An organization called the Ben Gamla Charter School Foundation wants to open a virtual Jewish religious charter school in Oklahoma.
The story is not as straightforward as it appears.
Behind the Florida-based Ben Gamla charter chain is a for-profit management company called Academica, which derives huge annual profits from its connection to more than 200 charter schools across the nation.
There are fewer than 9,000 Jews in the state of Oklahoma, and they are not clamoring for a Jewish charter school.
The state charter board twice rejected the Ben Gamla application, because a previous appeal for a Catholic online charter school was turned down by Oklahoma state courts, then by a 4-4 decision in the U.S. Supreme Court because Justice Amy Coney Barret recused herself due to her friendship with a lawyer for the religious school.
The Ben Gamla Foundation filed a lawsuit on March 24, claiming that the state law banning public funding for religious schools is unconstitutional religious discrimination.
The lawsuit asks a federal judge to strike down Oklahoma’s ban on religious charter schools, and to order the state to stop denying applicants on the basis of their religious character.
“We’re asking the court to end that blatant religious targeting and allow families to choose schools that are best for them,” Peter Deutsch, a former Democratic congressman in Florida and founder of the National Ben Gamla Jewish Charter School Foundation, said in a statement.
The lawsuit alleges that Oklahoma’s requirement that charter schools be “nonsectarian” is unconstitutional, citing the First Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause and the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause.
But Jewish organizations in Oklahoma are wary of the Ben Gamla application. A small group of Jews and a rabbi in Tulsa recently asked to join a lawsuit to block the Ben Gamla charter school.
Rabbi Daniel Kaiman, the principal rabbi of Congregation B’nai Emunah in Tulsa, says he opposes the mixing of religion and government because of the potential for abuse. His own children attend a public elementary school in Tulsa.
“I am passionate about Jewish education—indeed, I have dedicated my life to it. Kaiman wrote in a declaration filed with the court. “Children in my congregation, including my own children, receive excellent, privately funded Jewish education through our synagogue and at home in accordance with our community values. But the mixing of religion and government creates opportunities for religious coercion…”
The motion was filed on behalf of the seven by the ACLU, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, the Education Law Center, the Freedom From Religion Foundation and Oklahoma Appleseed.
The Ben Gamla school would under insert religious teaching into all subjects and require all employees to uphold Jewish values in their lives. What any of that means is unclear. How would math, reading, science, and other subjects be taught from a Jewish perspective. What sort of “values” would employees uphold and who would determine whether they did?
The Ben Gamla application is opposed by state Attorney General Gentner Drummond, who is against religious charter schools. But Drummond leaves office in January and might be replaced by a supporter of religious charter schools.
The state charter school board is pro-charter and is not vigorously opposing the Ben Gamla application. In fact, the state charter board retained First Liberty Institute to represent it. It is a conservative Christian legal group that believes that religious charter schools should be legal.
Oklahoma Jews are opposed to Ben Gamla. The Jewish Federation of Greater Oklahoma City sent a statement to the state Attorney General saying that religious charter schools “risk eroding the constitutional safeguards that protect both religious freedom and government neutrality toward religion.”
Ben Gamla’s financial interdependence on the Academica charter chain should alarm Oklahomans as much as the effort to turn public money over to religious schools.
Academica is a very wealthy for-profit charter management organization.
According to Ben Gamla’s strategic plan, Academica will control its budget and finances, facilities and management, human resources, and much more. And, of course, charge a management fee.
Academica manages more than 200 charter schools in at least 22 states. Its biggest chains are Somerset Academy (at least 80 campuses), Mater Academy (40-50 schools), Doral Academy, and Pinecrest Academy.
Academica held more than $115 million in properties in Florida in 2010 and collected $19 million in profit. That’s 16 years ago, the network has vastly expanded, and no one has updated the total value of Academica’s real estate since then or its annual profits.
Academica makes its hefty profits through management fees and “related party transactions.”
This is how a “related party transaction” works:
A real estate LLC controlled by Academica allies buys or builds a school property. The nonprofit charter school, like Ben Gamla or Mater or Somerset, leases the building. The school collects public funds from the state or the city, then pays rent to the LLC. The rent is high, often as much as 20% of all public funding. The management company chooses the services provided, making contracts with its allies.
Academica: The largest EMO is Academica, based in Miami, Florida. Academica’s owner is a real estate developer, Fernando Zulueta, who opened the first charter, Somerset, as part of a housing development he had constructed. He reasoned that his real estate venture would be more attractive to buyers since students would have a school within the development. Using their real estate companies, Fernando and his brother, Ignacio, built what journalist Jessica Bakeman called “an empire of charter schools.”
Over 100 active corporations linked to Fernando Zulueta and his family members are listed as residing at Academica’s Miami headquarters at 6340 Sunset Drive and 6457 Sunset Drive in Miami.39 They include real estate corporations, holding companies, and finance corporations, as well as sub-chains both within and outside of Florida.
Like many other charter schools and chains, Academica cashed in on the COVID Paycheck Protection Program during the pandemic. Individual schools and other nonprofit and for-profit entities related to the chain received in total up to $35.7 million dollars, even though there is no evidence of revenue lost during the pandemic. In fact, during the pandemic, the EMO continued to expand. In total, charter schools cashed in on one billion dollars from the PPP program.
Mater Academy Foundation, Inc., the related non-profit corporation that oversees Academica’s Mater brand of charter schools, acquired a $127.5 million educational facilities lease revenue bond to purchase several facilities from Academica. The South Florida Business Journal detailed the purchase price of several of the facilities and the Academica-affiliated real estate entities that cashed in on the sales, concluding that “the Pandemic Profiteering deal allows Academica to cash out after investing in the development of charter schools, although it will still earn management fees for the schools.”
The connection between Fernando Zuleta’s real estate holdings and his for-profit managed charter schools goes beyond the state of Florida. According to the State Public Charter School Authority, Academica Nevada pays the lease on behalf of the charter school Mater Academy Mountain Vista of Nevada to Stephanie Development LLC. The managingmembers of Stephanie Development are Fernando and Ignacio Zulueta and Robert and Clayton Howell. Robert Howell is the manager of Academica Nevada.
About 18% of all charter students are enrolled in for-profit charter schools, like those of Academica. If Ben Gamla is approved in Oklahoma, that will open new horizons for their expansion.
Be sure to read NPE’s report:
For-Profit Charter Schools Gone Wild—Proof That Greed and Education Don’t Mix
Peter Greene retired after 39 years of teaching, and now is the best-informed and most prolific writer about misguided and sometimes malicious efforts to “reform” public schools.
Peter has his own blog–Curmudgucation–and also writes a column about reform frauds for FORBES.
In this post, he tells the remarkable and unsavory story of vouchers in Nebraska. Nebraska is a solid red state, but its voters don’t want vouchers. Rural legislators–even Republicans–know it’s a waste of money and are sure to defund their public schools.
But the voucher-pushers keep looking for clever ways to bypass the voters, who have made it clear that they don’t want vouchers.
Peter Greene writes:
Nebraska’s voucher fans are bound and determined, like legislators in many states, to get around the voters so they can get vouchers installed.
In May of 2023, Nebraska’s Governor Jim Pillen signed into law LB 753, creating tax credit vouchers for subsidizing private schools.
The concept has been floated in Nebraska before, notably turning up more than once in 2022’s session. In 2023, it finally progressed through the legislature. But NSEA political action director Brian Nikkelson told the Nebraska Examiner that the public did not support the vouchers, and if the bill was passed, there would be a petition drive to force the bill to go on the ballot for voters to decide.
And so there was. It was a heck of a battle, with the pro-voucher forces have attracting a mountain of money, some of it from outside the state. Paul Hammel at the Nebraska Examiner reported that big money contributors include C.L. Werner, an Omaha-based trucking company executive ($100,000), Tom Peed and his son Shawn of a Lincoln publishing company ($75,000 each), and former Nebraska governor U.S. Senator Pete Ricketts ($25,000). Governor Pillen himself has contributed $100,000 to the campaign to save vouchers from a vote.
At the same time, Hammel reported, the American Federation for Children, the school choice advocacy group founded by Betsy DeVos, has contributed $103,000 in in-kind services and $583,000 in cash to the campaign.
It didn’t matter. Support Our Schools needed 60,000 signatures to force a referendum. They ended up with about twice that number (that’s roughly 10% of all eligible voters in the state). So this November, the voters of Nebraska were supposed to have their say. So you’d expect that voucher fans, who keep telling us how much everyone loves vouchers, would just sit back, secure in the knowledge that their program would win the referendum handily.
Well, no.
Instead, legislators cooked up LB 1402. This bill proposed to repeal the Opportunity Scholarships that were created under LB 753, and then to replace them with a new version of Opportunity Scholarships. This version would have been an education savings account (ESA) style super-voucher that hands over taxpayer money to send a student to a private or parochial school. It was more sketchy than last year’s bill because it appropriates state funds (rather than tax-credited contributions) to pay for the vouchers.
But mostly what it did it render the petition drive moot, because it repealed the version of vouchers that the public was going to vote on. “Ha,” they apparently thought. “That’ll stop those damned voters.”
In 67 days, the coalition of opponents gathered the necessary signatures—again. That repeal passed in November 2024, with 45 out of 49 legislative districts voting to repeal, and Nebraska’s voucher law was toast. The voters had sent a clear and unequivocal message.
Surely the state’s leaders would say, “Well, the voters have spoken, so that’s that.”
Fat chance.
Voucherphiles were back with a new proposal in January 2025. “I’m not dissuaded by the fact that it was defeated at the ballot box,” said freshman State Sen. Tony Sorrentino of Omaha.
Pillen’s new idea is to sell vouchers for the “gap” year, the year between the time when Nebraska’s vouchers are required to end and the time when the federal vouchers are supposed to kick in. The proposal is being sent through the state’s Labor Department rather than the Department of Education because that would skirt the requirement for any sort of hearing or debate, probably because voucherphiles have a pretty good idea of how that would go.
Nebraska is one of those states where rural Republicans have opposed all attempts at vouchers, and they aren’t sounding any friendlier about this one. Zach Wendling at Nebraska Examiner talked to State Sen. Tom Brandt of Plymouth, a Republican who opposed Linehan’s previous proposals; he said he is opposed to using any public money for private school choice. He’s still waiting to see how the federal tax credit program includes public schools (because, remember, there are no actual rules yet attached to the federal voucher program).
“The referendum simply eliminated that. Period, end of story,” he continued on the state policy. “There’s no other interpretation you can draw from that.”
The gap funding would cost about $5 million for around 2,500 students. Of course, with no rules in place, it’s possible that not all of Nebraska’s current voucher students would qualify for federal vouchers. Nor can we predict what slice of the federal money pie Nebraska would be entitled to. If it comes to that, we could expect voucherphiles to argue that more gap funding is needed to cover new gaps, or maybe to expand above and beyond the federal offerings.
Nebraska voucher fans are making a lot of “think of the children” noises, but families have plenty of time to look for new arrangements (i.e. finding the student a new school or going back to paying the full tuition with their own money).
This is the same story we’ve seen over and over again. Vouchers never win when voters have a chance to be heard. Every single taxpayer-funded voucher program in this country has been created without giving the taxpayers a say or ignoring the say they had already said. Taxpayer-funded vouchers are all the result of legislators backed by deep-pocketed voucher fans deciding they are going to inflict these on the taxpayers. Nebraska’s taxpayers just happen to have a few more tools to fight back with, but Nebraska’s voucherphiles just keep looking for a way to avoid that whole pesky democracy thing.
The Century Foundation published an analysis of Trump’s federal voucher program, which explains why it is a hoax and a fraud. The authors are Kayla Patrick and Loredana Valtierra.
The promise it makes is that families and students will choose schools that are just right for them, but the reality is that schools choose the students they want.
The promise is that school choice will benefit black and brown children, as well as children with disabilities, but children abandon all civil rights protections when they enroll in private schools.
The promise is that schools of choice will produce better academic outcomes but typically they produce worse outcomes (see Josh Cowen, The Privateers).
The promise is that school choice represents accountability but it usually means no accountability at all, because nonpublic schools don’t take national or state tests.
Kayla Patrick and Loredana Valtierra write:
Modern school voucher programs are often framed as a response to declining academic achievement and a way to expand “parent choice” by enabling private educators to operate within the public system. But in practice, vouchers operate quite differently than advertised. It’s the private schools, not families, who ultimately decide who enrolls, and they do so outside the accountability systems that govern public education and public dollars and ensure every student has equal opportunity to learn.
The Federal Tax Credit Scholarship Program (FTCS), passed as part of the Republican Party’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” (OBBBA), scales this model for camouflaged privatization to the national level. Though branded as a tax incentive, it functions as a nationwide voucher system that diverts public dollars to private schools while allowing those schools to play by different rules than public providers—evading civil rights protections, academic oversight, and any requirement to provide meaningful evidence to the public of their students’ outcomes.
A National Voucher Program Disguised as a Tax Credit
The FTCS nationalizes a model that at least twenty states and counting –including Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, and Pennsylvania – have already adopted, one which functions by siphoning public dollars through scholarship granting organizations (SGOs). Under this law, individual taxpayers can donate up to $1,700 annually to SGOs in exchange for a 100 percent federal tax credit, effectively turning private donations into reimbursed public expenditures.
SGOs then will distribute “scholarships” to K–12 students to use toward private school tuition, books, curriculum materials, tutoring or other educational classes, and educational therapies provided by licensed providers. While the program is optional for states, at least twenty-seven have already signaled their intent to participate.
[To see which states have expressed their intent to participate, open the link.]
Despite its branding, this design drains public revenue that would otherwise support public schools—which still educate roughly 90 percent of American students—and redirects it to private, religious, and largely unregulated providers.
The program model also ignores what parents time and again have told us they want for their children. When given a direct choice at the ballot box, voters have repeatedly rejected school vouchers and related private-school subsidy measures. In the 2024 election, proposals to authorize or expand voucher-style programs in Colorado, Kentucky, and Nebraska were defeated, and historical ballot measure data show that voters have rejected every statewide private voucher or education tax credit initiative placed before them since 1970. This opposition is reflected in polling that shows nearly 70 percent of voters say they would rather increase federal funding for public schools than expand government-funded vouchers, including majorities across party lines.
[Open the link to see which states have held referenda on vouchers.]
Broad Eligibility, Few Quality Controls, and Limited Public Benefit
Even measured against its stated goal of affordability, the FTCS program misses the mark. But if the goal is to make education more affordable for families under real financial strain, this program is also ineffective. Private K–12 tuition averages nearly $13,000 per year nationwide, placing private schooling out of reach for many families even with a modest subsidy. Yet the tax credit is not targeted to families facing affordability pressures. It allows households earning up to 300 percent of area median income to qualify, a threshold that would make roughly 90 percent of U.S. households eligible. In high-income regions, families earning as much as $500,000 per year could receive publicly subsidized support for private education, while in a city like New York—where median income is about $81,000—families earning nearly $244,000 would qualify. At a time when families are struggling to afford groceries, housing, and child care, this program directs public dollars toward a limited use—private education subsidies for households that largely do not need the financial help—rather than toward measures that would help most families, like lowering child care or housing costs.
At a time when families are struggling to afford groceries, housing, and child care, this program directs public dollars toward a limited use—private education subsidies for households that largely do not need the financial help—rather than toward measures that would help most families, like lowering child care or housing costs.
At the same time, the program imposes no meaningful accountability requirements on participating schools. There are no academic performance standards, no transparency obligations, and no requirement to evaluate outcomes. In contrast to nearly every other federal program serving children, from Title I to Head Start, this is public spending without public oversight. Federal programs historically are monitored for fiscal, quality, and sometimes for safety compliance by the agency with charge over the program. In this case, U.S Department of Education (ED) expertise plays no role in oversight of new national policy for education.1
What State Leaders Can and Cannot Control
FTCS offers a tempting hook for well-intentioned state policymakers as well: Some governors and state legislatures may view the tax credit as a way to unlock new resources for priorities like tutoring or after-school programs. In practice, however, it offers no new, flexible funding for states and gives them little control over how public dollars are used. The law defines “scholarship-granting organizations” so broadly that states cannot meaningfully restrict eligibility, set standards, or influence whether funds flow primarily to high-cost private schools rather than unmet public needs.
Once a state opts in, its role is largely administrative and unfunded. States receive no resources to carry out oversight, cannot impose safeguards, and must submit eligible organizations to the U.S. Treasury without authority to shape program design or accountability. Far from being additional education funding that states need, opting in requires that states absorb the fiscal, administrative, and equity consequences of a federal program they are unable to direct or correct. It is not “free money” for states. The opt-in decision is therefore the only meaningful leverage states have—and governors should use their right to refuse to play along in order to protect their public education systems.
Why Oversight and Accountability Matters
Public funding should never function on a good-faith system. It’s very simple: in good policymaking, whenever taxpayer dollars are allocated, oversight measures are put in place to make sure those dollars are spent in the way intended. We already know from numerous examples in the school choice policy space itself that no accountability means that those who need the help the least receive the most benefit.
Eighteen states have a universal private school choice program. Unfortunately, states that have expanded vouchers or education savings accounts with minimal oversight have already seen waste, fraud, and abuse. Arizona’s universal Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) program, for instance, has minimal controls, audit practices that automatically approve reimbursements, and has been linked to purchases of non-educational items like diamond rings, televisions, and even lingerie with taxpayer funds, prompting investigations by the state attorney general. Rather than lowering costs for families, the program has generated ballooning expenses for the state and contributed to a growing budget crisis—with no measurable benefit to students at all.
Similarly, the federal Charter Schools Program has repeatedly been shown to lack meaningful accountability, with investigations and audits documenting hundreds of millions of dollars wasted on schools that never opened or closed prematurely, and charter networks facing conservatorship over financial mismanagement and self-dealing. These outcomes are the predictable result of public dollars flowing to private operators without meaningful oversight.
Decades of research on voucher programs show mixed or negative academic outcomes, particularly in math and reading, and no evidence that vouchers close opportunity gaps. In Louisiana, Indiana, and Ohio, studies found declines in student achievement following expansions in voucher programs. Students in Louisiana’s voucher program experienced drops in both math and reading in their first two years, while voucher students in Indiana and Ohio performed worse than comparable peers who remained in public schools.
The program nationalizes an unproven experiment while insulating it from the very safeguards that exist to protect students and taxpayers alike.
Taken together, these examples underscore why oversight and accountability are not optional when public dollars are at stake. The FTCS program includes no meaningful accountability, evaluation, or research requirements to justify an estimated $26 billion cost to taxpayers. Without data on student learning, fiscal integrity, or long-term outcomes, the public has no way to assess whether this investment is helping students or simply reshuffling them across systems while diverting resources away from the public schools that serve most children and toward unknown corporate interests.2 In effect, the program nationalizes an unproven experiment while insulating it from the very safeguards that exist to protect students and taxpayers alike.
Who Profits When Public Dollars Become Private Subsidies?
Another consequence of turning public education dollars into private subsidies is that it creates a lucrative marketplace for the companies that manage these voucher systems. A handful of firms have seized on state voucher expansions to secure multimillion-dollar contracts, turning what was pitched as a cost-saving policy into a business opportunity for tech and finance intermediaries. These companies often have limited experience running education programs, and in some states have faced scrutiny over operational problems, questionable spending controls, and high administrative costs.
This track record raises questions about whether families truly benefit from FTCS’s model. It would seem the opposite: it diverts taxpayer dollars into private profit streams instead of lowering education costs for struggling families. Instead of more wasteful government contracts, these dollars should be used to improve neighborhood schools by hiring high-quality educators, increasing after school programs, expanding pre-K, and hiring mental health professionals.
A Tax Policy Not Designed to Support Education
Congress gave sole interpretive authority for this program to the U.S. Treasury Department, deliberately excluding the U.S. Department of Education and its education-specific expertise. As a result, a major national education policy will be implemented through the tax code, with limited attention to accountability, equity, or educational impact. While advocates have urged the Treasury Department to include stronger transparency, safeguards, and state authority, it is unlikely those measures will be adopted to address the program’s core design flaws.
This use of the tax code stands in sharp contrast to prior policies that successfully supported children and families. The 2021 expanded Federal Child Tax Credit helped to lift more than 2 million childrenout of poverty and reduced the country’s child poverty level to a historic low of 5.2 percent. This program will likely do the opposite. Research shows that private school voucher programs disproportionately benefit wealthy families. Consistent with many other provisions in the law, Congressional Republicans have chosen to prioritize a tax break that disproportionately benefits the wealthy, over nearly every other form of charitable giving, such as donations to food pantries, hospitals, or community services.
By incentivizing families to exit public schools, the voucher tax credit also undermines the financial stability of those schools, particularly in rural and high-need communities. Because education funding is largely enrollment-based, even modest shifts can lead to school closures, consolidations, and reduced services. This leaves behind those families who don’t have the time or resources to navigate private systems, and asks taxpayers to reimburse private donations on top of existing public education costs.
Civil Rights Protections Are Excluded
Public schools that receive federal funding are required to comply with federal civil rights laws, including Title VI and Title IX of the Civil Rights Act, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act. In 2024, ED received 22,687 civil rights complaints, including about 8,400 related to disability discrimination, reflecting just how often students and families rely on these protections.
These laws require schools to take corrective action to prevent and respond to discrimination, provide accommodations and services to students, investigate complaints, and offer families meaningful avenues for recourse. This is what public accountability looks like in practice, and its success depends on ED’s legal authority and the staff capacity to respond when families ask for help.
By contrast, the OBBA does not require scholarship-granting organizations or the private schools and programs they fund to comply with these federal civil rights protections, even though they benefit from publicly subsidized dollars. This means that if a student experiences harassment or discrimination based on race, national origin, sex, religion, or disability, families may have little or no ability to hold private schools accountable or seek remedies comparable to those guaranteed in public schools.
Evidence from state voucher programs shows why this gap matters. An investigation in North Carolina found that voucher funds flowed to private schools that were significantly whiter than the communities they serve, reinforcing racial segregation rather than expanding opportunity. In the absence of enforceable civil rights guardrails, public funding supports exclusionary practices that would be unlawful in public schools.
The Cost to Public Schools and Communities
Ultimately, this voucher/tax credit perpetuates a broader pattern of states, in addition to the federal government, stepping back from their responsibility to fully fund and strengthen public schools. Rather than address the systemic problems that perpetuate low-performing schools, it treats educational inequity as a series of individual problems to be solved by sending public dollars to private education. No matter how the administration spins it, these programs fail to prioritize students from lower-income families while simultaneously subsidizing private education for higher-income families. It invites taxpayers to feel as though they are helping children access opportunity, while leaving the underlying inequities in public education unresolved and, in many cases, deepened.
[Open the link to see data on source of insurance.]
This tax credit is projected to cost $26 billion, which is a high price tag that instead could be doing real good in public schools. If Congress instead invested this through Title I, that money would amount to roughly $1,238 per student in schools serving low-income communities. Research shows that investments of this size improve reading and math outcomes. In other words, we know how to use public dollars to help students succeed. This policy chooses not to.
Imagine putting that $26 billion, the lowest estimated cost of the tax credit over ten years, toward Title I, the federal program that benefits most public schools. That would more than double Title I’s current funding at $18.4 billion. Title I’s flexibility allows schools to meet their specific needs to improve student achievement: more teachers, aides, professional development, wraparound services, and more.
IDEA is supposed to fund 40 percent of each student’s special education each year, but the federal government has never met that promise. Current funding at $14.2 billion amounts to less than 12 percent of the promise. However, adding $26 billion to IDEA would almost triple current funding and completely close the gap.
We know that the unprecedented funding from the American Rescue Plan and other COVID relief packages will make a major return on investment: every $1,000 invested per student will be worth $1,238 in future earnings. That funding also required states to at least maintain their education budgets at prior funding so that the federal investment would not replace their responsibility and effort, but work together. The FTCS model completely disregards these precedents, and their values.
The Federal Tax Credit Scholarship Is a Heist Taken Straight from the Right’s Privatization Playbook
The Federal Tax Credit Scholarship program follows a familiar privatization strategy. It routes public dollars to private actors while stripping away the oversight, transparency, and civil rights protections that normally accompany public investment. Framed as generosity and choice, it instead creates a system in which taxpayers assume the cost while private schools and intermediaries operate largely beyond public accountability.
The program recreates many risks at a national scale. The schools and organizations receiving these publicly subsidized funds are not required to demonstrate academic results, comply with federal civil rights law, or provide transparency about how dollars are spent. Families are left without protections, taxpayers without accountability, and policymakers without evidence that the investment is improving student outcomes.
When public dollars are transformed into lightly regulated private subsidies, they invite exploitation. The Federal Tax Credit Scholarship is not an isolated policy choice: it follows a pattern of policies that weaken, and normalize weakening, public education while insulating private actors from responsibility. History shows where this path leads: higher costs, weaker safeguards, and fewer assurances that public investments serve the public good.
Notes
The Trump administration has taken multiple actions to reduce the role of the U.S. Department of Education, including firing staff and reassigning education programs and staff to other agencies through interagency agreements (IAAs) without congressional authorization. Such actions raise legal and governance concerns and further erode the education-specific expertise, oversight, and accountability that Congress has historically vested in ED.
Under the OBBA, the federal tax credit for contributions to SGOs applies to individual taxpayers. The law does not provide separate federal tax credit rules for corporate contributions; whether and how corporations might participate or benefit may depend on future Treasury and IRS regulations and state tax policies. Many states currently allow corporate contributions to SGOs.
Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders is holding the line on spending, except for vouchers, which h will get a big boost. About 85% of the students using vouchers never attended public schools, so Governor Sanders is handing out money to pay for students already enrolled in private and religious schools.
Poor people in Arkansas don’t get much help in the budget, but affluent families get tax cuts and vouchers to pay for private schools, religious schools, and home schools.
Arkansas lawmakers are set to convene April 8 to hash out next year’s state budget. In a Wednesday letter to lawmakers, Sanders said she’s proposing a 3% increase, a pretty standard figure on par with recent years.
But what’s going to be funded in this mostly flat spending plan, and what’s not? At first blush, it looks like well-to-do Arkansans are the big winners, cashing in on private school vouchers and more income tax cuts.
Sanders’ proposed 2026-27 budget, presented to lawmakers by Arkansas Department of Finance and Administration Director Jim HudsonWednesday morning, includes up to $379 million for the Arkansas LEARNS vouchers that parents who opt out of traditional public schools can tap to pay private school or homeschool expenses. That’s a big increase over the $187 million budgeted for vouchers last time.
The 2025-26 school year was the first in which all students in Arkansas were eligible for these vouchers, and the price tag keeps creeping higher. Ballooning costs are pretty much a given, based on what’s happened in other states that pioneered this tricky transfer of wealth from the poor and middle class to their wealthy overlords by paying fancy kids’ tony tuitions for them. Just ask Arizona and Florida.
Lawmakers have made a number of adjustments and budget increases for LEARNS after voucher costs quickly exceeded the budgeted amount. In January, a legislative committee signed off on giving another $32 million in one-time reserve funds to Arkansas’s newly universal school voucher program, bringing its total cost in the current 2025-26 school year to $309.4 million, which covers more than 44,000 students. That $309 million is the base amount proposed for 2026-27, but Sanders’ budget proposes an extra $70 million for it, just in case.
Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families warned in January that vouchers are doing all the things opponents warned they would: creating new spending obligations for taxpayers to cover private school tuitions and other costs that were never on the public dime before; chipping away at public schools’ financial resilience; and generally busting budgets.
These set-aside amounts that were incorporated into the state’s school voucher fund this year, and which are being teed up to be added next year to the tune of $70 million, look a lot like a trap. Last go-round, lawmakers approved about $187 million for vouchers, but then added another $122 million to the school voucher cause in piecemeal fashion over the course of the fiscal year, to ultimately spend $309 million. Now lawmakers are looking at $309 million as the floor for voucher spending for 2026-27, and will almost certainly throw in that set-aside $70 million, too (if not more). How many hundreds of millions more are we going to add in these payouts for the well-to-do each year, in slapdash fashion? Don’t say we didn’t warn you!
Dr. Mike DeGuire is a lifelong educator who served as a principal of a public school in Denver. Now retired, he has assumed an active role in fighting privatization.
The dirty little secret of the voucher movement is that most of them are claimed by well-to-do families whose children were already attending nonpublic schools. Vouchers are a subsidy for people who were already paying tuition at private schools
His post was distributed by Advocates for Public Education Policy.
A4PEP introduced his statement:
Vouchers aren’t winning because voters love them. In fact, they keep losing at the ballot box.
So what’s going on?
In a new post, A4PEP Vice-Chair Dr. Mike DeGuire points to a big driver: billionaire-funded networks that keep pushing “school choice” as a marketplace, where public dollars follow students into private (often religious) schools.
It’s not just messaging, either. These efforts are backed by think tanks, lobbying, and big political spending, and now there’s a new federal tax credit plan that could supercharge scholarship-granting organizations with even less transparency.
If you want the clearest breakdown we’ve seen of who’s behind this and what it means for public schools, read Mike’s full post:
Public education is a public promise. Let’s protect it.
Dr. Mike DeGuire wrote about why vouchers have been winning despite lack of public support.
He said:
One answer: Billionaires
Billionaires Charles Koch, Betsy Devos, Jeff Yass, William Dunn, Phillip Anschutz, Michael Bloomberg, Reed Hastings, Bill Gates, Eli Broad, John Arnold, and the Walton and Bradley families have led the movement for private school choice through support for both charters and vouchers for over 30 years. Their goal is to dismantle what they call the “government school system” and to change how public education is funded. They want to create a “marketplace of options” so families can use money (vouchers) from public funds to send their children to private, religious, or home schools.
The marketplace concept allows billionaires and their investors to make money through real estate, tech and service contracts, and gain significant tax benefits. For many, the goal is to support religious schools which then profit from enrollment growth.
How did billionaires get the public to go along with their privatization goals?
They used their vast resources to set up think tanks and lobbying organizations which employ hyperbolic messaging with misleading data to communicate that public schools are failing, insisting parents need resources (vouchers) to find alternative schooling options. When their voucher goals met with resistance in the 1990s, billionaires focused on spreading charter schools instead, especially in major cities. The charter movement created the false narrative that parents should leave their local public school instead of focusing on increased funding to meet changing student needs.
During Trump’s first term, and after the pandemic hit, vouchers started to reappear, especially in red states, as billionaires backed pro-voucher candidates in state legislatures and Congress to secure favorable voucher legislation. However, not a single taxpayer-funded voucher program in the United States has been approved by voters. Every state voucher program was enacted by legislators, often under heavy pressure from well-funded pro-voucher lobbying groups. Billionaires also funded groups who lobbied Congress to pass the federal tax credit voucher scheme in July that enlists all 50 states to join in the billionaire’s version of “education freedom for private school choice.”
How will they use the “historic” federal tax credit to spread more vouchers?
Taxpayers in states that opt in to the federal voucher scheme select from a list of scholarship granting organizations (SGOs) to reduce their tax liability by $1700 when they pay their 2027 taxes. Billionaires have been funding K-12 SGOs for over 25 years. They use the money raised to give scholarships for students to attend private schools. These SGOs will have billions more from individual taxpayers to use for the same purposes. Billionaire John Walton, son of Sam Walton of Wal-Mart and the richest family in the US, co-founded the nation’s two largest scholarships granting organizations, ACE Scholarships and Children’s Scholarship Fund. Most of their scholarships go to students who leave public schools to attend religious schools.
The federal voucher program includes no spending cap, and the billionaires have already tossed in over $10 million to market the program. The voucher advocates are pushing hard for regulations that slam the door on any approach that does not further the growth of this largely unregulated voucher program.
The path forward: opt out, speak up, organize
This isn’t a grassroots uprising. It’s a long-running, well-funded project, one that keeps losing at the ballot box, so it shifts strategy: different messaging, different vehicles, same end goal. If we want truly “free” public education, we can’t let billionaires and private interests redefine freedom as a shopping spree financed by public dollars.
The path forward is clear, even if it’s not flashy. Communities can press state leaders not to opt in. Parents and educators can demand transparency from scholarship-granting organizations and insist on real accountability for any program that touches public money. And all of us can keep returning to the basic truth: the best “choice” is a fully funded, welcoming neighborhood public school, one that serves every child, not just the children a private system chooses to accept.
Public education is a public promise. We should protect it like one.
Stephen Dyer, former state legislator, follows the money. As usual, in Ohio, public money is flowing to private organizations that are neither accountable nor effective. In this post, he assays the trail of public funds collected by the Center for Christian Virtue. The Ohio Constitution could not be clearer: no money for religious schools. The Ohio legislature treats the state constitution like an outdated relic.
Dyer writes on his blog Tenth Period:
The Center for Christian Virtue is making quite a play in Ohio’s education policy landscape. They are using a multimillion dollar Capital Square office to run the lobbying effort to continue the state’s unconstitutional private school tuition subsidies. They also are running a so-called $3.2 million Scholarship Granting Organization, which is really just a fancy way of funneling millions more of our tax dollars into unaccountable private schools.
And, potentially most harmful of all, they’re running an operation they call “school planting” where they use the unconstitutional private school tuition subsidy to kick-start “schools” inside of churches across Ohio.
They are now claiming to have done this with 15 “schools” so far, publicly naming four new ones that opened this school year and another 4 next school year. Here’s how they brag about it in their news release about this initiative:
“Through our innovative school-in-a-church model, God is expanding access to Christian education for families in every corner of the state. By leveraging existing church facilities, we help keep costs low, making it possible for more families to afford a high-quality, Christ-centered education.”
Let’s set aside the fact that having schools pop up in churches is an ancient practice and not in any way “innovative” (having American taxpayers subsidize these things is “innovative”, though).
Anyway, here’s the thing: a total of 25 kids in only 1 of these schools — Westside Preparatory, which is the shining example displayed on CCV’s education website — has ever been tested for proficiency in reading and math, with only 9 ever being deemed “proficient” in both1.
This performance reflects these kids’ scores on tests the schools gets to pick from scores of options allowed by the state.
Public schools, in contrast, do not get to pick their kids’ tests.
All taxpayers had to do for 9 private school kids to test proficient on tests the school picked was to unconstitutionally subsidize these schools by about $2 million.2
[Open the link to see the scores.]
But at least the schools’ scores are 51 percentage points worse last year than the previous year in Math. Not an awesome trend, by the way.
Quite a return, wouldn’t you say? I mean, considering that none of these kids ever attended a public school. I am deducing this because in the schools’ first year of existence, only kindergarteners and first graders are included in their enrollment counts.
And that’s it. That’s all we know about the quality of these 15 “schools.” Hence my quotation marks around the word “school”. Because what these “schools” really seem to be are money makers for CCV so it can finance the elimination of public education.
This is why I call them the new White Hat. For those who aren’t familiar with White Hat, it was the company run by David Brennan that made millions running Charter Schools in Ohio and simply flipped a small percentage of those profits into Republican campaign war chests with the goal of de-funding public schools and the teachers unions that backed Democrats.
CCV is running the same White Hat playbook — set up a bunch of bullshit shell corporations, siphon millions of public dollars from Ohio’s 1.5 million public school students, use a small percentage of that money to lobby Ohio legislators and governors (who are notoriously cheap to buy) who allow CCV to continue stealing that money from kids, then watch public school kids suffer from it all.
All in the name of Jesus — they call this a ministry even!
Because robbing money from poor kids in Columbus, Athens, Steubenville and Findlay is exactly what Christ would have done. What CCV is doing to Ohio’s public school kids is blasphemy. Pure and simple.
But get this: Because CCV’s operation involves advocating for the state to shovel money to private schools, we have no idea how much of that largesse CCV is accumulating. We do know that CCV staff is making bank — again, just as Jesus intended.
Stephen Dyer is a former legislator in Ohio who keeps track of the budgetary impact of school choice on the state’s public schools. Despite multiple voucher programs, 85% of the state’s 1,000,000 children attend public schools. Dyer’s blog is called Tenth Period.
Ohio’s State Constitution contains explicit language supporting public schools and equally explicit language barring the public funding of religious schools.
Article VI 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.”
Nothing ambiguous there, but Republicans in Ohio ignore or creatively distort the State Constitution.
So I came across an interesting piece of information today. Since 2021, Ohioans went from unconstitutionally subsidizing the private school tuitions of a little over 3 in 10 private school students to more than 8 in 10 today.
At an astounding pricetag of a 313 percent increase — at least — in taxpayer subsidies¹.
Yes, Ohio’s private schools have seen an enrollment increase. However, that 22,000 student increase represents barely 1 percent of the 1.9 million students enrolled in all Ohio schools this year.
And the funding has vastly outstripped the rate of unconstitutional voucher growth — resulting in a nearly 20 percent per pupil funding increase for private schools.
So get this.
State leaders have spent the last 5 years increasing unconstitutional voucher spending by $600 million, demonizing public education, putting on a full-court press to convince people to take unconstitutional vouchers and that’s netted them … barely a 1 percent increase in the private school share of Ohio’s school enrollment?
Pretty awful ROI, don’t you think?
Especially when you consider that by unconstitutionally subsidizing the private school tuitions of mostly wealthy people like Les Wexner, the state is literally funding a separate, second educational system in direct contravention of the state constitution.
And it has meant they have been unable (unwilling?) to fully pay for the state’s school funding formula for the 85 percent of students attending Ohio’s public schools. The state’s public school funding comes out of the same budget pot as its voucher money.
So the only way for voucher proponents to convince any good-faith judge or group of judges that they are not funding a second, unconstitutional and unaccountable² school system is to actually shrink the number of vouchers.
Which they’ll never do.
This fact, as much as any, helps explain state Rep. Jamie Callender’s recent attempt to bully the suing school districts into dropping the case— a threat from which he has (kinda) weaklybacked down.
For if these suing school districts continue to stand strong, Callender and his overlord, Speaker Matt Huffman — lawyers, both — know they are screwed.
Legally speaking.
Footnotes:
1. I’m only including the two EdChoice programs and the Cleveland voucher program because those are the ones at issue in the current lawsuit. These numbers are, obviously, higher if you include the autism and special needs vouchers. Also, as with every current year data analysis of vouchers, the funding numbers are estimates because we don’t have readily accessible current year dollar figures for the vouchers, just the number of students whose schools are now eligible to get them. So I multiplied last year’s per pupil amount for each of the voucher programs to reach the $861.6 million figure. It’s probably going to be more because per pupil voucher funding always increases.
2. Remember that not a penny of the $8 billion+ we’ve spent on unconstitutional private school tuition subsidies since 1996 has been audited.
John Thompson, historian and retired teacher in Oklahoma, reviews the big concerns that will preoccupy the Republican Governor and Legislature in 2026.
A proposed deregulation bill that would result in alligators taking over our wetlands; the bill to ban Sharia Law; the “doubly criminalizing the stealing of shopping carts,” and the bill which claims “condensation trails left in our atmosphere by airplanes are actually chemical agents designed to interfere with the sun, [and] weather or are a nefarious way to psychologically manipulate us.”
Then came Governor Kevin Stitt’s address to the legislature.
Seven years ago, Stitt promised to make us a “Top Ten” state,” by creating a business-friendly environment by cutting “red tape,” reducing regulations, as well as pushing school choice, and other free-market policies.
But, according to CNBC, Oklahoma is now ranked 41th for business, 48th in education, and 49th in life, health and inclusion.
According to the U.S. News and World Report, we’re ranked 46th in economic opportunity, and 42th overall.
We’ve proven to the world that Oklahoma is second to none – it’s a state that promotes innovation, champions freedom, and creates opportunity for its people.
Oklahoma wasn’t built by government planners or bureaucrats. …
Oklahoma was built by entrepreneurs, risk-takers and innovators who believe in free markets and the American Dream – that if you work hard, take risks and create value, you should be rewarded.
Actually, Oklahoma was founded on populist principles, such as empowering voters to pass initiative petitions and amendments to the constitution. After the voters legalized medical marijuana, and voted for the expansion of Medicaid, Republicans have attempted to undermine those rights. And, now, Stitt is calling for the repeal of those two laws, and passing two other petitions that are the opposite of what voters supported.
Stitt’s most destructive attack could be on Medicaid expansion, known as SoonerCare, which reduced the state’s uninsured rate from 17.6% in 2019 to 13.9 % in 2024. But, now it needs almost $500 million to maintain the federally mandated level of service and to administer new mandates and to more efficiently manage the system.
And Oklahoma’s recent privatization of Medicaid campaign “moved thousands of patients to other insurance providers.” And, it has “resulted in lower reimbursement rates and increased denials for services.”
Medicaid provides coverage for one in four Oklahomans. It provided coverage for more than ½ of the state’s child births. While half of its recipients are children, it helps out many low-income seniors and persons with disabilities.
But, Stitt told the legislature, “Nobody feels sorry for an able-bodied male that should be working between the ages of 25 to 65, and we should not be giving them free healthcare.”
Stitt bragged about his cuts in income taxes, which were “the Path to Zero income tax;” He called them a step towards “one of our greatest budget reform wins in history.”
Due to spending cuts, Oklahoma saved over $5.5 billion dollars. Those funds could be used to address $692 million shortfall for this year, as well as $1.5 billion in increased funding that state agencies have requested.
Instead, he wants to amend the constitution to place a 3% annual cap on recurring spending growth.
The third state question Stitt suggested to lawmakers would be to freeze property taxes for “all levels.” Property taxes are a major funding source for public schools, CareerTech, and county level programs.
And he would like to expand the $249 million per year tax credits for private schools.
And Stitt repeated his calls to reverse the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling and limit tribal sovereignty in Oklahoma.
Of course, Stitt praised Trump and Ronald Reagan. He challenged the legislators to read Reagan’s speech, “A Time for Choosing.” He then said Reagan was “the last best hope of man on earth;” without him we would have taken “the last step into a thousand years of darkness.”
He then bragged about freeing Oklahomans from Covid lockdowns, protecting them from vaccine mandates, and, in the name of protecting individual liberties and religious freedom, preventing boys from playing in girls’ sports.
After boasting about his success in limiting the freedom of transgender students, he called for the elimination of the Oklahoma Secondary School Activities Association (OSSAA) for not promoting the open transfer of student athletes.
And Stitt concluded:
Oklahoma is not just part of this American Dream. We are its purest expression. And this spirit is what has always defined Oklahoma.
Oklahoma is where bold dreams are possible.
I believe these last seven years have been the greatest in state history
Of course, Stitt’s “commitment to limited government and protecting the Oklahoma way of life,” also required cooperation with rightwing legislators; together, they share credit for making “our state … the best in the country.”
We have all heard the stories of the “Mississippi Miracle,” the dramatic rise in test scores in the midst of underfunding and poverty. Whether or not there has actually been a miracle, some Mississippi legislators are eager to help kids escape those miraculous schools. Specifically, by giving them vouchers for private schools.
The legislature is split, however. The key senator opposes vouchers, which always end up subsidizing kids in private schools. The key members in the House are all in to pay the tuition for affluent families.
Why in the world would legislators want to help students “escape” good schools?
Mississippi legislators are fiddling with school choice. Some of their fiddling is very limited, and some is just kind of odd, given the context of Mississippi education these days.
In the senate, SB 2002 is a bill for public school choice, called open enrollment in some states and portability in others. It would give students the chance to pick a public school outside of their own attendance area. Education Committee Chairman Dennie DeBar said that’s as far as he’s willing to go. As J.T. Mitchell reports for Supertalk:
“This is as far as we’re willing to go. I’m not in favor of vouchers,” DeBar said in regard to universal school choice that includes using public funds to help parents pay for private school tuition. “This creates competition amongst our schools to make them better.”
The house, however, is willing to go quite a bit further. They’ve launched HB 2, the Mississippi Education Freedom Act, which would establish Magnolia Student Accounts, an education savings account style voucher.
The bill proposes most of the usual features. A few notable quirks:
* Half of the vouchers are designated for students currently in public school, half for those already in private school.
* Vouchers will be awarded in a first come, first served priority order. Families with under 100% of area median income. Next those between 100% and 200%, then 200% to 300%. Then “all other eligible students.”
* Each of those eligible groups has a different voucher amount limits. It’s the total funding formula, not to exceed– $4,000 for the under-100% crowd, $2,000 for the next group, and so on. There are also limits on the total that can go to one household.
The voucher dollars can be spent on the usual stuff– tuition, fees, supplies, equipment, uniforms, testing. Plus a whole category for “technological devices” including television, videogame console or accessory, home theater or related audio equipment, and virtual reality products.
White is a longtime advocate for school choice, the idea of giving parents more of a say in where their children are educated without being restricted by their neighborhoods. In a statement, he pointed to Mississippi’s recent gains in education, including a No. 16 overall ranking and nation-leading improvements in reading. He said the Mississippi Education Freedom Act “builds on that success.”
I am not going to get into the Mississippi “miracle” at this point, other than to say that something certainly seems to have happened, but as always with education, it appears to have more to do with hard work, teacher efforts, school resources, and maybe some tweaking of the data, none of which is miraculous.
But whatever “that success” was, I’m not clear on how you build on it by letting parents pull their kids away from it while simultaneously taking resources away from those successful schools. “Our schools are finally improving,” declares White. “So let’s give families more ways to pull their kids out of them.” This does not seem like a recipe for success.
For the sake of Mississippi students, let’s hope the senate shuts down HB 2.
Norman Batley hosts a podcast called “Life Elsewhere with Norman B.” He is based in Tampa, Florida. The program is widely distributed through WMNF and NPR. He asks great questions, and I was thrilled to be invited to be on his show.
Diane Ravitch's blog 