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Andy Spears: Tennessee is Last in the Nation in Spending but Has Plenty of $$ for Vouchers

By dianeravitch
June 25, 2026 //
3

Andy Spears is an experienced journalist who writes a blog called The Education Report, where he revealed that billionaire Jeff Yass is funding a pro-voucher candidate in the race to replace Governor Bill Lee.

Lee pushed hard to enact voucher legislation, and he too benefited from Jeff Yass’s giving. Tennessee public schools are suffering as a result of Republicans’ devotion to vouchers.

Spears writes:

Thanks to Bill Lee’s leadership, Tennessee has gone from 44th in the nation in school funding when he became governor in 2018 to 51st – dead last – as Lee is on his way out this year.

In addition to leading Tennessee to the bottom – $1.9 billion below Mississippi – in school funding, Lee has also led the way to a $300 million private school voucher scheme. 

Lee was helped in his voucher quest by the School Freedom Fund and its top donor, New York billionaire Jeff Yass. Yass’s group spent more than $4 million to support pro-voucher GOP legislative candidates – winning key primaries and delivering the votes to get Lee’s voucher scheme across the finish line.

Now, Yass is taking sides in the race to replace Lee. Yass is the largest single contributor in the gubernatorial race, giving $1 million to a political action committee (PAC) supporting Marsha Blackburn, according to Tennessee Lookout.

Yass is known for his investment in TikTok’s parent company and for being a major financial supporter of President Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign.

He’s now the largest single contributor in Tennessee’s gubernatorial election after donating $1 million to Team Tennessee, a PAC that is backing U.S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn’s bid for the top job.

Blackburn is a vocal advocate for private school vouchers.

Categories Billionaires, Funding, Tennessee, 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

Non-Stop Criticism of Public Schools Contributes to Privatization

By dianeravitch
June 16, 2026 //
6

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

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

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

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

They say in the abstract:

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

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

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

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

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

By dianeravitch
May 19, 2026 //
5

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

Greene writes:

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

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

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

Parents don’t actually get to choose.

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

As reported by Laura Hancock at Cleveland.com:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Peter Greene: Colorado Governor Endorses Schools That Discriminate

By dianeravitch
May 11, 2026 //
5

Peter Greene knows the dirty little secret about vouchers: schools choose, families don’t.

Not only do private and religious schools choose their students, they are free to discriminate against students because of their race, religion, sexual preference, disability, or for any other reason. A religious school can exclude students who are not of the same faith. Any private school may exclude gay students or straight students if their parents are gay.

Governor Jared Polis of Colorado is openly gay, but he embraced Trump’s federal vouchers, which subsidizes private schools that discriminate against him and his children.

He is the first Democratic Governor to sign on to the Trump-McMahon voucher plan. They both hate public schools and are doing their best to defund them. Polis is willing to go along.

Now, New York Governor Kathy Hochul is interested in following Polis’s lead. She thinks that she will win the votes of Orthodox Jews by letting the state pay their tuition. This is truly outrageous for two reasons:

  1. The Orthodox Jews vote Republican. Hochul’s gift won’t change their behavior.
  2. The Orthodox schools have been called out repeatedly for refusing to teach the state curriculum, for teaching students primarily in Hebrew, not English, and for delivering a sub-par education.

Governor Hochul should be ashamed of herself.

Governor Polis, on the other hand, has a long history of disdaining public schools. He personally founded two charter schools.

And on a historical note, I had a personal encounter with Polis in 2010, when he was a member of Congress. I was invited by Representative Rosa DeLauro to meet with the Democratic members of the House Education Committee and discuss my book The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education.

When I finished speaking, then-Rep. Polis announced that my book was “the worst book he had ever read” and tossed it across the table at me. He demanded his money back. Another member of Congress pulled out $20 and bought Polis’s copy of my book.

Categories Bigotry, Budget Cuts, Education Industry, School Choice, Trump, Vouchers

Senator Mark Kelly: We Need Great Public Schools, Not Vouchers

By dianeravitch
May 6, 2026 //
3

Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona is a decorated military veteran and a former astronaut. He recently introduced legislation to roll back Trump’s federal voucher program. The Wall Street Journal denounced Kelly’s proposal, and he responded with this letter to the editor.

He wrote:

Your editorial “Mark Kelly’s Bad Education Choice” (April 18) misses some key facts. We can all agree on one thing: Every parent wants their kid to get a quality education that sets them up to succeed. There’s no better path to the middle class than our public schools. I’m the son of two cops. I went to public schools from kindergarten through the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy. That system gave me a shot, and every kid deserves the same, no matter where they grow up. Massive voucher programs threaten that.

Take my state. Arizona’s universal voucher program now costs about $1 billion a year and is growing. In your editorial, you note that’s only 8% of the state’s education budget, but that billion dollars is forcing real tradeoffs in the state budget, like cuts to community colleges and water infrastructure in a state facing a severe drought. Meanwhile, more than half of voucher recipients were already being privately educated. That means in Arizona hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars are going to subsidize private tuition for families who were already paying for it.

The federal tax credit your editorial defends isn’t free, either. You acknowledge this reality when you criticize clean energy tax credits. With these education tax credits, the cost could reach as high as $50 billion in lost revenue in a single year. That adds to the federal deficit and will likely largely benefit wealthier Americans’ taxes because the credit is nonrefundable. Likewise, because the scholarships can go to households with up to 300% of the area median income, it will subsidize families who can already afford to spend thousands out of pocket to send their kids to private schools.

And public schools across the country will pay a price. When students leave, funding drops. Schools cut programs and staff, sometimes creating a downward spiral. It’s happening in Arizona now. Then what “choice” does a parent have when their local school closes? I support parents who choose private school or homeschooling for their kids. But if we want better outcomes for everyone—higher scores, higher graduation rates—the answer isn’t to take resources out of public schools, it’s to make them better.

I refuse to accept that in the richest country in the history of the world, only a small percentage of our kids get a good education. We should aim higher. My dream when I was a kid was to become an astronaut. I got to achieve that. Every kid deserves the chance to chase their dream too, and that starts with good public schools.

Sen. Mark Kelly (D., Ariz.)

Categories Arizona, Budget Cuts, Education Industry, Funding, Supporting public schools, Vouchers

Senator Kelly Introduces Bill to Roll Back Federal Vouchers

By dianeravitch
April 22, 2026 //
4

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

Greene wrote:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New Hampshire: The Dirty Secret of Vouchers for All

By dianeravitch
April 20, 2026 //
2

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

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

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

He wrote:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By dianeravitch
April 15, 2026 //
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Texas Governor Greg Abbott waged a multimillion dollar campaign to defeat moderate Republicans in the Hogse of Representatives so he could finally get the legislature to pass his voucher bill. He wanted to subsidize private Christian schools and was shocked when Islamic schools wanted their students to get vouchers.

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

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

Justin Miller of The Texas Observer writes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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