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Excuse Me While I Keep a Close Watch on Texas

By dianeravitch
October 19, 2026 //
5

Over the next couple of weeks, I will write several pieces about the upcoming election in Texas. More than any other state. I will explain why.

First of all, I was born there, and I’m tired of Texas being a laughing stock. Texans are better than that.

Second, if Texas flips blue, it will be a political earthquake. The state has been owned by oil and gas billionaires for decades. It’s time for a change. It’s time for leaders who care for the people of Texas, not the 1%.

Third, Texas has two great candidates in James Talarico and Gina Hinojosa. Talarico is a religious man, actually a seminarian, who speaks eloquently about our obligations to one another. Gina Hinojosa is running to give the regular people of Texas a voice.

Fourth, Gina understands the sham of Abbott’s “vouchers for all” program. She has pledged to roll back the voucher scheme and invest in the state’s public schools, where almost 90% of the state’s 5.5 million children are enrolled. Under the voucher regime, rural schools are at risk of closing. Gina will fire State Commissioner of Education Mike Morath, who has used his power to take control of entire urban districts, despite the well-documented history of the failure of state takeovers.

Fingers crossed for a new day in Texas, free of the control of billionaires, corrupt politicians, and grifters.

Categories Billionaires, Budget Cuts, Education Reform, Funding, Privatization, Republicans, Rural Schools, School Choice, Separation of church and state, Students, Supporting public schools, Texas, Vouchers

Ohio: Appeals Court Rules Vouchers Unconstitutional!

By dianeravitch
October 16, 2026 //
2

In response to a lawsuit filed by more than 300 public school districts, a state appeals court ruled vouchers unconstitutional. The vote was unanimous.

Article VI, Section 2 of the Ohio State constitution says:

The General Assembly shall make such provisions, by taxation, or otherwise, as, with the income arising from the school trust fund, 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.

The Ohio Capitol State Journal reported:

An Ohio appellate court has ruled that the state’s “EdChoice” private school voucher program is unconstitutional. The program uses public taxpayer dollars to fund private school tuition.

The program will still be able to exist, as the judges expect the state to appeal. An appeal will go to the 6-1 Republican-controlled Ohio Supreme Court. Ohio Republican state lawmakers made Ohio Supreme Court races overtly partisan by adding party labels in 2021.

The state Attorney General will appeal. He responded that parents should send their children to the school of their choice, and the state wants to help them.

The state of Ohio spent more than a billion dollars of taxpayer money on private school vouchers in fiscal year 2025.

A panel of Democratic judges on the 10th District Court of Appeals in Franklin County unanimously sided with the more than 300 public school districts that sued, alleging that the EdChoice private school voucher program was violating the Ohio Constitution by funding a separate school system, one with a lack of oversight that isn’t available to rural students.

“EdChoice, as presently structured and funded, secures with taxpayer funds a competing system of uncommon schools that is not subject to the same obligations imposed on Ohio’s system of common schools,” Judge Dave Leland wrote.

The voucher program is also illegal because it draws taxpayer money away from schools and cherry-picks the students it wants, which harms public schools.

Former Attorney General Dave Yost appealed Judge Jaiza Page’s 2025 ruling that the EdChoice universal school voucher program was unconstitutional. Less than a year later, Yost resigned as Ohio Attorney General to work for the Christian conservative legal group Alliance Defending Freedom, which actively defends and promotes universal school vouchers and public funding access for faith-based and religious schools. Alliance Defending Freedom is one of the most outspoken defenders of vouchers in the nation.

It’s not clear how the highest court of the state will rule, given its domination 6-1 by Republicans.

Categories Education Industry, Ohio, Privatization, Religion, Vouchers

Thomas Ultican: Ohio’s Big Voucher Scam

By dianeravitch
October 16, 2026 //
2

Tom Ultican, retired teacher of physics and advanced mathematics, writes powerful columns about the value of public schools and the misguided efforts of those who vilify public schools.

In this post, he wonders why Ohio adopted an expansive voucher program without bothering to get the consent of the public. He writes, “Even though vouchers are very unpopular, residents in Ohio will never have the opportunity to vote against them. “

He writes:

At NPE Houston, a woman from Ohio gave me the book Right Down the Drain. It is a product of the Department of Education graduate school at Miami University Oxford, Ohio. In 2023, the state created the EdChoice Expansion Voucher Program which takes more than $1 billion a year away from public education with no audits. I have visited Ohio a few times and really liked what I saw but do not believe it is immune to corruption. Having no oversight for a billion dollars of taxpayer money is bizarre. As Education Professor Thomas Poetter wrote, “… the EdChoice Expansion Voucher Program feels to us like throwing Public money right down the drain?” (Right Down the Drain [RDTD] page 13)

President Ulysses S. Grant saw the Common Schools as a tool to enhance democracy. In his 1875 address to the Army of Tennessee, He stated, “Encourage free schools, and resolve that not one dollar of money appropriated for their support, no matter how raised, shall be appropriated to the support of any sectarian school.” He concluded:

“Leave the matter of religion to the family circle, the church, and the private school, supported entirely by private contribution. Keep the Church and State forever separate. With these safeguards I believe that battles which create us ‘The Army of Tennessee,’ will not have been fought in vain.”

 Grant Ignored in Ohio

Curiously, Grant was a Republican born in Ohio. Strikingly, the Ohio GOP of today completely rejects Grant’s admonition. In 1995, Republicans in Ohio’s legislature passed the Cleveland Scholarship and Tutoring Program. A coalition of parents and teachers sued to stop the program because among other reasons it allowed for taxpayer money going to religious institutions. This turned into a protracted legal struggle that saw victories for both sides. Finally, on June 27, 2002, the United States Supreme Court in a 5-4 decision declared that vouchers were constitutional. This opened the door for sectarian institutions to receive taxpayer money.

2023 saw Matt Huffman, one of the most powerful politician in Ohio, push through the billion dollar a year EdChoice Expansion Voucher Program. Huffman comes from the small isolated and shrinking old city of Lima, Ohio. An illustration of his political power is for the first time since the 19th century this politician was able to serve first as president of the Ohio senate and then became speaker of the house with no interruption between positions. The change was forced on him by term limits.

EdChoice’s adoption is an example of authoritarian government in action. Ohio is deeply gerrymandered and even though vouchers are very unpopular, residents will never be given the opportunity to vote against them.

The top 100 schools receiving the most cash for vouchers in Ohio are religious institutions. (RDTD page 51) In fact, 90% of Ohio voucher money is going to religious schools. (RDTD page 75) Even if Ohioans are not Catholic or Hindu, they are sending tax dollars to those institutions. So, the modern Ohio GOP supports sectarian schools and is unconcerned with the separation of church and state.

Maybe we should send taxpayer funds to religious schools but shouldn’t the public have some say in this?

What is the GOP Motive?

In 1955, economist Milton Friedman wrote an essay calling for the creation of a voucher system in America. The political establishment including President Eisenhower, the GOP and Democrats ignored what they perceived as a crackpot. It was Ronald Reagan who gave Friedman credibility in the 1980s which for the first time gave the voucher movement legs. In the early 2000’s, Friedman told the American Legislative Exchange Council that parents should pay for educating of their own children. Today, voucher zealots following Friedman’s lead are working to end taxpayer supported public education. (RDTD page 67) This appears to be the Ohio GOP motive.

Vouchers are a state-designed mechanism for channeling public dollars to private education providers. For the GOP, it is important that this money is provided without state oversight. For example, in June, Democrats put forward the Take the Dough, We Gotta Know Act that calls for state audits and monitoring enrollment, capacity, student demographics, tuition, services offered, and accreditation. This bill is probably already dead because House Speaker Huffman has contended that the fact parents enroll their kids in private schools constitutes accountability, and he is concerned that the bill might infringe on a private business. (RDTD page 77)

A Privatization Outcome

In their essay, Elijah L. Fenwick-Sanders and Anthony W. Rose state:

“When large amounts of public money are permitted to flow through private systems with limited transparency, the risk of corruption increases.”

“Public trust requires more than good intentions. It requires rules, records, audits, transparency and consequences.” (RDTD pages 84 and 85)

If a school does not want public audits, public reporting, nondiscrimination requirements, academic transparency or fiscal oversight it can opt not to accept public funds. That is a reasonable choice.

Support or opposition to vouchers is not a Left-Right situation. Many conservatives support public schools and some liberals support privatization. Emma Errang, who grew up in traditionally conservative Kentucky, bolstered this point in her essay when writing about the 2024 constitutional amendment vote that would have allowed school privatization in her state:

“The coalition against Amendment 2 was not liberal or conservative, nor was it Democrat or Republican. It included progressive voters like me and conservative voters like my father, who believe that choosing private education is a right but not something that should be funded at the expense of public education.” ( page 128)

Conclusion

I side with President Grant when he advised, “Encourage free schools, and resolve that not one dollar of money appropriated for their support, no matter how raised, shall be appropriated to the support of any sectarian school.” I would go a step farther and say that all private schools, not just those from religious institutions, be on their own and receive no taxpayer funding. Of course, the public has the right to support private schools if it desires, but that choice has the potential to undermine public schools and that would be a tragedy.

Reagan’s fraudulent A Nation at Risk report claimed, “We report to the American people that while we can take justifiable pride in what our schools and colleges have historically accomplished and contributed to the United States and the well-being of its people, the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.” SAT scores were cited to defend this statement. Seven years later, the Sandia Laboratories in New Mexico found that using proper statistical techniques all groups disaggregated by race and gender showed improved scores in 1983. This is where the ongoing attack on public schools began in earnest and it was based on a fraud.

In America, public education has been a great bulwark for democracy. It is a shared democratic obligation that must be defended from greedy entrepreneurs and misguided social theorists.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Education Industry, Extremism, Funding, Ohio, Privatization, Religion, Separation of church and state, Vouchers

The Sordid Voucher Scam Cheats Everyone But Billionaires

By dianeravitch
October 15, 2026 //
2

I have written about the devastating consequences of vouchers for years and the fact that they are promoted by billionaires and rejected whenever they are put to a statewide vote. So it is very satisfying that The New York Times, the newspaper of record, published this sharp opinion piece by Jessica Grose, a regular contributor. No both sides here; vouchers are a scam that billionaires love and that most public school parents loathe.

Jessica Grose wrote:

“I’ve been voting Republican my whole life. I’m superconservative,” the Pine Tree superintendent, Steve Clugston, tells the camera in an Instagram reel. “I’m going to tell you what: When Greg Abbott sold us out to the billionaires and sold out our schools, I’m done with his leadership.” In the Texas governor’s race, Clugston is voting for Abbott’s Democratic opponent, State Representative Gina Hinojosa.

The Pine Tree public school district is in the bright red small city of Longview in East Texas, between the big cities of Dallas and Shreveport, La. A majority of its 4,400 students are economically disadvantaged. When I caught up with Clugston on Friday, hours before the Pine Tree football team trounced its opponents under the lights, he was at his farm. “My wife’s a teacher. My daughter’s a teacher. My son-in-law’s a teacher. Both my sisters are teachers. My brother-in-law’s a retired superintendent. So I’d say education’s kind of in our blood,” he told me over the phone.

Clugston told me he’s sick of his fellow Texas conservatives straying from their principles of fiscal common sense and straight talk; he even attempted a run for the Texas State Senate as an independent conservative. He is particularly appalled by Texas’ voucher program, known as Texas Education Freedom Accounts, which went into effect this year. This program puts state money in accounts for Texas families to use outside the public school system: up to nearly $10,500 for children enrolling in private school, up to $30,000 for children with disabilities and up to $2,000 for those who are home-schooled.

The State of Texas has no say over the curriculum taught at the institutions that accept vouchers, and participating schools can discriminate against applicants for any number of reasons, including religion and disability status. Texas’ vouchers are universal, which means anyone can apply for them, regardless of financial means, though poorer students have been prioritized.

Around 70 percent of this year’s voucher recipients already were enrolled in private schools or were home-schooled. Vouchers are costing the state about a billion dollars this year alone and could ultimately cost $4.4 billion annually. While funding for vouchers comes from a budget that is separate from the public school pot, the state’s funding for public schools has not kept up with inflation.

Texas public schools are projected to lose $227 million just this year as they shed head count, according to The Houston Chronicle. More public schools may close as a result of vouchers siphoning that money away from them. In Clugston’s opinion, vouchers are “abillion-dollar giveaway program for the rich, and we’re going to have no accountability in it. Zero.”

Hinojosa has made saving public education central to her campaign for governor, and it is what got her started in politics. Her child’s school was on the brink of closure, and she describes her political trajectory as concerned parent to local school board member to Texas House member. If elected, Hinojosa has vowed to “end the voucher scam.”

I have long been frustrated at the way both parties barely talk about K-12 public education, despite plunging test scores and post-Covid woes. But the reason politicians don’t talk more about education is that votersdon’t care about it. What makes Hinojosa’s message on schools effective beyond irate public school parents and educators is that she ties the passage of vouchers to larger themes plaguing Republicans in the age of President Trump: corruption and the outsize power of billionaires.

Vouchers failed in the Texas Legislature multiple times, with rural Republicans tending to side with Democrats to block the measures. In rural areas “school choice,” even with vouchers, tends to be a mirage. There are few private schools, and public schools are often the biggest local employers and the heart of small-town life; nearly every Texan I spoke to for this newsletter said the reverence for “Friday Night Lights” is real.

When Abbott couldn’t get vouchers passed the honorable way, he decided to primary Republican state legislators who opposed the policy. He took $12 million from Jeff Yass, a pro-voucher Pennsylvania billionaire, got most of his preferred candidates into office and got vouchers passed in 2025, as The Washington Post noted.

The outcomes for students participating in voucher programs in other states have been decidedly mixed, but Yass doesn’t give a rip. “If the mother or the parent wants the kid to go from one school to another, who the hell is anyone to tell them not to?” he told The Post. “I don’t care what the studies say.”

Yass isn’t the only billionaire who meddled in vouchers in the Lone Star State. The religious Texas billionaires Tim Dunn and Farris and Dan Wilks have also poured money into pro-voucher candidates over the years. As The Texas Tribune explains, “Dunn is also the founder of Midland Classical Academy, a private school that offers its approximately 600 K-12 students a ‘classical education from a biblical worldview,’ according to its website.” (It’s worth noting that many of the elite, popular and highly ranked private schools in Texas refused to accept vouchers this year.)

Some voucher proponents claim that Texas offers more choice to underprivileged children in underperforming schools. But the data we have on other states with universal voucher programs, like Arizona, suggest that they are redistributing money to the highest income and most educated ZIP codes in cities and suburbs. An Arizona ABC station found that parents were spending their voucher money on everything from trampoline parks to ski tickets.

In Iowa, which has a universal voucher program for private schools that’s similar to Texas’, the Democratic candidate for governor and the current auditor, Rob Sand, has made a similar connection among vouchers, special interests and corruption. “The current school voucher program is an open invitation to waste, fraud and abuse of taxpayer dollars,” he explains on his campaign website.

Sand lists his voucher stance under the headline Accountability for All, where he also talks about protections for whistle-blowers and banning stock trading by politicians. By doing so, he is saying that you don’t have to care about what’s going on in the classroom to be outraged that a New York-based company called Odyssey, which manages his state’s voucher program, allegedly got a sweetheart deal for the work. As auditor, Sand found that the company “more than doubled its rate less than a month after signing their no-bid contract, costing taxpayers an additional $2.7 million.” (Odyssey, which has ties to Yass, also administers the voucher system in Texas.)

Whatever you think about public schools, it is difficult not to seethe at the fundamental unfairness of voucher programs that give money to schools that don’t have to educate all students. The Texas Observer found that of 291 private schools approved for voucher funds from the state, over 90 percent were religious or faith-based schools, “more than 100 of those schools require or prioritize for admission students of the same faith and more than 60 have a written policy that discriminates against L.G.B.T.Q.+ students, the schools’ own data shows.”

Though the Texas vouchers prioritize students with disabilities, The Observer also noted that most of the private Texas schools they analyzed lack special education services. A Dallas Morning News analysis found that thousands of students with disabilities returned state money, in part because private schools rejected them or didn’t even respond to their applications.

Some educators I spoke to in Texas and Iowa told me that they’d already seen students ricocheting back to public schools because their private or home-school experience wasn’t all it was chalked up to be. Another outrageous part of this legislation is that Texas public schools are still required to do the disability testing for families that choose vouchers, and it’s straining their limited resources.

When put to a public vote, school vouchers have been unpopular; they’re perennial losers on the ballot. It’s maddening that ideologically motivated billionaires, who probably never sent their own children to public schools, have been able to push this policy through.

According to the latest New York Times/Siena University polling, Hinojosa was up by four points, and Sand was up by 11. Texas is obviously the tougher battle, but after spending the week talking to parents there, I’m cautiously optimistic. Rebekah Baus, who described herself as a conservative Christian and lives in the Dallas-Fort Worth area with her husband and two kids, told me she is so upset about the state of public school policy that she doesn’t know which way she is voting.

The State of Texas, Baus said, is trying to pretend “our public school system is failing, but in the reality, we’re failing our public school system by not funding them properly.”

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Billionaires, Budget Cuts, Closing schools, Corruption, Disruption, Education Industry, Funding, Iowa, Privatization, School Choice, Support for public schools, Texas, Vouchers

Students Pay the Price for Failing Voucher Programs Where Education is a Fiction

By dianeravitch
October 13, 2026 //
0

Bruce Baker has written a sterling article about the real price of voucher programs. Who pays? Students.

Universal voucher programs like those of Arizona and Florida provide little, if any, educational benefit to students. They attend schools where teachers need not be certified or experienced. Their curriculum is non-existent. Their standards are phony.

The state pays for them not to get an education. The same may be said of home schooling, where in many cases uneducated parents are sharing their lack of an education with their children.

The result of this negligence is that these young people will earn less money over their lifetimes and have limited opportunities because of their mediocre or non-existent education.

The parents and the state are stigmatizing children by giving them a voucher.

The infamous federal report called “A Nation at Risk” warned about “a rising tide of mediocrity.” Today’s vouchers and home schoolers are responsible for “a rising tide of failure.”

Baker writes:

Back in January 2013, I wrote about three Kansas judges who saw right through the state’s claim that deep funding cuts would cause no harm. The Shawnee County District Court panel in Gannon v. State of Kansas (decision, p. 188) put it this way:

Simply, school opportunities do not repeat themselves and when the opportunity for a formal education passes, then for most, it is most likely gone. We all know that the struggle for an income very often – too often – overcomes the time needed to prepare intellectually for a better one.

If the position advanced here is the State’s full position, it is experimenting with our children which have no recourse from a failure of the experiment.

The Kansas experiment was a legislature cutting school budgets and betting that nobody would be hurt. That was bad enough. But at least in Kansas, the children were still in schools. There were still teachers, curricula, and test results that a court could look at.

A decade later, Arizona and Florida are running a different experiment. They hand public money to parents, place few limits on how it is spent, and ask almost nothing about whether the child learned anything. If that experiment fails for a particular child, who answers for it? Who does the 18-year-old sue?

The new experiment: money out, no questions asked

Arizona’s universal Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) program, expanded to all students in 2022, now serves more than 100,000 children and is expected to cost over $1 billion a year. Florida followed in 2023 with universal eligibility and a homeschool ESA, the Personalized Education Program (PEP), worth roughly $8,000 per child.

Consider what the statutes actually require of the parent. Under A.R.S. § 15-2402, the Arizona parent signs an agreement to use “a portion” of the money to provide instruction in reading, grammar, mathematics, social studies and science. That is the whole of the academic obligation. Then comes the remarkable part, subsection I: a signed agreement “constitutes school attendance” for purposes of the state’s compulsory attendance law. The contract is the education, as far as the state is concerned.

There is no testing requirement for ESA students in Arizona, no curriculum approval, no portfolio, and no evaluator. Even homeschool guides that are friendly to the program say so plainly. The state checks receipts, not learning.

Florida asks slightly more. PEP families must submit a student learning plan and have the child take a nationally norm-referenced test each year, with results sent to the scholarship funding organization (FLDOE PEP FAQ; Step Up PEP Family Handbook). But what triggers loss of funding is failing to take and submit the test, not the score. A child can test at a first-grade level in tenth grade and the money keeps flowing.

That is the experiment. The state funds the choice, defines the choice as compliance, and measures nothing that would tell anyone whether the child is learning.

What the money has bought

Reporters in both states have spent three years documenting what this money buys. Some of it was approved under the rules. Some was flagged as improper only after the fact. All of it was spent from accounts that exist, by law, to educate a child.

Baker here posts a chart that includes tickets to theme parks, video games, pianos, lingerie, jewelry, gift cards, payments to parents, trampolines, kayaks, appliances, paddle boards, LEGO sets, dolls, stuffed animals, surfboards, treadmills, swing sets, and much more. Open the link to see his chart.

In fairness to the programs’ defenders, Arizona’s education department maintains that most purchases are valid and that misspending is a small share of the total. Florida’s administrator, Step Up For Students, requires a statement of educational benefit for theme park tickets and caps them at $500 a year (WFTV). When Florida legislators tried to tighten the list in 2024, families lobbied against it and the restrictions failed.

But “small share” is the wrong frame. Arizona auto-approved purchases under $2,000 — over a million requests and $124 million — to clear a backlog, with plans to audit later. Of 18,000 parents flagged for $10.3 million in banned purchases, only six were referred for prosecution. And every audit is an audit of purchases. None asks the only question that matters to the child: was anyone teaching me to read?

The legal question: who does the 18-year-old sue?

Imagine a young woman turning 18 in Phoenix or Orlando. For a decade, her ESA paid for theme park passes, a television, a trampoline and a lot of LEGO. Nobody ever taught her to read beyond a primer. She has no transcript and no diploma. The state that funded all of it called her “in attendance” the entire time. What are her options?

I’m not a lawyer, and what follows is a policy researcher’s tour of the doctrinal terrain, not legal advice. But the terrain is not encouraging.

1. Sue the parent. Arizona abolished parental immunity in Broadbent v. Broadbent (1995), replacing it with a “reasonable and prudent parent” standard. Florida has never gone that far. So in Arizona, at least, a negligence claim against a parent is not barred at the door. But she would then run into the doctrine of educational malpractice. Since Peter W. v. San Francisco Unified School District (1976), courts have refused to recognize a duty of care for academic outcomes. They cite the lack of a workable standard of care, uncertain causation, and the burden on schools. If courts won’t hold trained, licensed educators to a duty to teach a child to read, a court is unlikely to impose one on a parent the legislature expressly freed from any measurable standard.

A narrower theory may be stronger: misappropriation. The Arizona statute says ESA money may be used “only” for the expenses of the qualified student. A diamond necklace or a family Disneyland trip is not that. A custodial-account or constructive-trust theory, treating the parent as having diverted money held for the child’s benefit, at least fits the facts. But that recovers the misspent dollars, not the lost education. And a judgment against a parent with no assets is worth little.

2. Sue the vendor. The private school, the online program, the tutoring center or the “ESA-approved” camp are private actors. A contract or consumer-fraud claim might reach a vendor that took money and delivered nothing. But a vendor that delivered exactly what was purchased (a ski pass, a paddleboard) did nothing wrong. And educational malpractice bars claims that the instruction itself was inadequate.

3. Sue the state, under the federal Constitution. This is where the Kansas panel’s warning bites hardest. San Antonio v. Rodriguez (1973) held there is no fundamental federal right to education. DeShaney v. Winnebago County(1989) held the Due Process Clause generally imposes no duty on the state to protect a child from harm inflicted by a private actor, including a parent. The one federal appellate ruling to recognize a right to a basic minimum education, Gary B. v. Whitmer (6th Cir. 2020), was vacated when the full court took it up after the case settled. She might argue that the state created the danger by funding the deprivation and deeming it lawful attendance. That theory is untested in this setting.

4. Sue the state, under the state constitution. Both states have education clauses. Florida’s is among the strongest in the country, declaring education a “paramount duty” and requiring a “high quality system of free public schools.” In Bush v. Holmes (2006), the Florida Supreme Court struck down a voucher program for diverting public funds to private schools outside that uniform system. But in Citizens for Strong Schools v. State Board of Education (2019), a divided court held that “high quality” offered no judicially manageable standard. More fundamentally, state adequacy litigation produces prospective, system-wide remedies. It is not a damages action for an individual who already aged out.

5. Ask the state to step in. Ordinarily, a child receiving no education might trigger truancy enforcement or an educational neglect inquiry. In Arizona, that door is closed by statute: the signed ESA agreement constitutes school attendance under § 15-2402(I). When the state does catch misspending, its remedy is to suspend the account or send it to collections. Any money recovered goes back to the state, not to the child whose education it was meant to buy.

So the honest answer to the legal question is: almost none. The 18-year-old is, in the Kansas panel’s words, a subject of an experiment with no recourse from its failure. The difference is that in Kansas, the state was cutting the budget of institutions still obligated to teach her. In Arizona and Florida, the state has written itself out of that obligation and handed the obligation, and the money, to someone the law does not hold to any measurable standard.

Please open the link and finish reading this excellent critique.

Categories Arizona, Education Reform, Florida, Privatization, School Choice, Students, Vouchers

ProPublica: It’s Easy to Open a Private School and Get Voucher Money!

By dianeravitch
October 7, 2026 //
7

A team of reporters from ProPublica learned that almost anyone can get approved to open a new private school, regardless of their experience and background. They found out by doing it themselves.

This story encapsulates the downward slide of American education since the first charter school opened in 1992 in Wisconsin. In pursuit of innovation or deregulation or whatever, many states have gone too far, to the point where anyone can open a school. Anyone can teach. No accountability. In Arkansas, the reporters needed only to fill out a form on the Internet, pay $45, and buy an American flag. That’s all! They had their own school and were eligible to get public money from the state voucher program. After January 1, their “school” would qualify for federal voucher money too!

They wrote:

We have no business running a private school.

We’re reporters, not teachers. That doesn’t matter. Inexperience has hardly been a barrier for those who want to start their own schools, as we have reported this year. And it didn’t stop us, either. 

Over the last few months, to test the process, reporters from ProPublica partnered with local journalists in three states to establish private schools. None required much effort.

In Arkansas, all it took was a few clicks on the Arkansas secretary of state website, $45 and an American flag to form a bona fide private school with the Arkansas Times.

We established a school with Mountain State Spotlight in West Virginia after filing our new school’s name and location with authorities on a piece of notebook paper, then exchanging a few emails.

And with The Assembly in North Carolina, we filed an online notice of intent to open a private school at Ponysaurus Brewing Co. in Durham, while perched on its metal bar stools, eyeing glasses of a crisp kolsch.

We used our names and news organization email addresses, following each state’s rules for starting private or microschools, a type of private school intended for just a few students. Experience running a school wasn’t needed. No one from any of the states asked us about our backgrounds or qualifications, though West Virginia did ask for proof of a high school diploma. No one questioned what we plan to teach or how we would measure whether students are learning.

And yet we could enroll students in two states right now, if we wanted to. Arkansas even suggested ways our school could accept public money through the state’s voucher-style program.

For the record, we are not enrolling students and have no intention of operating our new schools. We did, however, register a website for our new school ventures, ProPublicaAcademy.com, and even designed some fun pencils to show our school spirit.

This year, a team of ProPublica reporters has been documenting how the American education landscape is shifting dramatically as states use public money to help fund private schools. With few regulations, hundreds of new private and microschools have proliferated.

Our reporting has shown the relative ease with which people — some with questionable backgrounds — founded their own schools in unusual places. They’ve popped up in barns and on farms, in strip malls between an antique shop and an ax-throwing business and in churches, where lighting and sound for worship services is part of the curriculum.

All of this led to a clear reporting question: If the hurdles to open a private school are so low, could we do it? And what would we learn along the way?

Smith Richards, Cohen and Strain, in the Arkansas Times newsroom at Strain’s cubicle, apply online to found a private school.

Open their graphic to see which nine states allow anyone to open a school with no curriculum, no standards, no testing, no experience.

Categories Education Industry, Funding, Ignorance, Innovation, North Carolina, Privatization, School Choice, Stupid, Vouchers, West Virginia

Why States Should Avoid the Federal Voucher Program

By dianeravitch
October 5, 2026 //
4

In the Public Interest is an organization devoted to protecting the public interest. We live in an era when the public sector is at risk of being privatized, so that private sector organizations can extract profits. This project is reflected in the privatization of hospitals, vegetarian practices, nursing homes, retirement communities, private homes, and any other opportunity to turn a profit. All too often, the private owners drain their prize of profit, bankrupt them and move on.

This is happening in public schools, where entrepreneurs have persuaded many cereal and state officials that they can run schools better and for lest cost than educators.

The public has NEVER approved a voucher program yet they are being passed by state legislatures, adopted despite parents’ opposition. Now comes a federal voucher program, which mainly subsidizes the tuition of students in private and religious schools. Some public schools kids take a voucher, but whatever comparable data exist, the children lose ground compared to those who attend the public school they abandoned.

For every student who leaves public schools, the school must make cuts. Will it be sports, recess, the arts, or larger class size?

It’s basically a lose-lose situation: the public schools lose students and funding. The voucher achools hire uncertified teachers and are unable to match the certified teachers in the public school.

Here is a commentary on the federal voucher program by Jeff Hagan of In the Public Interest:

New proposed regulations released for public comment regarding the federal tax credit school voucher program have done nothing to alleviate concerns that the federal program—a tax program administered through the Treasury department—will further undermine public education in the United States.

“Not only is the program not in the best interest of the nation’s school children, it’s not in the best interest of the nation itself,” says Shar Habibi, executive director and research director of In the Public Interest, a national research and advocacy organization that explores the role of privatization of public things, including education.

“To our school children we owe the best possible education, and this lets them down,” she says. “Nothing about this program suggests that supporting and improving academic and educational outcomes for children–especially our most vulnerable children–were considered in its development. The fact that it is—as even supporters state—“a tax law…not an educational program” tells you what this legislation was always about: a subsidy for wealthy families who already send their children to private schools.”

In the Public Interest has long been opposed to school vouchers at every level.

“School vouchers have never been in the public interest,” says Leigh Dingerson, senior fellow at In the Public Interest. “They offer taxpayer dollars to private and religious schools, draining resources for our public schools. Where public schools are and have always been ‘the great equalizer,’  vouchers only divide us.”

Habibi points out that the problems with vouchers go beyond the schoolhouse.

“Vouchers put the nation as a whole at risk. A strong, nationwide system of public schooling is essential to a thriving democracy and a robust economy.”  

While President Trump promised to “return education to the states,” this program in fact denies states the ability to choose how to ensure — as every state constitution requires — that all children have access to a quality education, free of charge.

Under this program, multi-million-dollar organizations can collect donations and hand out school vouchers in virtually any state in the country that agrees to participate, with little oversight from state policymakers or voters and with no regard to the state’s history or vision for providing public education to its children.

This federal school voucher program will, over time, lead to the decimation of our nation’s system of public schools. ITPI’s already-stated position that all states decline to participate in the program has not changed with the release of these new regulations.

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Categories Budget Cuts, Citizenship, Democracy, Education Industry, Privatization, School Choice, Vouchers

Network for Public Education Urges States Not to Opt in to Federal Voucher Program!

By dianeravitch
October 5, 2026 //
6

The Network for Public Education is dedicated to the preservation and improvement of public schools. Public schools are a foundation stone of our democracy. Nearly 90% of American students are enrolled in public schools.

We urge concerned citizens to write to their Governor and tell them NOT to participate in the federal voucher program!

Every community needs high-quality public schools but diverting public money to private alternatives weakens public schools.

Public money should be spent in public schools.

The Trump administration does not like public schools. It encourages public funding for religious schools, vouchers, charter schools, for-profit schools, and home schools. Research and experience teach that these alternatives choose their students and they discriminate. And they get worse academic results than public schools.

Voucher schools are free to reject students with disabilities. Unlike public schools, students in special education have no rights.

Do not fall for the machinations of the Trump regime against public schools. Their intentions are not good. They loathe public schools, the schools that educated 90% of all Americans and created the greatest nation in the world.

From NPE executive director Carol Burris:

October 2, 2026

The Network for Public Education Urges Governors Not to Opt-in to the Federal Voucher Program

On October 1, the U.S. Treasury Department released regulations for the federal tax creditvoucher program that was slipped into the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and pushed through reconciliation.

The rules confirm that this program will advantage sending public dollars to private and religious schools, including schools that freely discriminate. Governors must decide whether to opt-in by January 1.

We make our recommendation that states not opt-in based on the following:

Opting in allows federal tax dollars to fund discrimination against children.

When a state opts in, federal tax dollars can flow to private and religious schools and other providers that discriminate against students based on disability, academic challenges, LGBTQ status, or religion. States are expressly forbidden from adding protections of their own.

Opting in pushes cash-strapped public schools toward “pay to play.”

The regulations allow scholarships for public school students to cover services such as tutoring or extra special education services. However, nothing in the regulations stops public schools from turning programs they now fund into paid services that would require families to scramble to cover with scholarships.

A struggling district could convert elementary band, middle school art, or high school SAT prep into programs paid for with these vouchers. Here is the catch: to do that, the district must first charge parents. Some students will get a voucher. Others will not. Children whose parents cannot pay will be shut out.

This moves us one step closer to libertarian Milton Friedman’s vision, in which parents pay to educate their children and public education disappears. Make no mistake. This has been the far right’s goal for decades.

Opting in now creates a blind commitment to a program designed by those who actively undermine public schools.

At this point, the regulations are not final nor has Treasury released its Guidance regarding what expenses will be eligible under the program. That Guidance is expected “by the end of the year,”according to Kevin Salinger at Treasury. Without the Department’s Guidance for what qualifies as an eligible expense, a governor may opt-in, only to find out that virtually any spending that makes its way to public schools or districts has been disallowed. And then they’re stuck, because it’s clear that once in, states cannot back out until the following year.

Opting in fuels the growth of schools without rules.

As privatization has expanded, NPE has documented the fraud, abuse, and chaos that charter and voucher programs have produced. Dangling more tax dollars with few restrictions will draw more bad actors into education, opening low-cost, experimental schools that mislead parents and shortchange children.

States cannot block money from flowing to schools with poor fiscal or academic records. They cannot require public reporting on how funds are used or which students are served. They cannot add safeguards against waste and fraud.

Opting in adds to an unsustainable federal deficit.

Treasury projects that by 2030 the program could cost $26 billion a year in lost federal revenue.

That is more than Title I or IDEA, the largest federal programs supporting public schools.

Opting in will drain donations from charities American families depend on.

Large, respected charities like St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, and smaller ones that fund suicide prevention centers and domestic violence shelters, will now compete with a program that offers a dollar-for-dollar tax credit instead of a deduction. In an affordability crisis, donors will be drawn to giving that returns their entire contribution.

We encourage friends of public education to act today. Write your governor with a simple message: Do not opt our state into the federal voucher program. Then urge your members of Congress to repeal it. Join the millions of Americans who treasure public education and recognize this voucher program for what it is—a stealth attempt to destroy our beloved public schools.

Categories Bigotry, Charter Schools, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Equity, For-Profit, Funding, Home Schooling, Network for Public Education, Privatization, Research, Resistance, School Choice, Separation of church and state, Support for public schools, Virtual Charter Schools, Vouchers

Peter Greene: New Regulations for Federal Voucher Program Tie the Hands of Local Officials

By dianeravitch
October 2, 2026 //
5

Starting on January 1, 2027, the federal government will sponsor its own voucher program. In this post, Peter Greene explains how the new program will work. You can be sure that every dollar spent on charter schools and vouchers will be taken away from public schools.

Peter Greene writes:

Since Congress passed President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill with its federal school voucher, questions have abounded about the exact form that the tax credit program would take. Today the Treasury Department released proposed rules for the voucher program, and some of those questions are being answered

One of the persistent questions has been how much flexibility will states have in how the program is administered. The answer that came today is “Not very much.”

The basic structure of the tax credit voucher program works like this: a taxpayer redirects $1,700 to a scholarship granting organization (SGO) and receives a dollar-for-dollar tax credit. The SGO uses that money (minus an up-to-10% administrative fee) to grant scholarships to students, who may then use the money for educational expenses. 

While the state must require SGOs to meet the state’s requirements for charitable organizations, the state may not put restrictions on how the SGO operates “such as by limiting the type of school that scholarship recipients may attend or the types of qualified elementary or secondary education expenses for which scholarship funds may be used.” 

This restriction on restrictions dovetails with the voucher movement’s push to render legal the use of redirected taxpayer dollars to fund religious schools without setting limits on how those schools can discriminate.

The rules appear to solidify the idea that an SGO cannot be removed by the state for reasons other than failure to comply with the law’s SGO requirements. These requirements simply require an SGHO to serve at least ten eligible students and spend the appropriate amount of money on the vouchers. Nothing in the law requires SGOs to monitor or assess the educational quality of the vendors who receive the money.

The rules issued do indicate that an SGO can choose to limit its scholarships “to specific subject matter” or to students whose household income is less than 80% of the area median gross income, but it appears that those limits would be placed at the SGO’s discretion and not the state’s.

The federal voucher program caps eligibility at 300% of area median gross income, a generous cap that would make the vast majority of American families eligible for the voucher. 

The rules published today show that if a state wanted to, for instance, add restrictions that directed vouchers only to low-income students or students in particular communities, they could not do so. Nor could they impose any restrictions that would keep the voucher dollars from going to religious schools. 

In short, any governors who expected to use these redirected taxpayer dollars in ways that aligned with their own policy goals may need to reconsider. If they opt in, their hands are tied.

There are other details to be dug out and discussed, but one rule guarantees that these discussions may go on forever. While some “stakeholders” recommended restricting state’s ability to opt out after opting in, the rules indicate that a governor will opt in for just one year at a time.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Education Industry, For-Profit, Funding, Privatization, School Choice, Separation of church and state, Trump, U.S. Department of Education, Vouchers

The Five Biggest Charter School Grifts

By dianeravitch
October 2, 2026 //
4

Bruce Baker taught for many years at Rutgers University in New Jersey. He now teaches education policy at the University of Miami. He will have many opportunities to observe and document edu-grifting in Florida.

In this post, he identities the five biggest charter scandals and explains how they worked. Much of what you will read was called “legal graft” by past pundits. In other words, the charter operators collect millions in public funds while providing a dubious education, and they get away scot-free.

In other words, take the money and run. No consequences.

He writes:

Five cases, four mechanisms, one ranking: this post lines up the biggest fraud prosecutions, the biggest company-store combination, and the biggest sweeps contract in the charter sector’s history against the single largest real-estate deal any operator has ever built, and asks which one moved the most money. The answer isn’t the one with an indictment attached.

In The Grift Model I group the ways charter operators route public money into private hands into four repeating types: enrollment inflation (getting paid for students who aren’t really being educated — phantom seats, unverifiable attendance, ghost enrollees); related-party transactions (a school’s own board or executives sitting on both sides of a contract); the company store (a captive vendor a school is required to buy from — curriculum, credentials, back-office services — that happens to be owned by the people running the school); and real estate (buying, or arranging for a related party to buy, the very buildings public dollars already financed, then leasing them back at a markup).

What I hadn’t done before is put the five biggest documented cases — regardless of category — on the same page and rank them by dollar figure. A caveat before I do: these numbers come from different kinds of documents (a criminal restitution order isn’t the same instrument as a municipal bond prospectus), cover different time spans, and in a couple of cases reflect an auditor’s or a prosecutor’s counting choice as much as anyone’s. I’m ranking them anyway, because the comparison itself is the point — and because the single largest number on this list isn’t attached to anyone’s indictment.

Here they are, five to one.

5. White Hat Management, Ohio: about $100 million over a decade

White Hat’s “sweeps” contracts with ten Hope Academy and Life Skills Center campuses in Cleveland and Akron routed roughly 95 percent of each school’s state funding to the management company, which then handled teacher salaries, facilities, and operations with minimal board oversight — company-store logic applied to an entire school’s back office rather than one vendor line. Over a decade that added up to something like $100 million. When several of the nonprofit boards tried to switch management companies, White Hat argued the computers, furniture, and classroom equipment it had bought with that money belonged to White Hat, not the schools — meaning the boards would have to buy back the property their own public funding had already paid for once.

In 2015, a divided Ohio Supreme Court sided with White Hat, 4–3, upholding the buy-back scheme as an enforceable contract term. Justice Paul Pfeifer’s dissent put it about as plainly as a judicial opinion gets: “the contracts require that after the public pays to buy those materials for a public use, the public must then pay the companies if it wants to retain ownership of the materials.” Justice William O’Neill called it, in a dissent The Progressive covered in full, “a fraudulent conversion of public funds into personal profit.” Neither dissent changed the outcome. Nobody broke a law here — a state’s highest court looked at the arithmetic and, on the merits, said it was fine. (Court News Ohio’s case summary has the full procedural history.)

4. ECOT, Ohio: $117 million ordered repaid

Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow was, at its peak, Ohio’s largest online charter school. Ohio funds schools on a formula built around enrollment and documented hours of learning activity — a formula that works fine when “attendance” means a body in a classroom, and considerably less well when it means a login timestamp nobody is verifying. A state audit covering fiscal years 2016 through 2018 found ECOT couldn’t substantiate the participation hours behind a large share of the funding it had claimed. The Ohio Auditor of State’s officeultimately found the school owed $106.6 million to the Ohio Department of Education, plus additional findings against ECOT-affiliated management entities, for a combined total just over $117 million. ECOT shut down in January 2018 rather than pay it back; Ideastream’s coverage of the final audit and the Dayton Daily News both note the state has spent the years since trying to collect. A related judgment against affiliated entities separately reached $161.6 million. It remains the largest attendance-fraud clawback in the sector’s history: virtual schools, virtual kids, real dollars.

3. Chester Community Charter School / CSMI, Pennsylvania: roughly $122 million combined

This is the case I use to show what happens when the company store, related-party real estate, and plain self-dealing all show up in a single school under a single owner. Chester Community Charter, Pennsylvania’s largest brick-and-mortar charter, is managed by CSMI, a company controlled by Vahan Gureghian. A 2009 Philadelphia Inquirer public-records fightestablished that CSMI had been paid roughly $60.6 million in management fees since 1999. In 2010, Gureghian sold the school’s buildings — which he owned personally — to a newly created nonprofit, for the specific and sole purpose of leasing them back to the school, for $50.7 million, financed through municipal bonds and requiring roughly $4 million a year in lease payments; Pennsylvania’s Auditor General found the school had also improperly claimed $1.27 million in state lease reimbursements on buildings the program’s own rules made ineligible, because the “related parties” on both sides of the lease were, functionally, the same person before and after the sale. Then, in 2016, a federal Office of Inspector General audit found that the school’s CEO — Gureghian himself — had written checks to himself totaling $11 million without board approval. Add the pieces up and you get a single owner, across roughly fifteen years, sitting on every side of upward of $122 million in transactions with the school he ran. No criminal charges resulted from any of it.

2. The A3 charter network, California: $400 million generated, about $80 million allegedly diverted

Between 2015 and 2019, Sean McManus and Jason Schrock used a network of 19 online charter schools, partnerships with struggling private schools, and summer athletic programs to enroll thousands of students who, per prosecutors, never took a class. The scheme generated roughly $400 million in California public education funding; investigators alleged about $80 million of it was funneled into companies the two men controlled. Voice of San Diego’s account calls it, by the state’s own description, one of the largest charter-school fraud cases in the country’s history — and yet neither man served a day in prison. McManus, an Australian citizen, was sentenced to four years but served it under house arrest with an ankle monitor in Australia; Schrock’s ankle-monitor time was credited against his sentence. Nine other defendants pleaded to reduced or misdemeanor charges. Both men paid roughly $19 million each in fines and restitution, and the California State Controller’s office says the state has recovered more than $240 million overall — real money back, on a fraud whose architects never spent a night in a cell.

1. National Heritage Academies, Michigan and six other states: $853.6 million

In 2021, National Heritage Academies — the country’s third-largest for-profit charter operator, with more than 90 schools — arranged to sell 69 of its campuses across seven states to Campus Partners 1, a nonprofit newly created for the transaction, with no operating history and, at the time reporters looked, no registration on file with Michigan’s attorney general. NHA’s owner, J.C. Huizenga, controls both the seller’s side (through Charter Development Co., which retained the facility-maintenance and ground-lease contracts) and, through his general counsel installed as the new nonprofit’s president, effectively the buyer’s side as well. The purchase was financed through $853.6 million in tax-exempt municipal bonds, issued by an industrial development authority in La Paz County, Arizona — a jurisdiction with no obvious relationship to any of the seven states where the schools actually sit. The schools then signed 30-year leases back to the very entities that had just “sold” them. Network for Public Education’s account and NCSPE’s coverage at Teachers College, Columbia University both flag the same detail: nothing about this required hiding anything, and no one has been indicted. Local commissions in Michigan raised transparency objections and briefly slowed a few approvals, but the deal closed.

It is, by a wide margin, the largest single dollar figure on this list — more than double the other four cases combined — and it’s the cleanest illustration in the sector of this project’s core argument: the extraction that scales isn’t the kind that needs a prosecutor. It’s the kind a bond market is happy to underwrite.

Open the link to see his comparisons of these five top educators-grifts.

Categories Accountability, California, Charter Schools, Cheating, Corruption, Education Industry, Ethics, For-Profit, Funding, Hoax, Ohio, Privatization, Vouchers
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