of the student population, were eligible for free and reduced lunch during the 2022-2023 school year.
These are not abstract numbers. These are real children who show up to school eager to learn but are instead distracted by hunger and uncertainty about when they will eat again. America’s kids deserve better.
The National School Lunch Act of 1946 laid the foundation that public schools are places where children can receive a free breakfast and lunch each day. This shouldn’t be a partisan issue. For decades, Republican and Democratic administrations alike expanded school lunch programs, operating under the shared understanding that no child should go hungry at school in the richest country in the world.
But the extreme right wing of today’s Republican Party has walked away from that moral consensus—ripping away these programs to give another tax break to billionaires.
The Trump Administration’s authoritarian blueprint outlined in Project 2025 takes the anti-public education attacks even further by attempting to gut the Department of Education and to send tax dollars to private schools, and promoting ideologically-driven book bans and classroom censorship.
And now, as the Trump Administration and its allies work to destroy public education, they also have attempted tointimidate the National Education Association and our 3 million educators. They know we are powerful and vocal advocates for students and a formidable opponent to their attacks on public education. Last month, the relentless efforts of organized educators and our allies got the Trump Administration to release $7 billion in education funds it had tried to withhold.
Together, we will fight forward: for our vision where every student attends a safe, inclusive, supportive, and well-resourced public school, which includes nutritious meals for all students regardless of race or place.
We are educators. We don’t quit. We will continue to engage with school boards, town halls, state legislatures, and Congress to fight for students. Public education does not belong to politicians trying to dismantle it. It is for every student, parent, and educator who understands it has the power to transform lives.”
This is one of Rachel Maddow’s best clips. She says that we worried about what Trump might do if he won re-election. Wonder no more. It is happening. He is a full-fledged authoritarian, intent on smashing the Constitution and our rights. what can we do? She has some ideas.
Laura Meckler of the Washington Post visited Arizona to learn about the effects of an expansive program of charter schools and vouchers. Arizona voted overwhelmingly against vouchers in a state referendum in 2018. Vouchers lost by 65-35%. The rightwing legislature and Governor Douglas Ducey, encouraged by billionaire Charles Koch, ignored the views of the electorate and enacted a large voucher program.
Now the state underwrites the tuition of kids who were already in private schools, many of whom come from affluent families. Voucher schools admit the students they want and exclude those they don’t want.
Arizona’s charter sector includes for-profit charters and charters run by entrepreneurs and grifters. It has experienced numerous scandals.
There’s no accountability for voucher schools and minimal accountability for homeschoolers whose parents spend money on sports equipment, ninja warrior training, toys, LEGO sets, and a wide variety of nonacademic stuff.
Vouchers and charters have not produced academic gains. On the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), Arizona is among the lowest-ranking states.
But the biggest consequence of voucher expansion has been the closing of neighborhood public schools. .
Meckler writes:
PHOENIX — The party at John R. Davis Elementary School was in full swing, but at the snow cone station, the school’s librarian was in tears.
Inthe cafeteria, alumni marveled at old photographs on display and shook their heads. On a wall of the library, visitors posted sticky notes to describe their feelings: “Angry,” read a purple square. “Anxious,” said a pink one. “Annoyed.” “Heart broken.” “Bummed.” And more than any other word: “Sad.”
Ten days later, John R. Davis Elementary School would close — not just for the summer, but for good.
Now, as the new school year begins, the Roosevelt Elementary School District opens with just 13 schools. That’s almost a third fewer than it had last spring, a response to enrollment declines as the state offers unprecedented taxpayer funding for alternatives to public school.
The party gave the community a few hours to celebrate the school’s 43 years — to say goodbye.
“It’s a grieving process for me,” Antionette Nuanez, the librarian, told a pair of Davis graduates who dropped by the party. Everyone at the party, it seemed, was feeling the loss — loss of tradition, of community, of simply having a school in walking distance. Nuanez, in particular, was overcome with the emotion of it all: “It’s like a death,” she said.
Perhaps more than any other state, Arizona has embraced market competition as a central tenet of its K-12 education system, offering parents an extraordinary opportunity to choose and shape their children’s education using tax dollars, and developing a national reputation as the Wild West of schooling.
The state has supported a robustcharter school system, tax money for home schooling and expansive private school vouchers, which are available to all families regardless of income. Nearly 89,000 students receive Empowerment Scholarship Accounts, a form of vouchers, state data show; a second voucher program awarded nearly 62,000 tax-supported private school scholarships in 2024, though some students received more than one. More than 232,000 students attend charter schools.
Together, these programs help explain why just 75 percent of Arizona children attended public schools in 2021, the most recent year for which data is available. That’s one of the lowest rates in the country.
Supporters of school choice say families are turning to alternatives because public schools are not serving their children well. It’s only right, they argue, that tax dollars follow children towhatever educational setting their families choose.
Critics complain that vouchers eat up state funding, benefit families who can afford private school on their own, disrupt communities and send tax dollars to schools that face little accountability. Unlike public schools, private schools don’t have to administer state tests. They can pick and choose their students, while public schools must educate everyone.
The modern school choice movement began in 1990 with a small voucher program in Milwaukee and has grown into a central plank of the Republican education agenda, with programs now operating in more than half the states. In 2022, Arizona created the first universal program — open to all, not just low-income families. Since then, about a dozen conservative states have adopted universal or near-universal programs. And in July, President Donald Trump signed into law the first federal voucher program, which will require states to opt in, at an estimated cost of $26 billion over the next decade.
Some stateprograms have now grown so large that spillover effects on public schools are coming into view. In Ohio, the legislature agreed toincrease voucher spending to $1.3 billion by 2027, up from just over $1 billion in 2025, while traditional public schools, which serve far more children, were given a smaller increase — and less than what public education advocates say had been promised under a multiyear agreement to ramp up school spending. In Florida, which has a $4 billion voucher program, public schools districts are seeing enrollment declines, meaning less money from the state and, in many cases, budget cuts.
The ramifications for public education have been particularly clear in Arizona, offering an early picture of K-12 education under the Republican vision of maximum school choice, or what proponents call education freedom. Here, public schools are starting to close.
The challenge: more competition for the same number of students. For the past 15 years, the state’s school-age population has remained steady, though the overall population has grown, said Rick Brammer, principal manager of Applied Economics, a consulting firm that has analyzed enrollment trends, demographic data and the effects of school choice programs in dozens of Arizona school districts.
“You’re taking the same size pie and cutting it into more pieces,” Brammer said. “As we’ve created and funded alternatives, we’ve just emptied out school after school from the districts. In a tight nutshell, that’s the whole story.”
The New York Times published an article by Dana Goldstein asserting that Democrats are divided about vouchers. Her evidence: Democrats for Education Reform (DFER), the organization created by hedge fund managers to advocate for charter schools, for evaluation of teachers by their students’ test scores, for Teach for America, and for every other failed corporate reform idea, now, unsurprisingly, supports vouchers.
This is no surprise. DFER never represented parents, teachers, or students. They gained notoriety because they raised big dollars on Wall Street to persuade key politicians to join their campaign to undermine public schools. In D.C. and in state capitols, money rules.
Goldstein tells us that the teachers’ unions, the usual suspect, woo Democrats to support public schools, but that’s not entirely true.
Most people don’t want their public schools to be privatized. Most people don’t want public money to subsidize religious schools. The proof is there. Voucher referenda have been on state ballots numerous times since 1967, and the public has voted against them every time.
In the 2024 elections, vouchers were on the ballot in three states, and lost in all three states.
Now that a number of states have voucher programs that are well established, we know three things about them.
Most students who get vouchers are already in private schools. Their parents are already paying private school tuition.
As Josh Cowen demonstrates in his book “The Privateers,” the academic results of children who leave public schools to attend private schools are abysmal.
Vouchers diminish the funding available for public schools, since the state takes on the responsibility of subsidizing tuition for students whose parents currently pay the bills.
DFER still has money but it has no constituency. The Democratic Party is not split. Its leaders know that the vast majority of students attend public schools, and those schools need help, not a diversion of funds to religious schools, private schools, and homeschools.
Diane Ravitch's blog 