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Steve Nelson: Don’t Trust the Federal Voucher Program

By dianeravitch
June 30, 2026 //
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Steve Nelson was headmaster of a prestigious private school in Manhattan, yet is a strong believer in public schools. Now retired, he holds to the principle that public money belongs to public schools, and only to public schools. If parents make a private choice for their own child, they are obliged to pay for it.

He writes here about the newly passed federal voucher program:

The latest, most manipulative and dangerous assault on American education is largely flying under the radar. Endorsed by such luminaries as former Ed Secretary Arne Duncan and Colorado governor Jared Polis, the soon-to-be rolled out federal school choice plan has gotten little public scrutiny, perhaps because the daily flash bangs tossed by the Trump administration keep folks distracted.


I encourage you to read this NYT article and then consider my post a rebuttal.


The program’s architects have brewed a kettle of artificial sweeteners to persuade policy makers that this is really a win-win-win proposition.
For example, they argue that vouchers for private schools will not reduce funding for public schools because the vouchers will be paid for by donations to non-profits. The donations, up to $1,700 per person, will be 100% deductible. Sound harmless? Well, not really. Every buck funneled into this program is a buck diverted from other programs as a result of reduced tax revenue; which means the rest off us will pay for the vouchers once this sleight of hand completes its circular play.


The other “oh-my-gosh-ain’t-this-swell?” gimmick is that public schools can tap the funds for a few after school services, thereby realizing additional revenue. What is unmentioned is that the voucher scheme will result in students leaving the public system and per capita funding will reduce overall revenue for many schools. As any reasonably informed observer knows, a school cannot reduce expenses in proportion to enrollment losses.


As is already the case in many states, this scam allows affluent folks to access voucher funds to take to the private school of their choice. Stunning, I know, that wealthy families win agaIn.


Beneath the heaps of cleverly contrived bullshit, the purpose of this scheme is unambiguous. Conservatives constantly rage against those damn “government schools,” which they accuse of indoctrinating kids into socialism, atheism, and white self-loathing caused by all those DEI programs. In truth, of course, most “government schools” are having enough trouble managing huge classes, hungry kids, and the enervating expectations of the accountability crowd.


This “choice” program will also allow many parents to choose a school that doesn’t expose their darlings to too many brown and Black children. America’s schools have become steadily re-segregated in recent years. White flight will get a fresh pair of wings with this program.

So, beneath the thin, shiny veneer, this massive con job is designed to kill public education and redistribute money and children to unaccountable charter schools, storefront religious schools, online money-suckers and other varietals that might appeal to the average News Nation viewer. Trump famously said he likes the uneducated, and this Education Freedom program will swell their ranks.

The current conservative movement, led by people who are generally operating behind the scenes, does not care a great deal for democracy. They support an autocrat wannabe and have enabled a steady attack on democratic institutions.


Public education is the institution best equipped to sustain a thriving democracy. It is among the only systematic ways of forging a common culture out of a wonderfully diverse population. Most Americans, including the less rabid MAGA troops, say they bemoan the deep divides in our nation. Then they cheer the possibility of sending their children to a school that deepens the divide by indoctrinating them into a perverse understanding of our history and values.


Amidst the more spectacular offensives of the current era, this issue may seem less urgent, but it is more urgent, not less. Most of the Trump era unraveling of decency and democracy can be re-raveled within a few election cycles. Our public education system is nearing the point of no return. Once gone, it’s too late. I cannot envision any politician or policy maker demanding or persuading parents to leave the school they chose for a “government school.” What’s left of the public system will warehouse children in poor neighborhoods, whose parents have insufficient power, energy or resources to do anything about.


An objective look at American schools today shows that we are not far from that point now.

Categories Education Industry, Privatization, School Choice, Trump, Vouchers

Jan Resseger: Privatization Causes Catastrophic Damage to Public Schools

By dianeravitch
June 24, 2026 //
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Jan Resseger, stalwart champion of public schools, is alarmed by the damage that privatization inflicts on public schools, attended by the vast majority of children. She describes the erosion of public schools as “a national wave of educational injustice that has reached crisis proportions.”

Resseger writes:

On Monday, the Network for Public Education (NPE) released an urgently important report, Public Schooling in America: Measuring Each State’s Commitment to Democratically Governed Schools. The report ranks the states on their protection of the institution of public schools that serve the mass of our children and adolescents and the degree to which school privatization is undermining that promise.

In what I found to be the report’s most shocking statistic, 19 states now provide Education Savings Account (ESA) vouchers and ten of those states give ESA vouchers to “virtually every family regardless of income or need.” An ESA is a virtual debit card that parents whose children do not attend public schools can use to pay for any kind of privatized education or for materials and services the parents claim to be using to homeschool their children. What this really means is that many of these states are basically just giving money away to parents to use as they please without appreciable regulations or oversight.

The Network for Public Education (NPE) confirms “a troubling and consistent pattern.  The states most aggressively redirecting public funds toward private alternatives—charter schools, voucher programs, and education savings accounts—are the same states most neglectful of their public schools, their teachers, and their students.  Our analysis found a strong, statistically negative relationship between the expansion of privatization and public school support…. Privatization and disinvestment, it turns out, go hand in hand.”

What is the scale of the problem? “Thirty-four states and the District of Columbia now fund one or more private school voucher programs, and nineteen states operate Education Savings Account (ESA) programs… The charter school sector presents parallel concerns. Forty-seven states have charter school laws, and in the majority of them, private unelected boards govern schools with no term limits and no formal accountability to the communities they serve… The consequences fall hardest on the children least able to seek alternatives: those in poverty, those with disabilities, those in rural communities, and those whose families lack the time or resources to navigate a fragmented marketplace of educational options. Public schools remain the only institutions in American life constitutionally obligated to welcome every child, regardless of circumstance. They are governed by elected boards, funded by public taxes and accountable to the communities they serve…”

The report examines four related threats.

Privatization     Vouchers are one form of school privatization.  The Network for Public Education reminds readers that vouchers trace back to the combination of racism and libertarian ideology. The first voucher schools supported segregation academies in the years immediately following Brown v. Board of Education, and NPE’s report explains that even today, “Study after study has found that school choice programs generally increase segregation,” with vouchers “enabling outright discrimination with public money.” Thirty-four states have at least one voucher program; in total states operate 73 voucher programs, “including some that allow families to double-dip, applying for funding from multiple programs.” Besides their traditional school voucher programs, some states have education savings accounts (“the most damaging and irresponsible of all voucher programs”). Some states have tuition tax credit ‘scholarship’ programs with tax credits for parents and others who contribute to scholarship granting organizations (SGOs) which are tapped by parents to pay for private schools and other educational expenses.  “(S)ome states also give individual tax credits (TTCs) for educational expenses at private schools or homeschools.” Thirty-one states have now also opted in to the federal tuition tax credit program created in the “One Big Beautiful” Bill.

What about the effects of the vast growth of private school vouchers? Because few states set income limits on the families who can qualify for the vouchers, they primarily benefit children from wealthy families. The vouchers “result in the defunding of public schools,” fail to protect the rights of disabled students, often fail to admit LGBTQ students, fail to provide any proof that students are thriving academically, fail require teachers to be certified, and fail to require background checks for teachers. Many states are spending on each voucher a large percentage of what they spend per-pupil on each public school student, and many vouchers are going to children who were always enrolled in the private school where the voucher will reimburse the families who have been paying tuition.

Publicly funded, privately operated charter schools are the second primary form of school privatization. Kentucky’s supreme court recently found that state’s charter school funding unconstitutional, and Nebraska, South Dakota, and Vermont have never had charters. Forty-seven states and the District of Columbia all have passed laws that enable the operation of charter schools.  Additionally, “a growing sector operates entirely online—and is largely run by for-profit corporations”—often displaying flagrant “financial opportunism” and “fraud.” And, “Like voucher schools, charter schools are subject to fewer regulations and less oversight than neighborhood public schools. As with voucher schools, this has resulted in significant concerns regarding accountability, accessibility, fiscal responsibility, and academic quality… In 39 states, for-profit companies are permitted to manage nonprofit charter schools. One common arrangement—known as a ‘sweeps’ contract—allows a for-profit management company to handle a school’s day-to-day operations while receiving the bulk of its public funding in return… This practice is especially prevalent in six states—Arizona, Florida, Michigan, Nevada, Ohio, and West Virginia….”

Protections for Homeschooled Children     “Homeschooling… is now the fastest-growing education sector,” fed by Education Savings Account vouchers.  However, “even as homeschooling growth has accelerated, laws to protect the homeschooled child have not. Through the relentless pressure exerted by the Homeschool Legal Defense Associations… even the most modest legislation designed to protect homeschooled children from educational or physical neglect and abuse has been opposed with breathtaking ferocity.”  The report details how states fail to require that parents let states know they are homeschooling children; fail to protect students from sexual abuse or violence; and fail to demand some kind of evidence that students are progressing academically.

Conditions that Promote Teaching and Learning     Along with the massive growth of  privatization, “Right-wing political forces have mounted a coordinated campaign against public education—eroding trust in neighborhood schools, creating hostile working conditions for teachers, and withdrawing support from the students who depend on them….  (N)umerous states have enacted laws that make the lives of transgender students significantly more difficult, while not fully protecting… LGBTQ students from bullying and discrimination.  Nearly half of all states still permit corporal punishment in schools.”  Class size has been increased, collective bargaining to ensure adequate teachers’ salaries has been undermined, and other conditions to attract highly qualified teachers have been undermined.

School Funding     NPE declares: “Research has firmly established a positive correlation between per-pupil (public school) spending and student learning.”  “This report tells a clear and troubling story.  Across the country, statehouses are making deliberate choices—choices that defund neighborhood schools, strip teachers of dignity and professional standing, leave vulnerable children without protection, and redirect billions of public dollars to private alternatives that are too often beyond public control… They are the predictable results of an ideological campaign decades in the making, whose architects have been candid about their ultimate goal: the elimination of public education as Americans have known it… States that most aggressively expand vouchers and charter schools are the same states that underfund their public schools, underpay their teachers, and provide the weakest protections for students… States with the most expansive ESA programs have produced the most egregious fraud… States that strip teachers of collective bargaining rights are the same states with the lowest teacher attractiveness ratings…the overlap is not coincidental.  Privatization and disinvestment are two sides of the same coin.”

The report grades each of the states overall for their protection of the public schools.”Seventeen states earned an F for their lack of support of public schools, students and educators while embracing privatization.” A second privatization grade identifies the states where schooling has been most damaged by privatization.  In both categories, Florida earns the lowest “F” grade, while Arizona’s grade is almost as bad.

NPE’s new report traces the impact of today’s national wave of school privation and the overall impact on our nation’s largest institution—a fifty-state system of public education. It cannot trace the convoluted history of any one state’s legislative and sometimes legal battle around school finance. It cannot examine the specific politics in any particular state that have contributed to the spread of today’s wave of privatization—of the role of gerrymandering, of particular regional funders of  state legislators’ political campaigns or the lobbyists who surround the statehouse. And it cannot examine the role of disparities caused by racial and economic injustice any particular state’s school funding.

The fact that such a report cannot possibly explore state-by-state detail, however, does not reduce the report’s significance. The Network for Public Education accomplishes an urgently important goal: identifying a national wave of educational injustice that has reached crisis proportions.  NPE concludes:

“Public schools are not merely institutions that deliver academic instruction. They are the places where children of every background, ability, faith, language, and circumstance are welcomed—not as paying customers, but as members of a community with an equal right to learn. They are governed by publicly elected boards, funded by public taxes, and accountable to the public in ways that no charter management company, no ESA vendor, and no private religious school is required to be… When public schools are weakened—through funding cuts, through the diversion of students and dollars, through the erosion of the teaching profession—the consequences fall hardest on the children least able to seek alternatives…  For those left behind in underfunded, understaffed public schools… (there) is no choice at all.”

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Equity, Funding, Network for Public Education, Privatization, School Choice, Vouchers

“The Grades Are In!” Support Our Public Schools!

By dianeravitch
June 23, 2026 //
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The organization called “In the Public Interest” is a valuable source of information on the creeping (or galloping) privatization of public goods and services. Headed by Donald Cohen, ITPI keeps tabs on takeovers by billionaires and equity services of public services that we all need and squeezing a profit out of them.

ITPI reported on the report created by the Network for Public Education to evaluate state support for public schools.

We’ve long argued that increased funding for alternatives to public education usually comes at the expense of public education. While some politicians have insisted that it’s a “yes, and,” not an “either/or” proposition, we’ve known that, since the 1960s, the long game has been to slowly defund public schools while increasing high-stakes consequences through reliance on standardized testing and sanctions against schools and educators to justify further defunding. As schools are increasingly labeled as “failing,”  privatization in the guise of “school choice” becomes the only alternative. 

Now a new, comprehensive study from our friends at the Network for Public Education (NPE), a nonprofit public education advocacy organization, brings the receipts. 

Public Schooling in America: 2026 Report Card studied all 50 states, plus DC, reviewing nearly forty factors across four categories: Privatization, Protections for Homeschooled Students, School Funding, and Conditions for Teaching and Learning.

The study makes a clear case that the more states invest in private education alternatives, the less they invest in public education.

“The data confirm what we have long suspected: privatization and disinvestment go hand in hand,” says Carol Burris, Executive Director of NPE and the report’s author. “These are not states struggling with limited resources. They have made deliberate choices to abandon their public schools while directing billions in public dollars to private alternatives.”

The full report, a must-read for anyone who cares about education in the United States, is available here, or you can start with the executive summary here.

Donald Cohen
Executive Director

Categories Budget Cuts, Education Industry, Funding, Network for Public Education, Privatization, School Choice, Supporting public schools

Non-Stop Criticism of Public Schools Contributes to Privatization

By dianeravitch
June 16, 2026 //
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The National Center on Education Policy frequently publishes reports, studies, and articles about important issues in education. This one makes a point that I have long believed: the rhetoric of “failing public schools” is intended to advance the privatization of public school funding, specifically, charter schools, voucher schools, and home schooling.

All of these are worse alternatives than public schools, but the media has lapped up the negative message.

The reality is that academic performance (test scores) is highly correlated with socioeconomic status. There are schools that are in need of smaller class sizes, physical upgrades, and intense professional support. But most parents are highly satisfied with their children’s public school and its teachers. Public schools offer more options than charter schools or religious schools. And most public schools are successful.

This study is titled: “The Cycle of Disinvestment in Public Schools: How Public-School Criticism Drives Policy and Disinvestment.” The study was written by Huriya Jabbar and Daniel Espinoza. The link is at the bottom of this post.

They say in the abstract:

Critiques of public education have intensified, and while some reflect real needs for improvement, many are manufactured crises that portray schools as broadly failing. Centered on claims of underachievement, inefficiency, inequality, lack of choice, and indoctrination, these narratives often ignore counterevidence on poverty’s impact, the benefits of increased funding, and the harms of large-scale voucher programs. Though targeted reforms are warranted, sweeping failure claims erode public support and fuel a cycle of disinvestment—reduced funding and enrollment that weaken schools and invite further criticism—advancing privatization and deepening inequality at a moment of heightened political and fiscal threats to public education.

Suggested Citation: Jabbar, H. & Espinoza, D. (2026). The cycle of disinvestment in public schools: How public school criticism drives policy and disinvestment. Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center. Retrieved [date] from 
http://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/disinvestmen

Categories Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Privatization, Propaganda, Separation of church and state, Vouchers

NPE Rates States for Support of Their Public Schools: 17 States Get an F! How Did Your State Rank?

By dianeravitch
June 15, 2026 //
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The Network for Public Education, which I co-founded with science teacher Anthony Cody in 2012-2013, supports the improvement of public schools and opposes privatization of public funding for schooling. Nearly 90% of children in the U.S. are enrolled in public schools. Their schools should be staffed by qualified teachers and fully funded. NPE works with state organizations that share our commitment to the principle: Public funds for public schools.

The following report was produced by NPE Executive Director Carol Burris and staff. Burris retired as a career teacher and award-winning high school principal.

NEW REPORT GIVES 17 STATES FAILING GRADES FOR ABANDONING PUBLIC SCHOOLS

Network for Public Education’s Most Comprehensive Report Card Finds Privatization and Disinvestment Go Hand in Hand

New York, New York

The Network for Public Education (NPE) released Public Schooling in America: Measuring Each State’s Commitment to Public Schools (2026), an expansive state-by-state assessment of support for public education. The report evaluates all 50 states and the District of Columbia across four categories: Privatization, Protections for Homeschooled Students, School Funding, and Conditions for Teaching and Learning. It documents a troubling national pattern: the statehouses most aggressively redirecting public money toward private alternatives are the most neglectful of their public schools, teachers, and students. NPE’s analysis found a strong, statistically significant negative relationship between privatization and policies that support public schools (p < 0.0001).

Only two states — Nebraska and Vermont — earned an A. Seventeen states received an F, failing to meet even 40% of the points allocated across NPE’s 39 standards. Florida ranked last, scoring 14 out of 102 possible points, with Arizona close behind. “The data confirm what we have long suspected: privatization and disinvestment go hand in hand,” said Carol Burris, Executive Director of NPE and the report’s author. “These are not states struggling with limited resources. They have made deliberate choices to abandon their public schools while directing billions in public dollars to private alternatives.”

The report draws on original research in addition to research from other organizations — including the Education Law Center, the Learning Policy Institute, and EdChoice — to deliver a comprehensive assessment of public education and privatization across 39 distinct factors. These include teacher-to-student ratios, teacher satisfaction, school funding levels, and the degree to which laws governing vouchers, charter schools, and homeschools protect both taxpayers and students.

Public Schooling in America also provides a roadmap for reform, showing policymakers and advocates exactly where laws and policies must change to better serve students and rein in the serious, well-documented problems created by privatized alternatives.

“Public schools are the only institutions in American life obligated to welcome every child, regardless of circumstance,” NPE President Diane Ravitch added. “They build community and democracy. They are as American as apple pie.”

The full report is available here. 

About the Network for Public Education

The Network for Public Education is a nonprofit advocacy organization dedicated to protecting, preserving, and strengthening public schools for every child in America.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Democracy, Education Industry, Education Reform, Funding, Privatization, School Choice, Supporting public schools

Peter Greene: A New Definition of “School Choice” in Ohio

By dianeravitch
May 19, 2026 //
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Peter Greene describes the hypocrisy at the center of school choice. Its partisans talk about giving parents the power to choose the school they want. The truth is that the school they want doesn’t have to admit them. Schools choose the students they want. “School choice” literally means schools choose. That may explain why every state that offers universal vouchers is paying the tuition of kids who were already enrolled in private schools.

Greene writes:

Around 200 school districts in Ohio sued the state over its voucher program, a program that funnels a billion dollars (give or take a few million) to private schools (most of them religious). Last summer, the Franklin County Judge Jaiza Page, ruled that EdChoice is mostly unconstituttional. That, of course, triggered an appeal (and some special legislator crankiness) and that appeal seems to have triggered a whole new definition of school choice.

The Institute for Justice, one more education privatization law shop, has been working on the state’s case, and after the Franklin County decision they were pointing at Simmons-Harris v. Goff, an old case that supported a different version of choice. They also mentioned the argument that the parental right to direct a child’s education requires a school choice system. And the state has also been claiming that having two separately operated but equally swell school systems is totally okay. Because “separate but equal” has always been a winning argument in education.

The Ohio 10th District Appellate Court panel of judges heard arguments from the parties (the school district count is now up to 330) and seemed to notice a problem with that whole “parental rights” argument. 

Parents don’t actually get to choose.

Judge David Leland posited hypothetical gay parents of a student living in a rural area with just one private school. The school could reject that student, and then parental choice available would be… what?

As reported by Laura Hancock at Cleveland.com:

“All the parents do is apply to private schools,” Leland said. “The schools are the ones who make the choice. They’re the ones who decide. Unlike a public school … the public schools have to take everybody. That’s the requirement in public education so that everybody in society would have an equal opportunity to get a good education and grow to the extent of their ability.”

That’s when the state floated its new definition of school choice:

Stephen Carney, an appellate lawyer with the Ohio Attorney General’s office, argued that parents nonetheless have a choice in applying. That’s why it’s considered school choice, he said.

Got it? Parents have a choice of where to apply, and that’s school choice. 

First, that’s silly. I have a choice to apply for a mortgage for a multi-million dollar house. That’s not the same as being able to choose that house. 

Second, if that’s what school choice means, then everyone in the state already had school choice before any voucher program was ever started! Every parent in the state always had the ability to apply for their child’s admission to any private school. 

This is not what anyone ever thought school choice promised, though it is an accurate definition of what it delivers. 

It’s one more reminder that the voucher crowd is not actually interested in school choice, because they consistently avoid addressing the actual obstacles to parents who want to choose a private school– tuition cost and discriminatory policies. EdChoice is not about providing actual school choice; it’s just about finding ways to funnel public tax dollars to private mostly-religious schools. 

If the 10th District panel upholds the ruling against, that will simply grease the wheels carrying the case up to the state (mostly-GOP) supreme court. Can’t wait to see what arguments the state uses there, but I’m betting they’ll keep the wheels on those goalposts.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Charter Schools, Disruption, Education Industry, Fake, Ohio, Privatization, School Choice, Vouchers

Senator Kelly Introduces Bill to Roll Back Federal Vouchers

By dianeravitch
April 22, 2026 //
4

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

Greene wrote:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An Activist in Indianapolis Mourns the Death of Public Schools

By dianeravitch
April 21, 2026 //
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Nigel Long is a graduate of Shortridge Public High School in Indianapolis and the parents of students in the Indianapolis Public Schools. He lived through the systematic destruction of his city’s public schools. He opposed the so-called reformers, as he watched them erode and finally eliminate democratic control of the public schools.

Here he expresses his outrage at the theft of democratic control of the city’ schools. His article was posted by the Indiana Coalition for Public Education.

Nigel Long wrote;

Guest Blog – How to Steal a Public School System: The Indianapolis Playbook

I want to talk about what happened in Indianapolis recently, not just for us, but for every city in America.

The Indianapolis Public Education Corporation board was announced. An unelected body now controls school closures, buildings, property taxes, and transportation across the entire boundaries of Indianapolis’ largest and oldest school district. 

David Harris, the man who founded the Mind Trust in 2006, chairs the board. Janet McNeal leads Herron Classical Schools, a network the Mind Trust incubated. Edward Rangel runs Adelante Schools, another Mind Trust launch. Dexter Taylor leads Paramount Brookside, same ecosystem. The IPS board members included were elected with the same dark money that’s been buying school board seats since 2012. And Micheal O’Connor, the consultant the city paid over half a million dollars in public money to design the process that produced this board is now its acting executive director. This board didn’t emerge from the community. It was assembled by the people who funded the takeover.

“This board didn’t emerge from the community. It was assembled by the people who funded the takeover.”

This is the final chess piece in a 20-year game. And I know that because I was there for the first one.

I was a 9th grader at Shortridge High School when the Mind Trust brought John Legend to Indianapolis. I remember being on that field trip, sitting in that room, caught up in the excitement of a global superstar telling us that the future of our schools was bright. I didn’t know then that I was watching the beginning of the end of IPS as we know it. I was a kid. I didn’t know what any of it meant.

I graduated from Shortridge 13 years ago. And I have spent the years since watching that moment slowly reveal itself for what it was.

John Legend wasn’t there for us. He was there to give community cover to the privatization of Indianapolis public schools: a coordinated decades-long effort involving the Mind Trust, Stand for Children, RISE Indy, the Walton Family Foundation (Walmart), Bloomberg Philanthropies, Reed Hastings (Netflix), John Arnold (Enron), and the political allies who carried their water at the statehouse. The money trail is all public record. You don’t raise $134 million and fly in a Grammy winner because you’re running an education experiment. You do it because you need people to stop asking questions.

Since 2006, the Mind Trust has raised over $134 million (their own number, from their own website) working toward this exact moment. They used dark money to purchase school board seats. They ran a legislative process that was designed from the beginning to land exactly where it landed.

The cruelest part of this privatization agenda is that real parents with real concerns were recruited, conditioned, and in some cases compensated to be the public face of something they were never given the full picture on. Their frustration was real. What was done with it was manipulation. They took the pain of Black and brown families navigating a broken system, pointed it in the direction that served them, and called it community engagement. That’s not parent voice. That’s manufactured consent with a marketing budget.

And long before any institution took an official position, there were everyday people in this city, parents, teachers, neighbors, who saw exactly what was happening and said so out loud. They got dismissed. They got ignored. They got outspent. The community has been screaming about this for years. What happened recently is what it looks like when nobody in power listens or cares about the community they are tasked to serve.  

When nearly twice as many people testified against this plan as those who supported it, it didn’t matter. The votes were already lined up. The legislation was already written. The board members were already chosen.

That’s not democracy. That’s the performance of it.

My grandmother had a saying: fat meat is greasy. It means learning a lesson the hard way after ignoring advice that was right in front of you.

A lot of us have been saying this for years. The receipts have been public. The Mind Trust got exactly what they came for. Now all of us — students, parents, educators, communities — have to live in whatever comes next. If this is the first time you’re hearing it, I hope today is the day it becomes impossible to ignore.

I want to be clear about where accountability lives here because this is not a partisan story. State Republicans wrote the legislation and pushed it through. Local Democrats, on the city council and beyond, had every opportunity to protect democratic governance in this city and chose not to. Mayor Hogsett convened the very process that produced these recommendations and appointed the board that will now run our schools. There is no version of this story where the spineless performance of our local elected officials doesn’t deserve to be named directly.

Both parties failed Indianapolis. Full stop.

IPS spent years being held up as a broken system that needed fixing. What actually happened was a live demonstration of how to take a public school system apart and replace democratic accountability with private control without firing a single shot. The enrollment flight that became the justification for this takeover was engineered by the same organizations now running the solution. And everyone in that room when the final vote was cast knew exactly where it was going.

I say this as someone who cares about every child in this city, Black, brown, white, charter school, public school, all of them. Every student in Indianapolis will feel this. Charter families included. This was never about kids versus kids. It was always about who controls the institution.

This was never about kids versus kids. It was always about who controls the institution.

We are living through modern day colonialism dressed up in innovation language. And the proof is in the outcome. Our schools are more segregated today than they have ever been. That’s not an accident. That’s by design.

The IPS that shaped me — that shaped generations of Indianapolis kids — has potentially changed forever. That matters beyond politics because schools are not just buildings and test scores. They are where communities build identity, pass down culture, and figure out who they are. This city has a documented history of coordinated institutional action against Black communities that most people were never taught. Crispus Attucks was built in 1927 to keep Black students out of white schools, segregation dressed up as institution building. Indiana Avenue, once a thriving Black cultural and economic district, was deliberately destroyed between the 1950s and 1970s through highway construction, IUPUI expansion, and eminent domain. Over 12,000 people were displaced. 400 acres of Black history erased. Coordinated by universities, hospitals, city leaders, and state government. Busing in 1981 put the burden of desegregation on Black children while white families simply moved further out. And now this. One day this moment will be remembered alongside all of those — another decision about Black children where the outcome was predetermined before the community ever had a real say. Different decade. Different language. Same intention.

IPS was first. This sets a dangerous precedent for every district in this state. The Indianapolis-Marion County townships, the rural districts, the suburban districts. Any community that powerful people decide isn’t capable of governing itself is vulnerable to exactly what happened here. That’s the part that should terrify everyone regardless of where your kids go to school. This isn’t just about Black and brown communities anymore. It’s about who gets to decide that a community isn’t smart enough or capable enough to make decisions about their own children’s education, and then build the infrastructure to take that power away from them. Indianapolis just showed them how.

The only chance we have going forward is making sure our next mayor isn’t full of shit. And it means holding every elected official, Democrat and Republican, local and state, accountable for what they did and didn’t do when it mattered.

Here’s what I know. The ability to elect the people who make decisions about your children’s education is not a bureaucratic detail. It is democracy’s most basic promise. When you erode that at the school board level and nobody stops it, you have established that it can be done. And if it can be done with education, the institution we trust most with our children and our future, then nothing is off the table.

This feels like a loss because it is one. But public schools have survived worse because the communities behind them refused to quit. That community is still here. It has always been here. No appointed board can change that. The fight doesn’t stop today.

Show up for our school boards. Know who represents us. Demand better from our mayor, our city council, our state legislators.Get involved in our local elections like our kids’ future depends on it, because it does.The people making these decisions are counting on our exhaustion. We can’t give it to them.

Nigel Long is a cultural organizer, event producer, and community builder based in Indianapolis. He is the Founder of SoundOff and serves as Chairperson of BLACK: A Festival of Joy. He is a proud graduate of Shortridge High School and an IPS parent.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Competition, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Ethics, Extremism, Indiana, Indianapolis, Inequity, Privatization

New Hampshire: The Dirty Secret of Vouchers for All

By dianeravitch
April 20, 2026 //
2

Garry Rayno, writer of “The Distant Dome” for inDepthNH, has been covering the legislature for many years. The presence of a large faction of libertarians in the legislature make it difficult to predict what they will do.

In this post, he reviews the likely consequences of passing a voucher bill for which everyone is eligible.

Rayno wrote about what vouchers will accomplish: They will subsidize the well-to-do while diminishing the resources of poor districts.

He wrote:

This week the House will vote on what is perhaps one of the Republicans’ biggest priorities, universal public school open enrollment or Senate Bill 101.

The bill has changed since it left the Senate with a new funding source so one town’s school property tax dollars are no longer sent to another school district following one of its students.

Under the new plan, the district enrolling another district’s student would receive a $9,000 payment from the state’s often tapped Education Trust Fund which was originally established to hold state tax dollars for public education separately to guarantee the state meets its obligation to provide its students an adequate education and to pay for it.

Over the last five years about $130 million dollars has been drawn from the trust fund to largely subsidize the education of children who were not supported by the state dollars because they are in private, or religious schools or homeschooled and their parents were footing the bill.

Despite two superior court rulings the state is not meeting its obligation to pay for an adequate education for its students, lawmakers have not seen fit to increase state aid to public schools which receive about $4,200 per pupil in state aid, along with differentiated aid for poverty, English language learners and special education making the average per pupil aid around $5,000 per student.

If this bill passes, and it probably will, even more money will be drawn from the Education Trust Fund to pay for students moving from one public school to another.

The State Department of Education declined to predict how many students might take advantage of the new open enrollment policy, so just how much of a hit the trust fund will take is not known.

The trust fund is not the only entity that will experience financial loss with the new policy.

The school district losing the student will lose his or her state aid which ranges from $4,200 on the low end to about $8,000 on the high side.

Chances are the districts losing students will be in property poor communities that can ill afford to lose any state aid for their schools without impacting property taxes. Even if they reduce staff if enough students leave, many costs like buildings, electricity, heating and transportation will remain the same.

The district receiving the students will receive the $9,000 per student state aid but its average per pupil cost is likely to be higher than the state average of about $23,000 per student.

That means the receiving district will have to pick up the difference in theory although adding a few students is not likely to change overall costs much.

And the big issue still hanging over the open enrollment bill is who pays for a student’s special education costs who transfers.

The sending district is responsible for those costs, so some — and it may actually be many — school districts will be sending the receiving districts substantial checks to cover special education services which have been growing steadily more expensive with the state and federal governments not living up to their obligations to pay those bills.

That means local property taxpayers in a sending district will continue to pay the majority of the special education costs for their student if he or she transfers out of the district.

Under the bill, parents are responsible for their student’s transportation to the new school although they can make arrangements with the receiving districts to drop their student at a convenient bus stop, but that is not guaranteed.

Looking at the bigger picture, who will be able to participate in the new open enrollment scheme? Probably not a single parent — most likely a mother — who has to work one or two or three jobs to support her children, or poor families with both parents working.

The largest group served by the open enrollment plan will be children of well-to-do parents who have the time and money to drive their children the 10 or 50 or 100 miles to the school of their choice be it for academics, the theater, music, art or athletic program, or even the special education services, to schools in property wealthy school districts.

Once again it is the reverse Robin Hood concept where the property wealthy districts and wealthy families receive the greatest benefit while the property poor districts and their families will see less state aid and dwindling educational resources for their children.

Much like the state’s voucher program, while it was originally touted as a way for low-income parents to access the best educational environment for their children, the greatest benefit is to those families wealthy enough to send their children to private or religious schools or to homeschool their children.

There is a lot of rhetoric about open enrollment providing the best educational experience for children, but that is only true if you can afford to and have the time to transport their children to another school district.

Since the supporters of the voucher program or Education Freedom Accounts, were able to open the program to any eligible parent in New Hampshire last year regardless of income this year, they have proposed several other ways to expand it beyond the legal cap of 10,000 students this year and 12,500 this coming school year by opening it up to military families and allowing EFA students to take classes at their local public schools at no cost.

When the program originally passed, EFA students were not allowed to go back to their former school for a class or two, there was a bold black line.

Now supporters of the program want to blur the line which is fine for the student and his or her parents but not the school districts which lost the state aid associated with those students.

The proposed changes do not help those low-income parents who were used to finally get the program passed by including it in the budget package during the 2021 session, but are now seldom mentioned. The program did not have the votes to pass on its own five years ago.

If the voucher program were truly helping kids who do not do well in the public school environment from low-income families, there would be a lot less opposition.

Those kids are a small minority and do not receive the vast majority of the benefits.

Those who benefit from the new open enrollment program are the same people who benefit from  the voucher program, those wealthy enough to send their children to private and public institutions and homeschool, not those leaving public schools, who are few and far between and a declining percentage.

The greatest beneficiaries of this “school choice” push are not the ones who need government’s help. They can do quite well on their own.

And all of these changes to public education do nothing to reform it or fund it adequately, but do make it more difficult to provide for the educational needs of 90 percent of the state’s children who attend public schools.

And that is the bigger picture too many people fail to see.

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Education Reform, New Hampshire, Privatization, School Choice, Vouchers

Texas: Politicians Fight to Exclude Islamic Schools from New Voucher Program

By dianeravitch
April 15, 2026 //
2

Texas Governor Greg Abbott waged a multimillion dollar campaign to defeat moderate Republicans in the Hogse of Representatives so he could finally get the legislature to pass his voucher bill. He wanted to subsidize private Christian schools and was shocked when Islamic schools wanted their students to get vouchers.

Abbott falsely claimed that public schools were “indoctrinating” students, and he wanted the state to pay for students to go to religious schools, whose explicit purpose is indoctrination.

As usual, the overwhelming majority of voucher applicants had never attended a public school. Most were already enrolled in a religious or private school or were none-schooled.

Justin Miller of The Texas Observer writes:

What would’ve been school-choice proponents’ triumphant publicity tour after the application period closed on Texas’ shiny new voucher program, in mid-March, was instead consumed by catty finger-pointing between two top state officials over who’s to blame for the state seemingly botching its attempt to religiously discriminate against some program participants.

It’s the sort of comedic tragedy that has become all too common in the red empire of Texas: Pass a harmful new policy while prevaricating as to its actual intent, create a pretext to carry out the policy in a clearly discriminatory fashion, invite a costly lawsuit that will ultimately end with the state being forced to comply, muddy the waters over who’s to blame. 

While pushing the private-school voucher bill through the state House and Senate last year, Republican legislative hands repeatedly insisted, when presented with various theoretical scenarios, that this near-universal “Texas Education Freedom Accounts” program would be open to any and all types of private schools—of all creeds and persuasions. Religious freedom was to reign supreme. How dare thee even question the universality of this venerable program, Republican legislators inveighed. 

In predictable fashion, the Texas GOP—lately in the throes of another virulent anti-Muslim bender—hasn’t quite lived up to that promise. In the lead-up to the official voucher rollout, acting Texas Comptroller Kelly Hancock—who is currently in charge of administering the program and was, at the time, trying to win a primary election to hold onto his appointed post—used the administrative process to effectively block certain Islamic schools from participating by alleging such potential applicants were affiliated with the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a national civil rights group akin to the NAACP or LULAC, and the Egypt-based transnational organization the Muslim Brotherhood, each of which the state has deemed a “foreign terrorist organization.” (The rule also sought to block schools affiliated with the darned Chinese Communist Party.) The conflation of CAIR with the Muslim Brotherhood and Palestine’s Hamas is a theory that’s long brewedin the right’s more feverish swamps. (CAIR is suing the State of Texas over this designation.) 

In response, a group of Islamic schools and Muslim families went to court over the discriminatory exclusion from the program: “The exclusion is not based on individualized findings of unlawful conduct by any specific school, but rather on categorical presumptions that Islamic schools are suspect and potentially linked to terrorism by virtue of their religious identity and community associations,” the lawsuit read. A federal judge ordered the state to extend its application deadline to allow for these schools to go through the process. 

The comptroller’s office has since said that it has accepted all eligible Islamic schools that applied to participate in the program—including Houston’s Quran Academy—but not before Hancock sent a letter critiquing Attorney General Ken Paxton’s handling of the court case and urging Paxton to strip Quran Academy, which the state unsubstantially claims has links to the Muslim Brotherhood, of its ability to operate in the state. In the letter, Hancock—fresh off being blown out in his primary bid to be the duly elected comptroller by ex-state Senator Don Huffines—effectively accused Paxton of being soft on terrorism. “Texas cannot be asleep at the wheel as radical Islam spreads,” Hancock wrote. 

Paxton, in the midst of a heated runoff battle with John Cornyn after coming in second in his own primary bid to ascend to the U.S. Senate, took exception to being scolded by the likes of a RINO such as Hancock (i.e., one of the two GOP senators who voted to convict Paxton in his impeachment proceedings in 2023). The still-AG issued a scorched-earth retort, calling the interim comptroller an incompetent never-Trump hack nursing a deep political grudge—and demanding Hancock be fired. (It’s not clear who, if anyone, would have the authority to fire him.) 

Paxton then said his office, whose duties include serving as legal counsel for state agencies, would no longer be defending the comptroller in the federal vouchers lawsuit, claiming Hancock’s letter undermined the state’s case and introduced “incendiary” accusations against Quran Academy that had not been entered into evidence in court. 

“Never before have I witnessed such a fundamentally unserious person be both an unbelievable embarrassment to the State and put his own interests above Texans,” Paxton wrote. “It would be easy to disregard Kelly Hancock’s letter as nothing more than hotheaded, politically-motivated behavior from someone desperately clinging to relevancy, but it’s far worse than that: His actions hurt my office’s ability to defend the Comptroller’s office in these critical cases.”

For vouchers, there have been some other PR snags as well. For instance, one religious school—Cypress Christian in the Houston area—that hosted a pro-voucher event during Governor Greg Abbott’s promotional tour last year, has itself opted not to participate in the program. 

Per the Houston Chronicle, the school’s leader told parents that the institution is “governed exclusively by biblical doctrine and scripture” and that enrolling in the voucher program would inherently result in “ongoing government entanglement.” Many other high-end private schools—where the annual tuition typically far exceeds the standard $10,000 voucher allotment—in the Houston area have also optedagainst participation. 

All the while, Abbott—who claims political ownership of both the school voucher program, having succeeded in ramming it through a humbled Texas House, and Kelly Hancock’s comptrollership, an ally whom he plucked from the state Senate to take over the statewide office and launch of the program—was radio silent. The governor, in late March, spent his allotted time at CPAC in Dallas, while Paxton and Hancock traded potshots, droning on about the urgent need to stop the “Talarico takeover of Texas,” referencing the Democrats’ Senate candidate. 

Meanwhile, how does the voucher program—which was sold as a tool to allow low-income families to get their kids out of the state’s failing woke indoctrination facilities, known as public schools, and into predominantly Christian private schools—appear to be sizing up with its mission? 

It’s certainly succeeded in getting more applications than the $1 billion that the state has initially appropriated can cover, which is about 90,000 spots. Applications had been submitted for about 275,000 students as of late March. But just 25 percent of those—about 60,000—were for students currently enrolled in public schools, according to state comptroller data. (That, per the Texas Center for Voucher Transparency, amounts to about 1 percent of the state’s 5.5 million public school students.)

To be clear, that means the vast majority of the students who are applying for vouchers are already enrolled in private schools, being homeschooled, or entering school for the first time. There were roughly 2,300 schools enrolled in the program so far—though those schools have full discretion in whether or not to accept a voucher recipient. Many of the enrolled schools are parochial Catholic schools or Christian academies. As the Texas Observer has previously reported, dozens of these enrolled schools have policies that restrict admission based on religion and even sexual identity. 

The application period closed on March 31, then the process moved on to the next phase in which the state—through its privately contracted voucher vendor—will determine who receives the limited number of vouchers, based on a convoluted, multistep process accounting for family income and other variables. 

By that point, it seems assured, some new brouhaha will be consuming the program. 

Categories Extremism, Privatization, Religion, Separation of church and state, Texas, Vouchers
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