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Arizona: Home-Schoolers Used Voucher Money to Pay for Condoms, Jewelry, Video Games, Dog Training

By dianeravitch
March 9, 2026 //
2

An audit of Arizona voucher funds for home-schools demonstrated that 20% of the purchases by parents were unallowable, spent on consumer items that had nothing to do with education, unless you consider condoms “educational.”

Of some 384,000 transactions from December 2024 to September 2025, about 84,000 were spent on non-educational purposes.

One way to stop this misuse of public funds is to bar those who misspend public funds from participating.

Alexandra Hardle of The Arizona Republic reported:

Audit data shows over 20% of vendor purchases made with Empowerment Scholarship Account dollars could be barred under the program’s guidelines.

The program, run through the Arizona Department of Education allows expenses for homeschooled students under $2,000 to be automatically approved by the department and later audited. But that audit could come months later, a process that Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne has blamed on understaffing.

The program was initially designed primarily for students with disabilities but was expanded to be available for all students in 2022. Many homeschooled students are eligible to receive about $7,000 per year through the program, though money allocated to special needs students can be much higher.

Records released by the Arizona Attorney General’s Office show Arizonans have spent millions of dollars on expenses that appear to fall afoul of the program’s guidelines. A risk-based audit performed by the Department of Education found that 20% of purchases were “unallowed.” A risk-based audit is a financial audit that examines where problems are most likely to happen. In this case, the audit examined a random sample of purchases made through the ESA program.

When the department’s risk-based audit detects “unallowed” purchases, it then performs a full audit of the account to review the account holder’s other purchases. Of the accounts that received a full audit, 46% of the purchases made by those account holders were “unallowable.”

Attorney General Kris Mayes, a Democrat seeking reelection this fall, in a January letter to the Department of Education asked for tighter guardrails on expense approval.

“ADE must do more on the front end to prevent unallowable purchases, and it must do so immediately,” Mayes said in her letter.

Horne declined to comment to The Arizona Republic, saying his office would soon send a letter in response to Mayes.

The Department of Education’s ESA handbook outlines all expenses that cannot be paid for by the program. While many of these expenses slip through the cracks, Horne said in September the department has already recovered about $600,000 during the auditing process.

But Mayes criticized the policy of automatically approving some purchases and auditing them later. That’s given people a “road map for how to game the system,” Mayes said.

What were the ‘unallowable’ ESA purchases discovered in the audit?

One of the heftier purchases was $7,500 in video gaming equipment.

Parents also paid themselves for homeschooling, which is prohibited under the program. One parent paid themselves $5,700, while others kept the payments to below $2,000.

Other expenses forbidden by the ESA handbook included coffee machines, $2,000 in Visa gift cards, a $1,700 diamond necklace and dog training. There were also trips to Mexico, a Kohl’s gift card, scuba diving equipment, swimming pools, condoms and lubrication.

Categories Accountability, Arizona, Ethics, Fraud, Funding, Home Schooling, Vouchers

The Very Important Texas Primaries: What’s Next?

By dianeravitch
March 5, 2026 //
7

As many of you know, I was born and raised in Texas. I grew up in Houston, third of eight children. I went to public schools, then to college in Massachusetts. I have never stopped being a Texan. I live in Brooklyn now but a part of my heart will always be in Texas. So I keep a close watch over developments in my home state.

The victories of James Talarico for Senate and Gina Hinojosa for Governor put Texas Democrats in a good position to turn Texas blue.

Gina Hinojosa coasted to victory in the Democratic primary over seven opponents. Soon after the polls closed, she had 61% of the vote. She will face incumbent Greg Abbot in November.

Talarico won the primary by 52.8% to Crockett’s 45.9%.

(Full disclosure: I contributed to all three campaigns.)

Talarico was a member of the state legislature. He has studied theology and is working towards a Master of Divinity at the Austin Presbyterian Seminary. He hopes to win independents and Trump voters with his deep religious faith and his rhetoric of love and reconciliation.

Under Governor Greg Abbot–now seeking his fourth term–Texas became an extreme MAGA state. Abbot echoes whatever Trump says , or says it first. Abbot is mean and has a stone heart.

Gina Hinojosa swept the Democratic primary for Governor. She is smart, articulate, beautiful, and Hispanic. One of the reasons that Democrats have not won a statewide office since 1994 is low turnout and growing Hispanic support for Trump. Gina was a featured speaker at the last conference of the Network for Public Education in Columbus, Ohio, and she was wonderful! As she explains in her PBS interview, strengthening neighborhood public schools is her top priority.

The Republicans running for Senate will compete in a May run-off. Jon Cornyn, the incumbent, is a reliable vote for Trump but not really MAGA. He seems like a moderate Republican who votes with Trump to protect his hide. Cornyn is running for his fifth term.

His opponent Ken Paxton is Attorney General of Texas, and it’s fair to say that he’s been scarred by scandals. His wife is a state senator. He cheated on her. Some of his staff blew the whistle on him and said he took payoffs from men he was investigating. The Republican House impeached him; the Republican Senate cleared him, thanks to generous donations by hard-right MAGA billionaires.

Paxton and Cornyn will have a runoff in May.

Talarico will be a strong candidate for the Senate. Hinojosa will be a strong candidate against Abbot, if Texans are sufficiently sick of pay-to-play politics.

The outcome will depend on turnout. Right now, Texas is run by a handful of oil billionaires. They want low taxes and minimal public services. They are Christian nationalists who love money and power.

If Talarico can attract the support of non-MAGA Republicans and if Gina can bring Hispanic voters to the polls, Texas will flip blue.

To learn why Gina Hinojosa ran for governor and what she wants to do, watch this excellent interview.

Watch Gina Hinojosa explain why “we don’t want handouts,” we want the services we paid for.

See Gina Hinojosa speaking at the Network for Public Education conference in April 2025, before the Republican-dominated Texas legislature passed vouchers. The passage of vouchers happened only after Governor Abbot primaried anti-voucher Republicans with the millions given him by billionaire Jeff Yass, the richest man in Pennsylvania.

To see Talarico in action, watch him talk on the power of love.

See Talarico on how the worst people quote Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on MLK Day and then violate his teachings every other day of the year.

Talarico on Christian nationalists, who–he says–are “more committed to the love of power than to the power of love.”

I love these two and will support them both. There will be a tidal wave of money pouring into Texas Republican coffers from other states to try to stop these two exciting Democrats!

Categories Vouchers, Texas, Democrats, Religion, Republicans, Politics, Love, Corruption, Cruelty, Elections, Extremism

Peter Greene: West Virginia Reduces Accountability for Private Schools That Get Public $$$

By dianeravitch
March 3, 2026 //
2

The introduction of vouchers for private and religious schools is accompanied by certain lies.

  1. Vouchers won’t cost much
  2. Vouchers will save poor kids from failing public schools.
  3. Voucher schools will be more accountable than public schools.
  4. Vouchers won’t hurt public schools.

Every one of those claims is a lie. Vouchers always cost far more than was predicted. In every state, most vouchers are claimed by students who are already in enrolled nonpublic schools. Voucher schools typically are completely unaccountable for their use of public funds.

Peter Greene offers the example of West Virginia.

West Virginia passed a law to allow taxpayer-funded school vouchers in 2021, and they’ve been tweaking it ever since. They opened it up to more and more students. Consequently, the costs of the program are ballooning: when the law was passed, supporters declared it would cost just $23 million in its first year, and now the estimate for the coming school year is $245 to $315 million.

With that kind of money on the line, you’d think that the state might want to put some accountability and oversight rules in place. You know– so the taxpayers know what they’re getting for their millions of dollars.

But you would be backwards. Instead, the legislature is considering a bill to reduce accountability for private and religious schools.
SB 216, the Restoring Private Schools Act of 2026, is short and simple. It consists of the current accountability rules for private, parochial or church schools, or schools of a religious order– with a whole lot of rules crossed out.

What are some of the rules that the legislation proposes to eliminate for private and religious schools? Here’s the list of rules slated for erasure:

  • The requirement for a minimum number of hours of instruction.
  • The requirement to maintain attendance and disease immunization records for each enrolled student.
  • The requirement to provide, upon request of county superintendent, a list of the names and addresses of all students in the school between ages 7 and 16.
  • The requirement to annually administer a nationally normed standardized test in the same grades as required for public schools. Ditto the requirement to assess the progress of students with special needs.
  • Since there’s no test requirement, there is also no requirement to provide testing data to parents and the state department of education.
  • The requirement to establish curriculum objectives, “the attainment of which will enable students to develop the potential for becoming literate citizens.” Scrap also the requirement for an instructional program to meet that goal.
  • So under this bill, private schools would not have to have a plan for educating students, would not have to spend a minimum amount of time trying to educate students, and would not have to provide the state with any evidence that they are actually educating students.
  • The bill does add one bit of new language:
  • As autonomous entities free of governmental oversight of instruction, private, parochial, or church, schools may implement such measures for instruction and assessment of pupils as leadership of such schools may deem appropriate.

In other words, private religious schools accepting taxpayer-funded vouchers may do whatever the hell they want.

The bill is sponsored by Senator Craig Hart. Hart calls himself a school teacher, and is mentioned as an agriculture/FFA teacher, though I could find no evidence of where he teaches. He was elected in 2024 after running as a hardcore MAGA. He has pushed for requiring Bibles in school, among other MAGA causes.

Said Eric Kerns, superintendent of Faith Christian Academy, “It just gives private schools a lot more flexibility in what they would be able to do as far as assessment and attendance and school days. Our accountability is that if people aren’t satisfied with the education they’re receiving, then they go to another private school or back to the public school or they homeschool.” Also known as “No accountability at all.” A school is not a taco truck.

As reported by Amelia Ferrell Knisely at West Virginia Watch, at least one legislator tried to put some accountability back in the bill. GOP Sen. Charles Clements tried to put back a nationally-recognized testing requirement and share results with parents. Said Clements

I want to see private schools survive, but I think we have to have guardrails of some sort. There’s a lot of money around, and it’s a way for people to come in and not produce a product we need … I think it just leaves the door open for problems.

Exactly. And his amendment was rejected. The School Choice Committee chair said the school could still use a real test if they wanted to, but the bill would allow more flexibility to choose newer test options; I’m guessing someone is pulling for the Classical Learning Test, the conservative unwoke anti-SAT test.


Democrat Mike Woelfel tried to put the immunization record back; that was rejected, too.

Look, the Big Standardized Test is a terrible measure of educational quality, and it should be canceled for everyone. But for years the choice crowd promised that once choice was opened up, we’d get a market driven by hard data. Then it turned out that the “hard data” showed that voucher systems were far worse than public schools, and the solution has not been to make the voucher system work better, but to silence any data that reveals a voucher system failure.

The goal is not higher quality education. The goal is public tax dollars for private religious schools– but only if the private religious schools can remain free of regulation, oversight, or any restrictions that get in the way of their power to discriminate freely against whoever they wish to discriminate against.

This is not about choice. It’s about taxpayer subsidies for private religious schools, and it’s about making sure those schools aren’t accountable to anyone for how they use that money. It’s another iteration of the same argument we’ve heard across the culture–that the First Amendment should apply because I am not free to fully exercise my religion unless I can unreservedly discriminate against anyone I choose and unless I get taxpayer funding to do it.

We’ve been told repeatedly that the school choice bargain is a trade off– the schools get autonomy in exchange for accountability, but that surely isn’t what’s being proposed here. If West Virginia is going to throw a mountain of taxpayer money at private schools, those schools should be held accountable. This bill promises the opposite; may it die a well-deserved death.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Education Industry, Funding, Hoax, Privatization, Vouchers, West Virginia

Andy Spears: Vouchers in Arizona Are a Morass of Fraud

By dianeravitch
February 24, 2026 //
8

Andy Spears of The Education Report tells the sad tale of unbridled fraud in Arizona’s voucher program.

In 2018, voters in Arizona overwhelmingly rejected expansion of the state’s voucher program. Despite the decisive vote against vouchers, the legislature made vouchers available to every student, regardless of income or need.

Today about 7-8% of the state’s students use vouchers at an annual cost nearing $1 billion a year.

Most of the voucher students never attended public schools. In other words, the universal voucher program is mostly subsidizing the tuition of students already enrolled in private and religious schools.

He writes:

Save Our Schools Arizona reports on the rampant fraud in that state’s school voucher scheme:

Arizona Republican leaders and Superintendent Tom Horne have long insisted that fraud in Arizona’s ESA voucher program is minimal. “One percent or less,” Horne often has said — but 12News has obtained new public records from Horne’s AZ Dept. of Education (ADE) that tell a very different story. Documents show unallowable purchases — spending explicitly banned under ESA voucher program rules — may account for about 20 percent of transactions. That’s one in five.

In 2025, 12News Investigates revealed parents used ESA voucher funds for non-educational purchases, including: diamond rings, smart TVs, gift cards, large appliances, luxury clothing, and lingerie.

These purchases are among more than 100 prohibited items listed in the ESA Parent Handbook. Accounts that make such purchases are supposed to be suspended or removed from the program by the ADE. However, according to 12News, “the spending continues as Horne contends his department uses risk-based auditing that will eventually catch wrongdoing.”

84,000 unallowable purchases??? 12News found an ADE memo covering ESA voucher spending from December 2022 through last September found that of 385,000 ESA purchases reviewed by Horne’s ADE, nearly 84,000 were deemed unallowable — or more than 20 percent of all transactions that should have been refused by the ADE!

Categories Accountability, Arizona, Education Industry, Fraud, Vouchers

Stephen Dyer: Vouchers’ Growth in Ohio Will Be Their Demise

By dianeravitch
February 23, 2026 //
0

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.

He writes:

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.

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Ohio, School Choice, Vouchers

New Hampshire: Legislators Reject Testing for Voucher Students

By dianeravitch
February 16, 2026 //
3

Here is a conundrum: Policymakers and pundits insist that public school students and teachers must be held accountable or they won’t make any progress. Students must regularly tested to make sure they are learning prescribed curriculum.

So-called “education reformers” are all in favor of standards, tests, and accountability. Such a strategy, they insist, drives higher test scores.

But when it comes to voucher students, the “reformers” fall silent. Voucher students don’t need accountability, don’t need testing, don’t need state standards.

Why the double standards? Why should voucher students get public money and be exempt from state testing?

New Hampshire just concluded that debate. Democrats proposed that voucher students take the same tests as public school students. Republicans opposed the bill.

It was defeated.

Garry Rayno of IndepthNH.org described the face-off:

CONCORD — The House defeated a proposal to require Education Freedom Account students evaluation results be reported to the Department of Education.

House Bill 1716 would require the results of national standardized and state assessment testing for EFA students to be reported to the department, along with an assessment of a student’s portfolio by a certified teacher.

The bill would also require the department to develop guidelines for assessing the portfolios and what information is needed in order to progress to the next grade level.

The department would review all the data to determine academic proficiency rates for EFA students based on graduation rate, grade level, gender, race, and differentiated aid categories.

The prime sponsor of the bill Rep. Tracy Bricchi, D-Concord, told the House as a former educator for 35 years she does not agree with those who say public education is bad for the country and communities.

“You hear public education is failing and throwing money at it will not improve the outcome,” she said, while the state has spent millions of dollars on the EFA program with no consistent data to support claims it is widely successful.

This bill would provide the data needed to support those claims, Bricchi said, using the three assessment paths in the statute.

It would also tighten the portfolio requirements to ensure clear documentation of student progress, she said.

“If you spend taxpayer funds,” Bricchi said, “you owe it to taxpayers and people to produce clear data to ensure the money is spent (effectively).”

But Rep. Margaret Drye, R-Plainfield, argued state assessment testing is done for students in grades three through eight and one year of high school, while the bill would require testing of every grade level, every year for EFA students.

And she said in public schools parents may opt their child out of assessment testing, but there is no such provision in the HB 1716 for EFA students.

She said a very successful evaluation process has been in place for 40 years for homeschooled students, but is not available in the bill.

The legislation places a burden on 10,000 EFA students that is not on 160,000 public school students, Drye maintained.

But Peggy Balboni, D-Rye, said the success of public schools is determined by the statewide assessment scores, but EFA students do not have to provide that information or other assessments to the Department of Education.

This bill would allow the same public reporting of the results for EFA students, she said.

“All students who are taxpayer funded should be held to the same evaluation reporting standards,” Balboni said. “This will allow the reporting of EFA students’ academic data to determine if indeed the EFA program is widely successful.”
The bill was killed on a 194-166 vote.

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Equity, Hypocrisy, New Hampshire, Vouchers

Mississippi Kills Voucher Bill in 84 Seconds

By dianeravitch
February 12, 2026 //
0

Last week, the state senate in Mississippi considered a bill to authorize vouchers. Governor Tate Reeves was enthusiastic about the bill, and Republicans control both houses in the Legislature. It appeared to be a slam-dunk.

But while the state’s House of Represntatives passed the bill, 17 Republicans defected to oppose it. The voucher bill passed by a narrow margin in the House, 61-59.

The Senate gave the bill short shrift.

It was defeated in committee without a single vote in favor.

The Mississippi Free Press wrote:

Mississippi Sen. Brice Wiggins, R-Pascagoula, entered a motion to vote on advancing the bill to the Mississippi Senate floor. The Republican-led committee held a voice vote on the motion, and none of its members spoke in favor of the bill, including Wiggins.

“The nos have it. The bill dies today,” DeBar declared.

Governor Tate was furious.

Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves, a Republican, harshly criticized DeBar and Republican Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann, the Senate president, for the bill’s defeat in a Facebook post Wednesday morning, saying that after 23 years in office, he had “never been more disappointed in elected officials” than he is now with the Senate Education Committee chairman and the lieutenant governor.

“They killed a Republican legislative priority shared by conservatives all across this country and they worked closely with the Democrats to do it,” Reeves wrote. “Even worse—they tried to do it in the dark and hide it from MS conservatives on a deadline day.”

The Mississippi Democratic Party celebrated the legislation’s failure.

“Today’s vote shows what we can accomplish when we stand together for Mississippi’s children against well-funded special interests,” Mississippi Democratic Party Chairman Rep. Cheikh Taylor, D-Starkville, said in a Tuesday press release. “Our public schools are the cornerstone of every community in this state, and this unanimous rejection sends a clear message: Mississippi will not abandon the students and families who depend on quality public education—no matter how much out-of-state money tries to buy our legislators.”

Public school educators were happy to see the bill die.

“Our concern with HB 2 is that it moves Mississippi away from a shared public commitment to education and toward a model that fragments funding and responsibility,” Union Public School District Superintendent Tyler Hansford said in a Jan. 29 Newton County Appeal opinion article. “Public dollars should be used to sustain public systems that serve all students and communities, not to convert a public good into a marketplace transaction.”

Other parts of the education legislation passed:

On Tuesday afternoon, the House Education Committee passed a $5,000 teacher pay raise that includes an $8,000 pay raise for licensed special education teachers in special education classrooms. That bill, House Bill 1126, also includes a structured cap on school superintendents’ salaries, changes to PERS’ years of service requirements, an increase to the Mississippi Student Funding Formula base student cost and a pay raise for school attendance officers’ starting salaries.

The Senate passed three education bills on Jan. 7: a $2,000 teacher pay raise bill, legislation to bring Mississippi Public Employees’ Retirement System retirees to the classroom and a bill making it easier to transfer from one public school district to another. DeBar said at the time that he would like to expand the Senate’s proposed pay raise to $5,000. All three bills await action in the House.

Mississippi Today reported:

The House’s education bill that includes wide expansion of school choice policies is dead, its fate decided after 84 seconds of deliberation by a Senate panel.

But as the House leadership and proponents of school choice have continued their press, reaching a fever-pitch in recent weeks, Senate leaders have made clear they are opposed to voucher programs that siphon money away from public schools — so opposed that there was no discussion when the committee considered the bill.

“I’m not going to discuss it much other than to say we’ve looked at it in depth and … this committee has passed most everything (else in House Bill 2),” Senate Education Committee Chairman Dennis DeBar said.

After DeBar, a Republican from Leakesville, received no questions, Sen. Brice Wiggins, a Republican from Pascagoula, made a motion to vote on the bill.

After a chorus of “nay” from committee members, DeBar said, “The bill dies today.”

Categories Mississippi, Privatization, Vouchers

Josh Cowen: Why Should the Public Pay Tuition at Religious Schools?

By dianeravitch
February 12, 2026 //
4

Over the past few years, vouchers have been endorsed by state legislatures even though the public overwhelmingly opposes them. Nearly a score of state referenda have been held, and in every single state, voters rejected vouchers. Even voters in red states said NO to vouchers.

Voters don’t want to pay for tuition at private and religious schools. But legislators ignore their votes. In Arizona, voters rejected vouchers by 65-35%. But the legislature passed a voucher bill anyway, and the cost to subsidize these nonpublic schools is $1 billion a year.

Today’s evangelists for subsidizing religious schools have chosen to ignore the admonitions of the Founding Fathers, who made clear their opposition to state-funded religion. When Thomas Jefferson wrote about “separation of church and state,” he was referencing a widely held principle.

Josh Cowen recently wrote about this issue on his Substack blog:

Since the U.S. Supreme Court rolled back fifty years of national reproductive freedom in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization in 2022, the Christian Right has turned to another long-held priority: an eventual Court ruling that states must fund religious education.

Over the past few weeks, efforts to create religious charter schools have seen new life. Charter schools are public schools operated outside of the traditional district framework. They can be independently managed by a non-profit or, in some states, for-profit management group, or they can be part of larger networks of charter providers. There are roughy 8,000 charter schools across the country, serving nearly 4 million students.

Blurring Public and Private

In mid-2025, a case called St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School v. Drummond deadlocked at the Supreme Court, 4-4. It returned back to Oklahoma, where that state’s highest court had invalidated efforts by a Catholic-run provider to operate a virtual charter school. Had the Court ruled in St. Isidore’s favor, it would have effectively created the nation’s first church-run public school.

But Justice Amy Coney Barrett recused herself, reportedly because her best friend, a law professor named Nicole Garnett, had worked extensively on the legal defense for the Catholic charter school (Side note: while I’m glad Barrett recused herself, notice that the one conservative woman on the Court has held herself to a higher ethical standard than right-wing guys like Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito).

The Court’s 4-4 ruling was less a definitive position and more an artifact of the small, insular nature of conservative—and especially Catholic conservative—American legal networks.
Now, efforts to create a Jewish charter school in Oklahoma, and Christian public schools in Colorado and Tennessee are taking new shape.

Technically, these cases operate in a separate stream of legal theory from school voucher jurisprudence. Vouchers are simply taxpayer subsidies for private schools—either through the tax code or directly through state funds. And since 2002’s Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, their application to religious schools has been constitutional. Three voucher-related cases since 2017—Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia v. Comer (2017), Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue (2020) and Carson v. Makin (2022, 3 days before Dobbs)—have extended protections to religious schools in state voucher systems.

Basically, once states use public dollars to subsidize private providers of a certain social service (such as education), they can’t limit those providers to non-religious organizations.

But for now, state’s don’t have to provide voucher funding to parents. It’s just that if they do fund vouchers, they must allow vouchers to be spent at religious schools too.

This connects to the question of religious charter schools because although charter schools are legally public entities, the organizations operating them in most cases are private. In theory, the arrangements governing these groups are similar to situations where a school district contracts with a private transportation company for their buses, or a cleaning company for their buildings. Except that with charter schools, the contracted party typically provides instructional materials and even often supplies the teachers.

What right-wing activists want is for the Supreme Court to say that states can’t prevent religious organizations from running public schools as part of a charter agreement
And in that, they are taking one tactical approach in a broader legal and political strategy to simply require states to fund religious instruction.

Establishment and Free Exercise

Spurred partly by new “education savings accounts” spreading in red states (aka vouchers, with additional allowable expenses beyond tuition), a vast network of conservative Christian homeschoolers is pushing for new legal rights. Including mandatory subsidies for their homeschools.

And Betsy DeVos, the billionaire and former U.S. Education Secretary, has made no secret of her desire to see the Supreme Court overturn more than a century of state “Blaine Amendments” prohibiting public dollars spent on religious schools. That would basically force all states to pay for some form of religious instruction.

All of this is possible in large part due to the efforts of Leonard Leo, the Catholic super-fixer of right-wing judicial politics all-but-responsible for the Court’s current conservative majority. Leo has made clear that following Dobbs, state-funded religious education is his next major project in the federal judiciary. And he’s enlisting the Alliance Defending Freedom (the main litigation group in Dobbs) to help lead the way. Beyond garden-variety culture warring, this is partly what the sustained effort to holler about LGBTQ and especially trans-students in public schools is about.

Meanwhile, brand new guidance from what’s left of the U.S. Department of Education is informing public schools across the country that federal dollars will now be tied to expansive interpretations of the right for school personnel to pray during the day in schools. So long as they do not technically compel students to pray at lunch or at the start of the school day, teachers and school leaders may choose to lead their students in prayer.

The end-game here is to de-emphasize the first part of the First Amendment—the Establishment Clause prohibiting government from establishing a single religion—and to emphasize the second part, the Free Exercise Clause.

The argument pushed by DeVos, Leo, ADF and their allies is that by providing taxpayer support only for secular public schools, states are putting undue hardship on families who see religious education as a fundamental part of their free exercise of faith but must pay out-of-pocket for it.

What’s at Stake

It’s possible—even necessary—to object to all this without attacking faith. I’m a Christian man myself, looking forward to the season of reflection of Lent that begins next week.

But church-based public schools are the plan on the Right. And although it’s mostly a battle that will take place in the courts, it’s also a battle that’ll take place in legislatures and in the court of public opinion. And those venues are determined by elections and by political organizing.

When I argue that Democrats have to get serious about improving public schools as part of defending public schools, I’m not just making an argument about campaign strategy (though I’m making that argument too).

What’s at stake here is that the American Right is obsessed with schools, and with carving more and more dollars out to subsidize religious education. And that’s going to be what happens without countering that objective with a bold, sustained vision for educational opportunity for every child.

Categories Accountability, Arizona, Funding, Privatization, Religion, Separation of church and state, Vouchers

Bernie Sanders Speaks Out Against Vouchers

By dianeravitch
February 11, 2026 //
4

Blogger Meg White posted on her WordPress blog (@reflectionsined) about Senator Bernie Sanders’ opposition to vouchers, which are overwhelmingly used by students who are already enrolled in private schools and are free to discriminate. The Trump administration has passed voucher legislation and is encouraging the spread of vouchers. In theory, vouchers enable poor students to transfer to better schools. In practice and in reality, vouchers are a subsidy for the rich.

Meg is an advocate for public schools and co-author of a valuable book about desegregation in New Orleans and how it affected one school: William Frantz Public School: A Story of Race, Resistance, Resiliency, and Recovery in New Orleans.

White writes:

Last week, Senator Bernie Sanders (D-VT) released a report that addresses the federal school voucher program. In the report, Sanders charges that “The Trump administration’s school privatization agenda threatens our nation’s public schools and harms working-class students, students with disabilities, and students from diverse religious backgrounds” (forbes.com). Sanders is a ranking member of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee (HELP).

Sanders said, “President Trump and his billionaire campaign contributors have been working overtime to create a two-tier education system in America: private schools for the wealthy and well-connected and severely under-funded public schools for low-income and working-class students. That is unacceptable. This report makes clear that vouchers are being used to benefit private schools that reject students because they have a disability or because of their religion, and benefit some of the wealthiest families in America. Trump’s voucher program will only make a bad situation even worse (sanders.senate.gov).

The report analyzed state-level school voucher programs, including 111 SGOs and 1,600 voucher-accepting private schools across eleven states. 

The report finds that school voucher programs:

  • Subsidize private education for the rich. School vouchers, on average, cover just 39% of middle school private school tuition across the sampled states. Even with a private school voucher, tuition prices are often out of reach for working-class families, meaning that the vouchers function as a subsidy to the rich who can already afford to pay for private education.
  • Allow private schools to systematically deny admission to students with disabilities, limit how many students with disabilities they serve, only serve children with certain types of disabilities or charge extra tuition. While public schools must provide all students with the same opportunities to learn and excel, 48% of private schools analyzed in this report choose not to provide all students with disabilities with the services, protections and rights provided to those students in public schools under the IDEA.
  • Enable private schools to discriminate against students based on their religion. This report finds that despite the fundamental right of freedom of religion enshrined in our constitution, voucher programs benefit private schools that discriminate against students based on their religious beliefs. Specifically, 17% of private schools reviewed in this report charge different tuition rates based on the family’s religious beliefs.
  • Benefit private schools that lack basic credentialing, accountability and transparency requirements. Fewer than half of states reviewed require private schools to be accredited, while even fewer require student learning assessments. Unacceptably, only two states require teacher credentials in private schools receiving vouchers (sanders.senate.gov).

“Bottom line, in my view, we should be strengthening and expanding public education, the foundation of American democracy, where Black and White and Latino, rich and poor kids come together in one room” rather than privatizing public education, Sanders said (k-12.com).

The report comes ahead of a HELP Committee hearing where Arizona Education Association President Marisol Garcia will testify about the harms of private school vouchers in her state, which has the nation’s largest universal school voucher program and is a cautionary tale for the rest of the nation. The state is now spending nearly $1 billion annually on private school vouchers, while public schools are being forced to shut down (sanders.senate.gov).Researchers found that the use of vouchers in Arizona is highest in affluent school districts, and lowest in poorer school districts. More than half of voucher students came from the wealthiest quarter of zip codes in the state, with median incomes ranging from $81,000 to $178,000. Most of those students have never attended public schools (azmirror.com).

After Florida cleared the way in 2023 for any family in the state to get a taxpayer-funded school voucher regardless of income, students signed up in droves. Enrollment in the voucher program has almost doubled to half a million children. But by the end of the 2024-25 school year, the program cost $398 million more than expected. When students switched between public schools and voucher-funded programs, tax dollars did not move with them as lawmakers had promised. “On any given day, Florida’s education department did not know where 30,000 students were going to school and could not account for the $270 million in taxpayer funds it took to support them, according to the state Senate Appropriations Committee on Pre-K-12 Education” (msn.com). in 2023, of the 122,895 new students who signed up for vouchers, 69% (84,505) were already in private school, 13% (16,096) came from public schools, and the remainder were new kindergarteners (ncpecoalition.org).

According to the Arkansas Department of Education, 95% of the participants in the state’s universal voucher program had never attended public schools before receiving a voucher  (ncpecoalition.org).

Most students in Indiana’s voucher program come from well-off families. During the 2022-2023 school year, voucher recipients were more likely to come from families that made more than $100,000 per year than families that made less than $50,000 per year (the74million.org).

Since Ohio expanded its voucher program to wealthy families, the percentage of low-income students using vouchers in Cleveland fell from 35% to 7%. Now, most Ohio voucher students did not attend public schools before they took a voucher: the percentage of voucher students statewide who had already attended a private school in the year prior jumped from 7% in 2019 to almost 55% in 2023 (ncpecoalition.org).

State-provided data shows that about two-thirds of students receiving vouchers in Iowa’s new statewide program were already attending private schools before getting taxpayer money for tuition. Only about 13% of voucher recipients had ever previously attended a public school (ncpecoalition.org).

Savannah Newhouse, Department of Education Press Secretary commented, “Opponents of President Trump’s Education Freedom Tax Credit are quick to lecture about equity and fairness, but they’re fighting to keep families trapped in failing government-run schools and environments that don’t meet kids’ needs. The reality is this historic tax credit, funded entirely from private philanthropic dollars, puts parents in the driver’s seat—supporting scholarships that can be used for tutoring at public schools, tuition, and essential services for students with disabilities. Expanding school choice levels the playing field so that every family, no matter their income or needs, can better prepare their child for success”. (forbes.com).

Sure, because it’s working so well.

Public Schools in the U.S. educate 90% of the children. Strengthening and supporting public education is essential to maintaining a fair and equitable society. As Sanders’ report illustrates, universal voucher programs serve as a taxpayer-funded subsidy for the wealthy, leaving working-class families behind. Diverting billions of dollars to unregulated private schools not only creates massive budget shortfalls but also destabilizes neighborhood schools that serve the vast majority of American children.

These are my reflections for today.

If you like what you’re reading, consider sharing and following my blog via email.

@reflectionsined

Categories Education Industry, Privatization, Religion, Republicans, Separation of church and state, Supporting public schools, Vouchers

Nancy Bailey: Will School Choice Kill School Sports?

By dianeravitch
February 10, 2026 //
5

Nancy Bailey is a retired educator and a dedicated ally of public schools. She understands the importance of public schools as the heart of communities, which bring parents together and teach citizenship.

In many communities, Friday night lights are an important civic ritual. Why should they be dimmed?

In this post, she voices a concern that many parents and educators share: Will school choice kill school sports?

Bailey writes:

Americans love sports, but what happens to athletic programs when democratic public schools close? Privatizing public education, so-called school choice, means drastic changes, as school officials grapple with the effects of school choice legislation.

Communities rally behind high school football in the fall, basketball during the winter, and track and field in the spring. Public schools might offer swimming, soccer, and other sports, critical for helping young people obtain college scholarships. Even though they aren’t easy to obtain, about 180,000 NCAA D1 and D2 student-athletes earn athletic scholarships each year.

School choice, including charter schools, vouchers, homeschooling, and open enrollment, alters who plays sports and undermines community pride in public schools. Defunding public schools ruins sports programs. Which students get access? Will only the wealthiest private schools get sports?

In 2023, West Virginia headlined How lawmakers helped ruin high school football in West Virginia reflecting on game “blowouts” in that state. When private schools corral all the best players, it changes the competition. It also makes for boring games. Brooke High Coach Mac McLean, whose team always struggled in the AAA class, said it’s only going to get worse: The rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer.

School choice crusaders seem not to have thought through what happens with sports. Olivia Nutter recently wrote in Athletics Directors 411:

Proponents of school choice argue that parents should be free to choose what’s best for their children, including athletic opportunities. But that freedom raises difficult questions about fairness and competitive balance. If top talent continually migrates to a handful of programs, the very structure of high school sports could change, creating a system where access to success depends less on effort and more on ZIP code flexibility.

Consider that between 2010–11 and 2021–22, 4,000+ public secondary schools closed due to declining enrollment, unaffordable housing, lower birth rates, and an overall defunding of public education by school privatizers seeking to create schools for profit.

Parental school choice is also deceptive. Private schools, not parents, ultimately choose students. Gifted athletes will likely be welcome at a private school that prioritizes sports. Wealthy private school teams will compete with other private schools, but what about students who never got swept up in the choice program, never got identified in their poor charter schools, or in their homeschools?

Undiscovered students who haven’t yet shown their prowess in sports may not have the opportunity to do so, relegated to a fledgling public school that has lost its resources, a charter school, or homeschool, where they remain unrecognized. What if they never get the opportunity to practice sports under the eyes of a good coach?

Charter schools often lack the budget or incentive to offer quality sports programs. Sports facilities, football fields, tracks, or access to swimming pools is costly. Some may rent facilities or partner with community organizations for practice, but this can be expensive.

States like Florida allow charter school and homeschool students (7.d) to participate in traditional public school sports, but this is controversial. It dismisses the community school pride factor, a significant all-American feature of school sports. If parents don’t want their child at that public school, take tax dollars elsewhere; why get the advantage of a public school sports program? What happens when the school ultimately closes?

Missouri is another state that permits homeschool students to participate in public education sports.

Students might also leave public school sports programs for sports clubs, which have become synonymous with college recruitment across areas, though in football, they appear less so.

Athletic organizations see the problems with school choice. Both the Oklahoma Secondary School Activities Association (OSSAA) and the Alabama High School Athletic Association (AHSAA) ran into difficulties with their states choice programs.

As one parent puts it:

Private schools often have access to resources that public schools do not – such as better facilities, more experienced coaches or even the ability to attract top talent through scholarships. This creates an uneven playing field during playoff competitions. According to a study by The Atlantic (2013), private high school students are over twice as likely as public school students to reach Division I college sports.

Some private schools are small and also lack resources, but will be expected to compete against wealthier private schools.

School board members in Hamilton, Tennessee, voiced concern that the state’s Education Freedom Scholarship, allowing students to attend private schools, siphons desirable athletes from public schools. They worry about a drop in public school attendance, likely related to the school choice program. Sports success skews toward wealthier super schools, leaving fewer high school teams for competition.

Texas exemplifies the problems school choice creates for sports. At 2.22 on the video below they discuss how football, basketball, and track, public school sports programs beloved in that state, could be affected. It might mean laying off school coaching staff.

Cultural overemphasis and concernsabout sports injuries leave critics to advocate for the end of school sports altogether. But athletics are an ingrained American tradition, and it’s hard to see public schools successfully survive without vibrant sports and extracurricular programs.

Sports aren’t only about making future successful athletes, of course. Students benefit physically and mentally, and team sports promote positive socialization and all around good health. Students learn how to win gracefully, build confidence, but also how to lose and accept defeat without always quitting.

But if public education is fully privatized, once unimaginable, public school sports could end. Most Americans are not on board for school choice and want to see better and more support of public schooling. The loss of sports might be added in as a reason to reject school choice. It may be time for pushback and Americans rallying around their democratic public schools. Could it be?

Consider Mississippi where football in small towns is called “the fabric of the community.” Parents worried about their public schools, and the Mississippi legislature recently killed the school choice bill which would have sent public school funding to private schools.

Maybe there’s hope, not only for school sports, team building, but for democratic public schools. Perhaps we’ll soon see a public school renaissance and a great refocus on the greatness of our country and its children and their schools, not only with sports but learning. Now that’s truly a winning idea!

Categories Accountability, Charters, Ethics, Home Schooling, Parents, Students, Vouchers
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