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Florida: How Vouchers Are Destroying Public Schools and Violating the State Constitution

By dianeravitch
August 3, 2026 //
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Article IX, Section 1 of the Florida constitution:

a) The education of children is a fundamental value of the people of the State of Florida. It is, therefore, a paramount duty of the state to make adequate provision for the education of all children residing within its borders. Adequate provision shall be made by law for a uniform, efficient, safe, secure, and high quality system of free public schools that allows students to obtain a high quality education and for the establishment, maintenance, and operation of institutions of higher learning and other public education programs that the needs of the people may require. 

Article I, Section 3;

Religious Freedom

There shall be no law respecting the establishment of religion or prohibiting or penalizing the free exercise thereof. Religious freedom shall not justify practices inconsistent with public morals, peace or safety. No revenue of the state or any political subdivision or agency thereof shall ever be taken from the public treasury directly or indirectly in aid of any church, sect, or religious denomination or in aid of any sectarian institution.

The Florida state constitution explicitly requires that the state provide a free public education for all children. It explicitly forbids the use of any public funds for religious schools. In 2012, then Governor Jeb Bush promoted a referendum to change the constitution and allow vouchers for religious schools. Florida voters resoundingly said NO. But the voice of the people did not dissuade Bush and his friends.

Florida now has a full/blown universal voucher system where the state funds children who attend religious schools, private schools, even home schools, regardless of family income. Most of the children who use vouchers were already in nonpublic school.

The state now spends billions of dollars every year on charter schools and vouchers. Many charter schools operate for profit. Their lobbyists work in tandem with the legislature, which seems eager to defund public schools.

Ironically, Jeb Bush used to boast that Florida was successful because of its toughs count ability. Yet this is the same governor who pushed through vouchers, even though voucher schools have NO accountability.

Go figure.

Stephanie Vanos wrote the following article for the Orlando Sentinel. She is a member of the Orange County School Board, where her children are enrolled.

She wrote:

There is an alarming misuse of public funds in Florida that isn’t just unfair and irresponsible, it undermines our state’s constitutional obligation to provide a high-quality, uniform education for every child and erodes trust in the very system meant to serve all of Florida’s children.

The taxpayer-funded voucher program has created a shadow educational system, one where billions in taxpayer funds move with little oversight, leaving families and communities in the dark about how their money is spent. This lack of accountability and transparency has created a fractured, unequal  education landscape, robbing students of stability and opportunity no matter where they go to school.

Approximately $5 billion in taxpayer money is being siphoned away from our traditional public schools into voucher systems. Private schools that accept vouchers are held to a tiny fraction of the standards our public schools must meet, if any at all. Nearly a quarter of all state funding for education is now drained by voucher programs that serve only 15.3% of Florida’s students and overwhelmingly benefit families who were already paying to send their child to private school. How is this fiscally responsible?

The consequences of this system are clear in Orange County, where my kids go to school.

This year, our county was forced to close seven public schools and cut hundreds of positions despite the district earning high grades. An estimated $315 million of education money will be diverted from Orange County Public Schools to vouchers just this year. These closures and loss of funding are a direct result of a state system that puts politics and profits ahead of students.

Traditional public schools across the state are held to incredibly high standards on how and what they teach students, who they hire, how they report grades and more. However, the taxpayer-funded voucher program and charter schools are not held to the same standards and measures of accountability despite receiving public tax dollars.

Charter schools, deemed public schools by law, sometimes serve an unmet need in a community, and may operate transparently under a fully nonprofit model. In some cases, they can benefit our larger communities. However, charter schools operate with far fewer requirements and accountability measures than traditional public schools, and far too many are franchise operations, run by for-profit management companies that benefit affiliated for-profit entities with our tax dollars.

Categories Accountability, Closing schools, Democracy, Education Industry, Equity, Ethics, Extremism, Florida, School Choice, Vouchers

Carol Burris: The Hoax of “School Choice”

By dianeravitch
July 29, 2026 //
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I posted the link to Carol Burris’s terrific article about school choice yesterday but was unable to copy the text. Carol sent the text to me.

Here it is:

Advocates of a rightwing, billionaire-funded campaign to replace public education with a privatized education marketplace have been candid about their goals and disciplined in pursuing them. A new reportfrom the organization I lead, the Network for Public Education, provides an accounting of how far state lawmakers across the nation, in both red and blue states, have advanced this campaign and have put at grave risk access to the current system of education that is free and available to all families.

For nearly a decade, the Network for Public Education has issued statehouse-by-statehouse report cards holding legislators accountable for how they treat public schools and the children who depend on them. And over the years, we have seen a ramp up in school privatization and continuous neglect of public school students and teachers.

This 2026 Report Card is our most expansive to date, evaluating all fifty states and the District of Columbia across four categories: privatization of public education, protections for homeschooled students, school funding, and conditions for teaching and learning based on thirty-nine factors. Some of those factors include charter school expansion, discrimination, and student-to-teacher ratio. 

In 2022, when we issued our second report card, ten states achieved 80 percent or more of a possible 102 points. By 2024, the number of states achieving 80 percent of all possible points had dropped to four. Two years later, only two states, Nebraska and Vermont, hit the 80 percent mark.

Over the past four years, privatization efforts have seen heightened success across the country.  Voucher programs (which began in the mid-1990s) have expanded from twenty-seven programs in 2022 to seventy-three programs in thirty-four states as of 2026, with multiple programs in several states. Vouchers pay for tuition at both secular and religious schools, and in some states, the purchase of goods and services by homeschoolers and microschoolers. Schools accepting vouchers also typically face little of the academic, financial, or civil rights accountability required of public schools, and many can reject or expel students based on disability, religion, sexual orientation, or academic record. And because voucher amounts frequently fall short of full private school tuition, the benefits flow disproportionately to families who could already afford private school without public dollars.

Charter schools, which began in 1992 as experimental schools controlled by school districts, have been privatized to include large chains of schools, some of which span across multiple states. Nearly one in five charter school students attends a charter run by a for-profit corporation. It is an unstable sector of schooling, with more than one in four closing by year five. 

Only Nebraska and Kentucky are now the only remaining states free of both charter schools and state voucher programs. But the 2026 report card reveals a troubling and consistent pattern beyond the expansion of school privatization. The states most aggressively redirecting public funds toward private alternatives—charter schools, voucher programs, and home schools—are the same states that fund privatization at the direct expense of investment in public schools.

In fact, our analysis found a strong and statistically significant negative relationship between the expansion of privatization and other indicators of public school support. Privatization and public school disinvestment, it turns out, go hand in hand.

Seventeen states earned a grade of F, meaning they failed to meet even 40 percent of the thirty-nine standards we set for responsible stewardship of public schools. Standards that included equitable school funding, teacher satisfaction, protections for homeschooled students, and class size. Florida ranked dead last, scoring just fourteen out of 102 possible points, with Arizona following closely behind. These are not struggling states making hard choices with thin budgets. They are states that have made deliberate decisions to defund neighborhood schools while directing public money toward private alternatives with minimal oversight, weak accountability, and documented records of fraud and mismanagement.

The appeal of “school choice,” in which families are permitted to use state funds that would’ve been otherwise spent on public education on non-traditional programs like charter or private schools, is easy to understand. The promise of options and tailored education sounds reasonable in the abstract. But in practice, choice works best for families with the time, information, and flexibility to navigate it, and whose children the private school is willing to choose. For a family in rural Florida or a child with complex disabilities whose needs most private schools won’t accommodate, the marketplace of options is theoretical. The public school is the only institution legally required to educate every child who walks through the door. When it is weakened through funding cuts, the diversion of students and dollars, or a hollowed-out teaching workforce, the consequences fall hardest on the children least able to find alternatives.

Meanwhile, many of these states that have expanded privatization are the same states that fail to uphold school policies that support teaching and learning.

You cannot systematically eliminate teachers’ job protections, freeze wages, and inject heavy political pressure into classrooms, then be surprised when talented people leave the profession. States like Arizona and Florida, which we rank at the bottom for teacher working conditions, are the same states reporting severe shortages of teachers and the highest rates of underqualified instructors. That is a direct consequence of policy choices, not a demographic inevitability.

The top of the rankings offers a useful counterpoint. States like Nebraska and Vermont demonstrate that it is possible to adequately fund public schools, support teachers as professionals, and resist privatization pressure. The distance between them and the bottom-ranked states reflects not differences in wealth or circumstance, but differences in political priorities.

None of this means public school systems are beyond criticism. They have real failures and persistent inequities worth addressing. But the solution is not to defund the institution and redirect money to private alternatives that face no equivalent accountability. Charter schools limit enrollment. Voucher schools can turn away students. Education savings accounts, which give taxpayer funds to parents to buy private services in lieu of public schooling, can be misused with little consequence. Public schools cannot do any of these things—and that constraint is precisely what makes them worth protecting.

What happens next depends on whether parents, teachers, and the communities built around our public schools engage with the same urgency as forces on the right wing who work to dismantle them.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Failure, Funding, Hoax, Privatization, School Choice, Vouchers

The Century Foundation: Federal Voucher Program Will Increase Segregation

By dianeravitch
July 24, 2026 //
1

It is a well-established fact that the school choice movement was created in the South in the 1950s to protect segregation. After the Brown decision of 1954, whites resisted desegregation with e Rey strategy they could dream of. One such was to offer vouchers to every student to attend the school of their choice. The predictable result was to protect segregated schools.

In this century, voucher promoters sell them as parental choice, “saving poor kids from failing public schools,” etc.

But unless an effort is made to enrcuage racial integration, choice will lead to segregation.

Halley Potter of The Century Foundation wrote this report. I urge you to open the link and read it in full.

Potter wrote:

In rural Northampton, North Carolina, a private Christian school called Northeast Academy is 99 percent White in a county that’s 40 percent White. It receives about half of its tuition from taxpayers, through the state’s private school voucher program. Northeast is one of a number of private schools known as “segregation academies,” because they were founded during desegregation so that White parents could avoid having their children educated in an integrated setting.

Segregation academies ought to be a thing of the past, but they could experience a resurgence—paid for with taxpayer dollars—under the new federal private school voucher scheme enacted as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBA). Bringing back segregation academies using taxpayer dollars is part of the Trump administration’s radical two-pronged approach to undermine public education. The first tactic in the Trump administration’s plan to undercut public school systems is to dramatically reduce the federal role in education by dismantling federal programs, reducing oversight, attempting to cut federal funding for K–12 schools, and working to close the U.S. Department of Education. The second tactic is actively working toward privatization through an unprecedented federal private school voucher program.

How the Voucher Plan Would Work . . .

In July 2025, OBBA established a new federal tax credit—known as the Education Freedom Tax Credit—that, in effect, serves as a private school voucher program. The program allows individuals, beginning January 1, 2027, to contribute up to $1,700 per year toward private entities known as scholarship granting organizations (SGOs) and receive a dollar-for-dollar return of their money in the form of a federal tax credit. SGOs then would then be able to decide how to distribute the funds as scholarships to applicant students for them to spend on education. There is no cap on the size of such scholarships, and no limit on the number of individuals that can claim the tax credit. While recipient students may be able to use scholarship funds to pay for some things like tutoring or activity fees at public schools, because public schools are essentially free, it is anticipated that the vast majority of these funds will go toward private school enrollment.

There are very few requirements of SGOs in the statute, and it appears that any organization in a participating state that meets the criteria will be allowed to participate. SGOs must give scholarships to ten or more students who do not all attend the same school, must spend at least 90 percent of the income on scholarships, must give priority to students who received scholarships the previous year and to siblings, cannot earmark funds for a particular student, and must ensure that students come from families earning no more than 300 percent of the area median gross income. Essentially everything else will likely be up to the SGO, as the program’s regulations are not expected to add additional guardrails. It appears an SGO could, for example, be set up to fund scholarships to Christian schools only. Because private schools are not subject to all of the same civil rights laws as public schools, SGOs could also likely discriminate against students based on disability or sexual orientation.

While starting the process with individual donations gives the program the veneer of a charity operation, this is a ruse. All this does is mask who is truly bearing the cost of the program. In actuality, the donors to SGOs bear no cost, as they are later fully reimbursed by the federal government through the dollar-for-dollar tax credit. The federal government—using taxpayer dollars sent to the supposed donors—bears the entire cost of the program. Estimates of the cost to taxpayers range from around $4 billion to over $50 billion annually.

Moreover, the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s language regarding the tax credit program is very misleading. Their fact sheet states: “A recent report estimates that the Education Freedom Tax Credit will generate an additional $24 billion in education funding annually.” That makes it sound like this is a revenue-creating program rather than one that bears a huge federal cost.

States and the District of Columbia have to decide annually whether or not to opt out of or into the voucher program. As of July 6, 2026, twenty-nine states had indicated that they plan to opt in for the first year of the program. However, federal regulations guiding the program are not expected until September. Further complicating matters, at least eighteen states will have new governors and the District of Columbia will have a new mayor when the program launches in 2027 because of term limits, and that number could be as high as thirty-six after this fall’s elections.

. . . To Increase Segregation and Undermine Public Education

One of the dangers of private school voucher programs—alongside their well-demonstrated negative effects on students’ academic outcomes, civil rights violations, and destabilization of public school funding—is that they can exacerbate racial and socioeconomic segregation.

Diverse learning environments that bring students of different racial and socioeconomic backgrounds together are one of the most powerful educational tools we have. Integrated schools help encourage critical thinking, boost academic achievement, and build the skills for working across lines of difference that are essential for our democracy. The growth of private school voucher programs threatens to roll back progress on integration, limit educational opportunity, and further fracture the educational landscape by race and class.

As state leaders and advocates weigh whether or not to opt into the federal voucher program, they should consider the evidence on how the program could deepen inequality and further racial and socioeconomic divides. New analysis in this piece shows that in some metro areas in states that are still deciding whether to opt out of or into the federal voucher program, private schools already drive more than 40 percent of the racial segregation in schools.

The Segregationist History of Private School Vouchers

Private school enrollment nationwide is disproportionately White and wealthy. As of 2021, 9 percent of American schoolchildren attended private schools. Sixty-five percent of private school students are White, compared to 45 percent of public school students. Private school students are about twice as likely as public school students to come from higher-income households, and private school attendance is concentrated among the highest earners.

Private school voucher programs were started by segregationists across the South in the 1950s and 1960s as part of efforts by Southern leaders engaged in “massive resistance” to avoid integrating their schools in the wake of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling. Many communities opened all-White private schools, which became known as segregation academies. Local governments slashed public school funding and instead created public subsidies for these private schools—including voucher programs to reimburse tuition as well as tax credits.

The courts eventually struck down many of those voucher programs tied to segregation academies, but current voucher programs still show troubling patterns of segregation. Roughly 300 private schoolsthat were founded as segregation academies still receive money from publicly funded voucher programs. Most voucher money goes to students who are already attending private schools, and data has shown that private schools tend to raise their tuition after the introduction of voucher programs. For example, when Iowa started a new voucher program in 2023–24, two-thirds of vouchers went to students who were already attending private schools. By 2026, tuition at some of the state’s largest private high schools had grown by as much as 50 percent. It is important to note that vouchers typically do not cover the full cost of tuition, making private schools still out of reach for most low-income families, and so the voucher programs tend to function mostly as cost-reducing schemes for wealthier families sending their children to private schools. In Arizona, for example, half of all voucher recipients come from the wealthiest quartile of zip codes.

There are some private school voucher programs that target low- to middle-income students and enroll mostly students of color, such as the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, the oldest operating school voucher program in the United States. However, research shows that even students in these programs, which arguably have the highest potential for integration, by and large did not give students greater access to integrated schools.

Furthermore, some voucher programs that started out serving mostly students of color have now seen an increase in White students in recent years. When North Carolina’s private school voucher program launched in 2014, for example, a majority of students receiving vouchers were Black, and just 27 percent were White; however, as the program expanded incrementally from one serving only low-income students to one with no income limits, the percentage of vouchers going to White students grew to 73 percent, in a state where only 51 percent of school-aged children are White. A 2024 investigation by ProPublica into North Carolina’s private school voucher program found thirty-nine schools that fit the profile of segregation academies that were receiving public money through voucher programs.

The new federal private school voucher program specifies that participation is open to families earning up to 300 percent of area median gross income, which means it would be open to roughly 90 percent of students nationwide. With near universal eligibility, the federal program could easily be susceptible to similar patterns of segregation, disproportionately benefiting White students and furthering segregation between public and private schools.

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, Extremism, Privatization, Racism, School Choice, Segregation, Separation of church and state, Vouchers

Nevada: Charter Schools Are the Trojan Horse of Privatization

By dianeravitch
July 21, 2026 //
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Kelly Edgar taught music in Clark County, Nevada (Las Vegas) for 25 years. She recently wrote this article in The Nevada Independent about the dangers of charter schools.

She wrote:

Charter schools have been touted as the solution to our “failing public schools.” To be fair, the original intention was good. Those who founded the charter school movement envisioned it as a way to collaborate with public schools by finding creative solutions for students who weren’t thriving in traditional educational settings. 

But that’s not what’s happening today. Since retiring from the Clark County School District in 2024, I’ve developed my own theory: Between the dismantling of the Department of Education and free market ideologues wanting in on public school tax dollars, it’s now clear that the goal of privatizing education has been decades in the making. And charter schools are the stepping stones to get the job done.

Most people assume that charter schools are public schools because they’re free to attend and publicly funded. However, unlike traditional public schools, many are managed by private, for-profit companies — such as Academica in Nevada — and they filter enrollment via applications and lotteries.

Moreover, they do not have publicly elected school boards. In other words, we have no say on how our tax dollars are spent in charter schools because oversight is lax. Yet a charter school principal, a charter school founder and members of Moms For Liberty (which has direct ties to the school privatization movement) can sit on our school board.

Public education certainly has its challenges. I devoted decades to working inside the system and spent my final years sounding the alarm about overcrowded classrooms, insufficient resources, district leaders with ulterior motives and a lack of teacher autonomy. 

What I didn’t realize was that we were being sabotaged by the very people selling taxpayers the solutions. 

According to a July 2026 report by the Network for Public Education, there’s a direct correlation between academic achievement and per-pupil funding. States that support public schools outperform those that do not. So why is Nevada’s education system still ranked 48th in the nation despite “historic education funding” being passed in 2023?

Because you can’t pour water into a leaky bucket and expect it to hold. The funding was a start, but it wasn’t enough to compensate for the fact that Nevada also aggressively redirects public funds toward “private alternatives” such as charter schools. As the Network for Public Education puts it, “Privatization and disinvestment go hand in hand.”

The groundwork for all this was laid when the President Ronald Reagan’s administration, ahead of his 1984 re-election campaign, convinced Americans that we were A Nation at Risk, public schools were to blame and only Reagan could save us. This report simmered with “apocalyptic rhetoric” and the media seized on it like a dog with a bone because nothing grabs attention better than lines such as “the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity.” 

What A Nation at Risk and major news outlets failed to mention, however, was a statistical sleight of hand called Simpson’s paradox. Students weren’t actually doing worse; more students, not just the privileged few, were taking the Scholastic Aptitude Test. In fact, President George Bush’s own commissioned study concluded that on nearly every measure, scores held steady or improved. But those findings were suppressed, and politicians on both sides of the aisle doubled down on the same flawed premise that public schools were failing America.

Rather than addressing systemic poverty, which we know affects educational outcomes, politicians and corporate philanthropists wasted billions of dollars micromanaging teachers and student learning with policies and programssuch as No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top and Common Core.

And when public schools didn’t crumble under those “reforms” as anticipated, the Council for National Policy (CNP), a conservative network, manufactured a new crisis: convincing the American people that teachers are indoctrinating their children with radical, anti-American ideologies.

The impact of this conspiracy on teacher morale has been brutal. We went from being treated as professionals to villains overnight, pouring ourselves into our work just to be disparaged by the media and pundits who would never survive a day in our shoes.

But sadly, breaking us was the point so they could justify defunding public education, sell parents on charter schools and other private alternatives under the guise of “school choice,” and “save” Americans from the crisis they created.

In 2017, the council provided the Trump administration with a blueprint to return education to “free-market private schools, church schools, and home schools as the normative American practice.” This “Education Reform Report” became the foundation of Chapter 11 of Project 2025. 

And while we haven’t seen every part of their mandate unfold in Nevada, there are red flags. Clark County schools are seeing their lowest enrollment numbers in decades, with many parents opting for alternatives, citing “lax classroom discipline” and “poorly performing public schools.” One would assume lower enrollment could have been an opportunity for the district to address parents’ concerns by decreasing class sizes and offering more individualized attention. But instead, the district was forced to declare a reduction in force that affects 60 licensed professionals because when students leave, the funding follows the child. 

And where are those tax dollars going? To Academica-managed schools, and more ideologically driven ones such as Founders Classical Academy, run by Hillsdale College, whose leadership has ties to the CNP network that wrote the privatization blueprint. 

The Clark County School District is not alone. Data indicate that by 2031, public school enrollment is projected to decline nationwide. 

This begs the question: If by 2031, more students are enrolled in charter schools, then aren’t charter schools just glorified public schools without the safeguard of public oversight? 

That absence of oversight is key when profit is the goal. It’s in the best interests of management companies to keep costs down. This inevitably leads to shrinking school budgets and compromising standards through raising class sizes, lowering pay and hiring less experienced teachers. And our students? Commodities. 

Which brings us back to square one. But this time, instead of pulling our children out of one free school to attend another free school, parents will be forced to either pay for private education or send their children to a potentially substandard charter school. As we face rising inflation and artificial intelligence replacing jobs, private school tuition is out of reach for most families.

The paradoxes of “school choice” can’t be ignored. Public schools educate every child who walks through the door, including those who need more trauma-informed care, more expensive interventions or who face severe learning challenges. These are often the same students that the “choice schools” didn’t have room for. Comparing the educational outcomes of a school that accepts every child to one that does not is, frankly, illogical, especially since the system is rigged against us: per-pupil funding follows the child while proposed federal budget cuts gut the very resources our students need most: Title I and Title II funding, Individuals with Disabilities Education Act protections and ample resources for arts education and mental health services. 

Healthcare in this country is run for profit, yet we have the highest maternal mortality rate of any high-income nation. We don’t blame doctors or hospitals. We point to the economic disparities built into a broken system. Let’s not repeat the same mistake with our children’s education.

Kelly Edgar taught in the Clark County School District for 25 years, specializing in music education.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Disruption, Education Industry, Ethics, For-Profit, Nevada, Privatization, School Choice

Texas Vouchers Subsidize Students Already Attending Private Schools

By dianeravitch
July 10, 2026 //
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When Governor Greg Abbott sold his voucher program, he talked about helping the poorest kids escape public schools and choose better private schools; he talked about enabling those with disabilities go to private schools. He talked about spreading opportunity through school choice.

Some moderate Republicans and rural Republicans supported their community public schools, and they repeatedly voted down Abbott’s vouchers. So Abbott used the millions of dollars contributed by Pennsylvania billionaire to replace them with conservatives who backed vouchers.

But now the data are in on which students are getting vouchers. Three-quarters of them are private school students. This is similar to what happened in other states. Vouchers are not about helping public school students; the reality is that they subsidize kids who never attended public schools.

Maryam Ahmed of The Dallas Morning News reported:

As Texas’ $1 billion school choice program approaches rollout this fall, preliminary data shows most of the program’s applicants were already enrolled in private schools, fewer applications came from families in poorer districts, and less that 30 students with special needs got the top award amount of $30,000.

The Dallas Morning News analyzed data from the Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts, which runs the Texas Education Freedom Account program.

The first year of TEFA has exposed key challenges voucher programs have faced nationwide: insufficient funding for some families to make the move to expensive private schools, difficulties for special education students finding private schools that can support their needs, and minimal benefits for lower-income and rural families.

Since similar data are reported in every state that has no income limits, it’s reasonable to conclude that the transfer of public money to kids in religious and private schools is a feature of school choice, not a bug.

Out of 5.4 million students enrolled in Texas public schools, 275,000 applied for vouchers. The legislation, passed last year, offers students $10,474 while disabled students can receive up to $30,000. Homeschooled students can get $2,000. Median private school tuition is about $9,400, not including books and transportation. Elite private schools charge much more.

Now we learn that the purpose of the voucher program was to “ease the burden” on families already paying for private school, not to help kids in public school:

TEFA spokesperson Travis Pillow said the program’s goal is not to “lure away” public school students but make private school affordable across the board. Many families with children in private school make major sacrifices to keep them there, Pillow said, and TEFA eases that burden….

Out of 5.45 million public school students in Texas, only about 68,000 even applied for TEFA — barely one percent. Half of those students were awarded funds, as of June 16 records provided to The Dallas Morning News, but more could drop out of the program if they can’t find a school to fit their needs.

But even a small drop in public school enrollment leads to budget cuts.

Florida’s voucher program has ballooned to more than $4 billion dollars since it was implemented in 2023, taking up nearly a quarter of the state’s public school fund.  In Arizona, which has the country’s oldest universal school choice program, vouchers contributed to a $1.4 billion budget shortfall in 2024…

In Texas, public school districts receive a $6,215 allotment per student from the state, meaning fewer public school students directly translates to less funding…

About one in four of the voucher awards went to students with disabilities but only 20 in the entire state received the top award of $25,000-$30,000. However, private schools are not bound by federal law and may deny admission to students with disabilities. It is anticipated that many who received vouchers may return to their public school, where they are guaranteed admission and services.

If the state’s public education budget becomes strained, said Daniel DeMatthews, an educational policy professor at the University of Texas at Austin, lower-income and rural districts would likely be hit hardest.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Education Reform, Lies, School Choice, Separation of church and state, Texas, Vouchers

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 //
2

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 //
3

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

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

By dianeravitch
June 15, 2026 //
7

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

Scott Maxwell: Voucher Schools in Florida Should Be Accountable

By dianeravitch
June 11, 2026 //
9

Scott Maxwell is a columnist for the Orlando Sentinel. In this column, he argues that voucher schools in Florida should not be allowed to dodge accountability. And, he explains, they are completely unaccountable. The state Constitution requires that the state provide high-quality education, which voucher schools do not. He neglects to notice that the state Constitution states that no public money should go to religious schools. Not a penny, but most vouchers go to religious schools.

What is more, the voters of Florida rejected an effort to strip that language from the state Vonstitution in 2012.

Scott Maxwell wrote:

Teachers and parents have filed a landmark lawsuit challenging the legality of Florida’s billion-dollar school voucher system

The argument at the heart of their suit is that Florida’s constitution requires tax dollars be spent on “high-quality” education. Yet Florida’s voucher system is a black-hole of accountability, sometimes paying for kids to go to “schools” that are total disasters — where teachers lack degrees, inflate grades and use curriculum that is rubbish.

I’m not convinced the teachers and parents will win this lawsuit. In fact, I doubt they will. Similar challenges have been unsuccessful. And Gov. Ron DeSantis has done a pretty thorough job of stacking the courts with political allies, especially at the appellate level.

But I know for a fact the teachers and parents have a point. In fact, It’s inarguable. This newspaper has spent nearly a decade documenting voucher schools that failed children.

Often, the parents themselves were shocked and outraged to learn that schools were failing their kids and that there was little to no accountability.

The Sentinel’s multi-year “Schools Without Rules” investigation into voucher (or “scholarship”) schools found some schools employed teachers that lacked any teaching credentials or college degrees.

Some were such financial disasters, they shut down in the middle of the year, stranding families. (One in Orlando was evicted from a commercial complex where a neighboring tenant was “Drug Tests R Us.”)

Some refused to serve children with disabilities, whether it was autism or reliance on a wheelchair. Even more refused to teach children who are gay or had gay parents. These were schools eager for the public money but unwilling to serve all the public. None of this was discreet. Some had written policies saying that they wouldn’t serve children with Down’s syndrome or who uttered the sentence: “I am gay.”

Some schools taught junk science and bogus history, suggesting that dinosaurs and humans roamed the earth together and downplaying slavery and segregation.

And at some schools, parents were so appalled at what they found that they reported to the state things like “Cleaning lady substituting for teacher” and “I don’t see any evidence of academics.”

If you think any of that represents “high quality” education, you might also believe the mini tacos at 7-Eleven are five-star dining.

Many private schools that accept vouchers do stellar jobs and fill niche needs that public schools have historically struggled to meet. But too many taxpayer-funded schools are total trainwrecks. And the reason is that Florida has very few standards for voucher schools.

That is, in fact, the crux of the lawsuit, which lists about 20 different things that public schools are required to do by state law, but which all voucher schools are not.

Like providing certain levels of school safety staffing and having threat-management plans in place. Offering vetted curriculum and providing transportation. Hiring qualified teachers. And publicly posting test scores from state assessments that show whether students are actually learning anything. Public schools must do all of that.

The argument from choice-without-standards supporters is that parents should be able to choose any education they want for their kids without exception.

There are two problems with that argument.
One is that no other government-funded voucher program works that way — and for good reason. We don’t let recipients of food vouchers use them on Twinkies and Mountain Dew. This is public money meant to provide nutritional sustenance. So there are guidelines. The same way there is for Medicaid and Medicare. You don’t get to spent public money that’s meant to fulfill a public purpose on anything you like just because you invoke cries of “freedom” or “choice.”

The other problem is that using this money to provide “high quality” education isn’t optional. It’s part of the Florida Constitution — a point the lawsuit addresses when it says: “… choice does not change the Constitution. When public funds are used to educate a child, that child is entitled to the same level of educational opportunities, the same quality standards, and the same basic protections.”

You can certainly make the argument that some public schools have failed some students. Do you know how we know that? Because these schools were required by law to disclose their test scores, standards, hiring practices and curriculum.
In fact, newspapers in Florida were often the ones that exposed problems at public schools.

And most anytime we did, public officials would spring to action and agree reform was needed.
Yet most every time we’ve exposed problems in taxpayer-funded voucher schools, state lawmakers leaders looked the other way.
The most pathetic part of all this is that it’s easily fixable.

Florida could still offer “choice,” but also demand that any schools that receive public money meet basic standards. Hire qualified teachers. Post the results of nationally-normed standardized test scores and graduation rates. And ban discrimination.

“To me, this is just common sense,” said Stephanie Vanos, an Orange County School Board member who also happens to be an Orlando mom and joined the lawsuit as a plaintiff in that capacity. “I’m not saying they need the thousands of pages of rules that apply to us, but we need a common-sense set of rules that should apply to everybody.”

She is, of course, right. Schools that do good jobs shouldn’t be afraid of accountability and transparency. Most aren’t.

In fact, ask yourself these basic questions:
Why shouldn’t parents and students be guaranteed qualified teachers?

Why shouldn’t taxpayers be able to see what kind of test scores are being produced at all the schools they’re funding?

And why shouldn’t taxpayers be assured that the money they’re spending is actually providing “quality” education, as the Constitution requires?
Better yet, ask those who defend the status quo.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Curriculum, DeSantis, Education Industry, Elections, Florida, For-Profit, Fraud, Racism, Religion, School Choice, Separation of church and state, Vouchers
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