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Tennessee: Voucher Students Get Lower Test Scores than Peers in Public Schools. State Drops Testing Requirenent.

By dianeravitch
September 18, 2026 //
3

William Phillis has been leading the battle to protect public schools in Ohio for many years. Now retired, he was Deputy Superintendent of the Ohio Department of Education.

He forwarded the followings news about Tennessee:

Tennessee voucher school students registered lower scores and performed worse on state tests in 2026 than their public school peers. So, what is the Tennessee legislature’s solution? Drop the test requirement.

Four years into the Tennessee voucher program, voucher students performed worse on state tests in 2026 than their public school peers. The legislature perfected a solution. The testing requirement for voucher students was discontinued.

Years ago, it was generally believed that there was a private school advantage (i.e) private schools outperformed public schools. Research has shown that when demographics are inserted into the equation, public schools outperform private schools.

The Tennessee voucher project outcomes seem to support that conclusion.

Political officials throughout the nation have the mindset that private is better, even in view of the facts to the contrary.

TN voucher students lag in ELA, math proficiency

  • Knoxville News Sentinel
  • 20 Aug 2026
  • Vivian Jones covers state government and politics for The Tennessean. Reach her at vjones@tennessean.com.

When the Tennessee House approved the state’s Education Savings Accounts program by a single vote in 2019, some Republican lawmakers supported the program on the condition that students be required to take the state TCAP exam — so the state could exercise oversight.

The ESA program offers low-income students taxpayer-funded scholarships to attend private schools. Advocates said voucher students coming out of public schools might lag behind academically, but in time their achievement would take off.

Four years in, that hasn’t happened. Tennessee students who attended private schools through the state’s Education Savings Accounts voucher program performed worse on state tests in 2026 than their public school peers. Fewer voucher students were proficient in math and English this year than were last year, new state data shows.

Just 17% of ESA voucher students met or exceeded math proficiency expectations on the TCAP this year, while 24% met or exceeded expectations in English, according to new state TCAP data obtained by The Tennessean through a public records request.

In public schools, 40% of students — more than twice as many — met or exceeded proficiency expectations in math, while 42% achieved proficiency in English.

Tennessee sorts student achievement levels in four categories, measuring a student’s proficiency as “below,” “approaching,” “meets” or “exceeds” expectations. Under Tennessee’s third grade retention law, public school students are required to “meet” or “exceed” reading expectations by third grade, or face retention.

Over the past three school years, the achievement gap between state-funded students attending public schools and private schools gradually widened.

In Hamilton County, ESA students’ ELA proficiency has dropped seven percentage points in three years, from 32.2% proficiency to 25.2% proficiency. Public school students there grew slightly, from 39% to 40.3% proficiency this year.

In past years, Shelby has been the only county where ESA students have outperformed their public school peers. But this year, nearly 3% fewer Shelby County ESA participants met or exceeded English proficiency compared to last year.

In a statement to The Tennessean, Education Commissioner Lizzette Reynolds pointed to a 14.6-point reduction in the number of ESA students performing “below expectations” as a sign of the program’s efficacy.

“Students enrolled in the program continue to make meaningful gains on TCAP,” Reynolds said in a statement to The Tennessean. “For example, in 202223, 51.6% of ESA students were performing below expectations in math, compared to 37% performing below expectations in 2024-25.”

Education Savings Accounts participants get about $10,100 to attend private schools in Nashville, Memphis and Chattanooga. To qualify for a scholarship, students must be previously enrolled in public school or entering kindergarten, and their family must have an income of less than $83,590 for a family of four.

Another, statewide school voucher program, Education Freedom Scholarships, offers $7,300 state-funded scholarships for students to attend private schools. EFS recipients have never been required to take the TCAP, though some schools have done so voluntarily.

Test scores aren’t everything. While voucher students have consistently underperformed on the TCAP, parents have said the choice has offered lifechanging opportunities for their children to get out of bullying situations, or access academic opportunities that would otherwise not be financially possible.

This is the last year we’ll have this data.

Lawmakers voted to end required TCAP testing for voucher students this year after a scathing audit of the program.

Josh Cowen, a professor of education policy at Michigan State University, studies school voucher policies and accountability across the country. He said it’s common for school voucher participants to score lower on standardized tests than their counterparts in public schools.

But instead of working to improve achievement results, he said other states have opted to stop requiring state achievement tests for voucher students – just as Tennessee has.

“States have basically done what your state just did – which is stop testing,” Cowen said.

After this year, Tennessee voucher recipients will be able to take any national standard test to measure their academic achievement – but there will be no apples-to-apples comparison to track the voucher recipients’ academic growth.

“When they stop administering the state exam, then the lobby groups and the voucher supporters can just yell about how great it is for everyone and no one calls them out on it anymore,” Cowen said.

Reynolds said that the TCAP is not the only measure of the student’s academic success.

“TCAP provides valuable information about student academic performance, but it is one measure of student learning and program outcomes,” Reynolds said, noting that in the future, other testing options will be available for voucher students.

“The department will continue to evaluate student outcomes and other measures of program success to ensure Tennessee families have access to educational options that are meeting their students’ needs,” Reynolds said.

In her campaign for the Tennessee governor’s mansion, U.S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn has pledged to work to expand Tennessee’s school voucher programs “until no parent has to win the lottery to have a say in their child’s education.” Republican legislative leaders have echoed similar commitments.

But without a universal testing requirement, Cowen said, effective state oversight of the taxpayer-funded program will be virtually impossible.

“If these results showed good things, they’d be the first out there in the press conference yelling ‘scoreboard!’ ” Cowen said. “The reason they aren’t testing is because they don’t want to see the answer.”

As lawmakers debated ending TCAP requirement for voucher students this spring, Sen. Jack Johnson, R-Franklin, said requiring the TCAP for the original voucher program was “a mistake.” He said the TCAP is “not an accurate assessment for some private schools,” because they are not required to follow state standards.

Democrats who opposed the idea said Tennessee should not hold public and private students to different standards.

While nationally normed tests differ, Cowen said all are aimed at testing students’ mastery of the subject fundamentals.

“[If ] a private school takes a decent nationally normed exam that tests basic arithmetic, you’re not going to see a kid perform really poorly on that and then ace the TCAP – or vice versa,” Cowen said.

Choosing not to have a like comparison, he said, definitely stifles oversight, but wouldn’t necessarily test what students are learning more closely.

A better way to measure a student’s academic growth would be to compare students’ TCAP scores while in the ESA program to their TCAP scores from prior public school enrollment, Cowen said.

But when that’s been done in other states, the results have shown a gap. In 2023, just 14% of students in Louisiana’s voucher program met state achievement targets, compared with 24% of low-income students in public schools.

Voucher advocates frequently point to parent satisfaction as the “ultimate metric” of the program’s success. Reynolds said 99% of ESA families surveyed by the Department of Education this year reported being satisfied with the program.

Sen. Raumesh Akbari, D-Memphis, who opposed ending the TCAP requirement, pushed back.

“While I do agree parent satisfaction is important,” Akbari said, “parent satisfaction doesn’t get a child into college or help them get a job: achievement does.”

Article Name: TN voucher students lag in ELA, math proficiency

Author:Vivian Jones Vivian Jones covers state government and politics for The Tennessean. Reach her at vjones@tennessean.com.

Categories Education Industry, Failure, Tennessee, Vouchers

HECHINGER Report: Voucher Schools Are Not Required to Comply with Federal IDEA Law

By dianeravitch
September 17, 2026 //
0

In voucher debates around the country, parents of children with disabilities are often outspoken on behalf of vouchers. If they are dissatisfied with the services at the local public school, they feel sure they will find a private school that is better. What they don’t don’t know is that private schools do not have to follow federal laws. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act does not affect private schools. Stories like this one are a wake-up call. When they leave public schools, they abandon their federal rights.

Pepper Stelter of The HECHINGER Report wrote about a family in Ohio that decided to place their child in a religious school, using voucher money. When the school decided her care cost too much, they told her grandparents to withdraw her. Private schools are not required to comply with the federal disability law.

Stelter wrote:

CINCINNATI — The meeting with staff members of Cincinnati Christian Schools began with a prayer. Then they told Mike Grimmer and Linda Kelly that their granddaughter could no longer attend the private school.

Annabelle Kelly had enrolled there three months earlier, in August 2025, in a program specifically for students who struggle in mainstream classrooms. Annabelle, 15, has Rett syndrome, a genetic condition accompanied by significant cognitive and developmental delays. Her grandparents, who took legal custody of Annabelle when she was 5, believed that the small, faith-based setting of CCS would be a better fit than the local public school. She received a voucher from the state through a school choice program specifically for students with disabilities, which authorized paying CCS up to $29,750 for Annabelle to attend tuition-free. 

But at the meeting in November, Kelly said, the school’s director of academic support services told her and Grimmer that Annabelle’s physical and educational needs were too extensive for her to continue at CCS. If they wanted her to stay, Annabelle would need an aide to work with her one-on-one, and her grandparents would need to pay the additional cost, roughly $25,000 per year.

Disability advocates warn that as private school voucher programs spread, more parents will find themselves in similar straits. Federal protections for students with disabilities don’t apply to private schools, and neither the schools nor voucher programs like the one Annabelle qualified for are required to inform parents that they waive certain rights when they leave the public school system. When Congress passed legislation last year establishing the nation’s first federal voucher program, it did not include language that disability rights groups had lobbied for that would have required private schools receiving federal funds to follow the law known as the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act. 

“If there are public funds being spent, public protections need to be afforded,” said Chris Roe, director of state policy at the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates, a policy advocacy organization that provides training and guidance in special education law. “At the very least, states that provide voucher programs should be required to inform parents of the rights they are giving up.”

Kelly said the decision from CCS came despite the family being transparent about Annabelle’s needs when they applied to the school: They shared medical information, copies of her academic evaluations and her learning plan from the public school she attended. The then-eighth grader attended three trial days at the school before enrolling, and several previous conferences with teachers had gone well, her grandmother said.

“We were blindsided by the school’s decision,” said Kelly. 

Raymond Kochis, superintendent of Cincinnati Christian Schools, declined an interview but said in response to written questions that the costs of educating Annabelle exceeded what had been determined initially. “When a student’s needs evolve,” Kochis wrote, “the school works with the family to determine the most appropriate level of support.” (According to Kelly, Annabelle’s needs had not changed, and school officials quickly dismissed any alternative solutions she proposed.) 

Private school voucher programs have proliferated in the United States in the last decade. The number of students with disabilities in these programs has grown too: In the 2025-26 school year, Annabelle was one of more than 200,000 students nationwide either using vouchers meant specifically for students with disabilities or enrolled in the country’s largest voucher programs, compared with more than 180,000 the year prior. 

The federal school voucher program goes into effect next year. After failing to persuade Congress to include language stating that voucher programs and participating private schools must comply with IDEA protections, COPAA and other disability rights groups are focused on pressing states that choose to participate in the program to enforce the IDEA even for private schools. 

Signed into law in 1975, the IDEA states that everyone ages three to 21 with a disability must be provided a free public education that meets their particular needs. In collaboration with parents, public school districts must develop an individualized education program, or IEP, establishing learning goals and plans appropriate for the student. The law also states that students with disabilities must be taught alongside children without disabilities “to the maximum extent appropriate.” Today, 8 million public school students are served by the IDEA.

While voucher programs like the one Annabelle received, Ohio’s Jon Peterson scholarship, are publicly funded, participating private schools like CCS control their own admissions and enrollment decisions. Students using a private school voucher are considered “parentally placed,” and private schools are not required to follow an IEP or uphold any IDEA protections. Families that use these vouchers sacrifice key civil rights afforded by the IDEA, including protection against discrimination and removal from the school based on a disability.

Kelly doesn’t remember, when filling out the scholarship application and enrolling Annabelle at CCS, being told that the rights and protections that apply to students with disabilities in public schools do not extend to private schools. Since students must have an IEP to qualify for the Jon Peterson scholarship, she assumed that the IDEA’s rules and policies would be followed. 

In a response to written questions, a spokesperson for Ohio’s Department of Education and Workforce said there are multiple safeguards for students with disabilities who attend private schools. The department’s website never explicitly states that private schools are not required to comply with the IDEA’s mandates and regulations. But it does mention on a page of regulations that if a student is enrolled in a school that is not public, it is “not obligated to provide the child” with a free appropriate public education. Ultimately, the private school is not required to follow the IDEA, and parents have little recourse if the school chooses not to. 

Please open the link to finish reading the story.

Categories Ohio, Special Education, Vouchers

How the Billionaires Manufactured an Education “Crisis”

By dianeravitch
September 14, 2026 //
7

Mike Simpson, known on Twitter as “Big Education Ape,” is known for his brilliant memes and editorial cartoons. Typically, they expose the latest fads and lies that defame teachers and public schools. Every once in a while, he publishes a great post, like this one.

He writes:

I’M SHOCKED, SHOCKED — HOW 30 YEARS OF BILLIONAIRE-FUNDED “REFORM” MANUFACTURED THE EDUCATION CRISIS IT PROMISED TO FIX

There’s a famous scene in Casablanca where Captain Renault declares he is “shocked, shocked” to find gambling going on — right before a croupier hands him his winnings. That’s essentially the posture of the billionaire reform industrial complex today, clutching its pearls over a Gallup poll showing public satisfaction with American schools has cratered to 32% — an 11-point nosedive in just two years — while quietly pocketing the profits of the crisis they spent three decades engineering.

Shocked. Absolutely shocked.

The Architecture of a Manufactured Crisis

Let’s be precise about the timeline, because precision matters when someone is picking your pocket.

For roughly 30 years, a well-funded constellation of think tanks, philanthropic foundations, hedge fund managers, and tech oligarchs pumped billions of dollars into a single, relentless narrative: public schools are failing. Not “underfunded.” Not “systematically neglected.” Failing — as in, inherently broken, irredeemably incompetent, populated by bad teachers protected by evil unions, and salvageable only by the heroic intervention of the private market.

The messaging was surgical. The money was real. And — surprise! — it worked.

As the Big Education Ape’s deep dive into school funding makes devastatingly clear, the playbook was never subtle:

Starve public schools of adequate funding. Declare them “failing.” Ride in on a white charter bus to “rescue” the children.

The chronic underfunding wasn’t fiscal negligence. In many states, it was a feature, not a bug. Squeeze hard enough, the theory went, and disruption would force innovation. What it actually forced was deferred maintenance, teacher shortages, and a generation of kids learning to read in buildings where the roof leaks and the textbooks predate the iPhone.

Now the poll numbers confirm the narrative took hold — and the reformers are citing those same poll numbers as proof they were right all along. The audacity is, genuinely, breathtaking.

The Numbers That Tell Two Very Different Stories

Here’s what the data actually shows — and what it doesn’t show:

Metric: The Headline. What It Actually Means Gallup Public Satisfaction 32% — record low 30 years of “failing schools” messaging worked exactly as intended.

Parent Satisfaction with Their Own School Historically ~2x the national figure People trust what they experience; they fear what they’re told

Math & Reading Scores Declining, especially bottom quartile Tracks directly with funding inequity and screen-time explosion

Top-tier U.S. Student Performance Still globally competitive. The “crisis” is concentrated where disinvestment is concentrated

The gap between how Americans rate schools in general versus their own child’s school is the smoking gun. It has always been the smoking gun. People who actually walk into a public school building — who meet the teachers, see the classrooms, watch their kids come home — consistently rate those schools dramatically higher than the national “failing” narrative suggests.

That gap is the manufactured crisis. It lives entirely in the space between lived experience and media-amplified fear.

$1.8 Billion Worth of Snake Oil, Served Fresh

And just when you thought the reform carousel might slow down, along comes the Science of Reading — the latest Next Big Thing™ in a long line of Next Big Things™ that have collectively cost American taxpayers tens of billions of dollars and produced reading scores that went, as the Big Education Ape’s withering analysis puts it, precisely nowhere.

Remember Common Core? $15.8 billion. A decade of standardized testing theater. Reading scores: unmoved.

Now we have the Science of Reading, $1.8 billion deep and climbing, with the same cast of vendors, the same philanthropic networks, and the same conspicuous absence of a money-back guarantee.

To be scrupulously fair: phonics works. Explicit decoding instruction works. The underlying research on structured literacy is legitimate. But here’s the thing about legitimate research — it doesn’t require a $1.8 billion vendor ecosystem, mandatory state legislation in 40+ states, and the systematic deskilling of teachers who are told to stop thinking and start following the script. When real science gets packaged into proprietary curricula, sold to districts under legislative mandate, and deployed without the trained human educators needed to implement it well, you don’t get science. You get very expensive phonics worksheets.

The question nobody in the reform complex wants to answer remains the same one it’s always been: Where is the money-back guarantee?

The Other Hand: How Tech Bros Broke Kids’ Brains While Selling the Cure

Here is the part of the story that deserves its own criminal investigation — or at minimum, a very uncomfortable congressional hearing.

The same Silicon Valley billionaires who spent decades pushing EdTech into classrooms as the revolutionary equalizer — screens for every student! –are the identical billionaires whose social media platforms have:

  • Collapsed long-form reading among adolescents at a rate researchers describe as one of the steepest drops in PISA history
  • Engineered algorithmic doom-scrolling that neurologically rewires 15-year-olds away from the sustained attention that math and reading comprehension require
  • Distracted over a quarter of students internationally during core academic instruction, by their own PISA survey data

They sold the disease and the cure. They pushed the screens that fragmented attention spans, then sold the adaptive software to remediate the fragmented attention spans, then pointed at the test scores and said: See? Public schools are failing.

As Big Education Ape’s piece on reading struggles frames it with characteristic bluntness: if you’re struggling to read this, you have some very rich friends to thank.

The Exit Ramp Is Marked “November 3”

None of this is inevitable. None of this is permanent. The No Kings Coalition — the sprawling, nonpartisan civic movement that flooded the streets in March — is now flooding the polls, with a Vote Early Day of Action on October 17 aimed squarely at the November 3, 2026 midterms.

The math is straightforward, even if the billionaires prefer we can’t do it:

  • Elect candidates who will defend public education funding, not divert it into voucher schemes that enrich private operators at public expense
  • Overturn the Supreme Court rulings — from Citizens United forward — that transformed American democracy into a billionaire auction
  • Restore the principle that public money follows public children into public schools, not into the portfolios of private equity firms with a “reform” logo.

The manufactured crisis has a manufactured solution: more billionaire intervention, more privatization, more EdTech, more testing, more disruption. The actual solution is considerably less glamorous and considerably more effective — fund schools equitably, pay teachers competitively, put phones away, and stop letting people who profit from public school failure write public school policy.

The Bottom Line

The 32% satisfaction number is not evidence that public schools have failed. It is evidence that a 30-year, billion-dollar propaganda campaign succeeded. The same people who manufactured the crisis are now selling the cure — at $1.8 billion a pop, no refunds, no guarantees, no accountability.

Meanwhile, the teachers who showed up every day through a pandemic, through chronic underfunding, through a staffing crisis, through the algorithmic dismantling of their students’ attention spans — those people are still in the classroom at 7 AM, doing the work that no EdTech platform, no voucher program, and no think tank white paper has ever actually replaced.

The casino is rigged. Captain Renault is shocked. And the November ballot is the one lever the house can’t control.

Vote like a public school depends on it. Because one does.

🔗 Related Reading from Big Education Ape:

Sources & Links

🔵 Public Satisfaction & Gallup Data

🔵 PISA Performance & International Benchmarks

🔵 School Funding, Privatization & the Manufactured Crisis

🔵 Science of Reading & EdTech Accountability

🔵 Democracy, Elections & the No Kings Coalition

All links verified active as of September 9, 2026. Primary polling data sourced from Gallup/Walton Family Foundation. PISA data sourced from NCES/OECD 2025 release.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Broad Foundation, Charter Schools, Closing schools, Corporate Reformers, Corruption, Cruelty, Curriculum, Democracy, Education Industry, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Failure, Fraud, Funding, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Hoax, Injustice, Lies, Literacy, Privatization, School Choice, Standardized Testing, State Takeover, Teacher Evaluations, Technology, Vouchers, Walton Foundation

Florida Couple Homeschooled Their Grandchildren While Confining Them to a Truck and Sexually Abusing Them

By dianeravitch
September 4, 2026 //
13

In Florida, a couple were arrested and charged for keeping their four grandchildren confined in a truck for six years and allowing them to be sexually abused during their long confinement.

The good news (sarcasm) is that they homeschooled the children by enrolling them in Khan Academy online classes.

Did the couple know they were eligible for $32,000 in voucher payments to pay for all their educational expenses from the state of Florida? Maybe they did and were collecting. Why pay for the Khan Academy classes when the state will pick up the bill?

The New York Times reported:

A grandmother and her fiancé are accused of trapping four children for six years inside a semi truck’s cab, where the children endured sexual abuse, malnutrition and neglect, prosecutors in Florida said on Tuesday.

Starting in 2019, the victims, two girls and two boys who now range in age from 11 to 15, slept on a top bunk without all fitting on the mattress, the authorities said in an arrest warrant. They urinated in a plastic cup and defecated in a grocery bag, the warrant said.

One child scarred her hand permanently when hot noodles burned her, and she was not taken to the hospital, the warrant said. One girl contracted a sexually transmitted infection, the warrant said.

“This is just straight evil, and a scourge on our society,” Mark Glass, the commissioner of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, said during a news conference held on Tuesday.

The victims are the biological grandchildren of Keysha Monique Epps, 51, of Atlanta, according to Jae Williams, a spokesman for the state attorney general’s office, which filed charges against the suspects.

The ordeal began when Ms. Epps and her fiancé, Tamra Marshon Stewart, 37, of Jacksonville, Fla., traveled with the children from Atlanta to Miami, James Uthmeier, the state’s attorney general, said during the news conference. Ms. Epps was a licensed semi truck driver, Mr. Williams said.

The couple served as primary caregivers for the children, and they all lived inside the truck’s cab.

The cab included two seats for a driver and a passenger, a bunk bed, a refrigerator, a microwave and a space for storage all packed into tight quarters, the authorities said in the arrest warrant.

“This was a prison, a rolling prison,” Mr. Uthmeier said.

One of the girls, who is now 12, said Mr. Stewart had touched her inappropriately every day for two years, the authorities said. She said her grandmother knew what was happening to her, and in one instance pretended to be asleep, according to the arrest warrant.

Mr. Stewart furnished the other girl, now 11, with candy and money after sexual encounters in an effort to keep her quiet, according to the arrest warrant. The victim “said it didn’t work,” the warrant said.

A 15-year-old boy confronted Mr. Stewart, calling him a pedophile and a child molester, according to the arrest warrant from the state’s attorney general office. Mr. Stewart punched the victims after the dispute, according to an arrest warrant filed by the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office.

The children did not attend school while with Ms. Epps and Mr. Stewart and instead used Khan Academy, a website with educational videos that is not accredited, the authorities said.

Categories Accountability, Childhood, Corruption, Cruelty, Curriculum, Ethics, Evil, Florida, Home Schooling, Vouchers

Arizona: State Supreme Court Kicks Anti-Voucher Referendum Off the Ballot

By dianeravitch
August 25, 2026 //
2

Save Our Schools Arizona enlisted thousands of volunteers to reform the state’s costly, wasteful, and destructive voucher program. They collected almost half a million signatures, but the state Supreme Court ultimately threw the measure off the ballot. This was not a decision on the merits: most members of the Supreme Court were appointed by Koch puppet, Governor Doug Ducey.

The last time vouchers were on the ballot, in 2018, they lost by an overwhelming majority. The legislature proceeded to enact a massive voucher program.

Meanwhile, most kids using the vouchers never attended public schools. Some families used the voucher money to buy frivolities. It is welfare for those who previously paid their own tuition.

Arizona SOS posted the events:

As we reported last week, the fate of the Protect Education Act was in the AZ Supreme Court’s hands. Unfortunately, the Court ruled against Protect Education, and the measure will not be on the November ballot. Here is our statement.

Thousands of SOSAZ volunteers gave this measure their all for 14 weeks, pounding the hot pavement and talking to Arizona voters. This decision has gutted all of us, knowing that the $1 billion voucher program will remain unchecked with no regard to student safety or taxpayer accountability, and knowing that the impacts of the voucher drain on public schools will mean continued school closures, teacher and staff layoffs, and program and resource cuts.

Arizona students deserve so much better – but our state is the tip of the spear when it comes to the war on public education, and we are up against powerful and deep-pocketed special interests that want to see our schools privatized, turned into unregulated private models that can pick and choose their students and profit off of our tax dollars. They don’t want Arizona voters to have a say in this $1 billion, taxpayer-funded voucher program because they know they voters are with us and would have passed Protect Education hands down.

What happened? We believe in full transparency and giving our volunteers who worked so tirelessly the full information, so here is a breakdown. We were so proud to have turned in ~420,000 signatures, which then went through the Secretary of State’s office for their review. Their office removed some signatures due to detached or un-notarized pages, invalid dates, wrong counties, etc., which was a predictable margin that left us with 387,249 signatures.

Then, a 5% sample from each county was sent to that county’s Recorder’s office to determine a validity rate that would be applied to the full county sample. Our validity rates were extremely high, due primarily to our incredible volunteers: Apache 75%, Cochise 89%, Coconino 93%, Gila 95%, Graham 93%, Greenlee 75%, La Paz 100%, Maricopa 73%, Mohave 78%, Navajo 80%, Pima 81.5%, Pinal 82%, Santa Cruz 86%, Yavapai 94%, and Yuma 61%. The statewide validity rate was determined as 75.2% — far higher than most initiatives! — which meant we were left with about 292,820 signatures.

However, the scorched-earth lawsuits from the voucher lobby proved too damaging given the numbers. The lower court threw out many signatures on ticky-tack technicalities, and the Arizona Supreme Court (packed with former Gov. Ducey’s appointees) upheld the lower court’s rulings. The voucher lobbyists suing Protect Education challenged the initiative’s validity on 47 different categories of objections, many focused on picayune details like the phone number or address a paid circulator used when registering with the Secretary of State. By throwing everything at us but the kitchen sink, it became a numbers game. In one example, the court ruled against a paid circulator, who gathered 10,419 signatures, for using a mailbox for her address on her registration form out of fear for her safety. In other words, 10,419 voters were disenfranchised on a technicality. As Gov. Hobbs pointed out, the Republican-controlled state legislature has spent years making citizens’ initiatives increasingly difficult, with strict compliance setting a nearly impossible bar.

The Courts also favored Goldwater on the issue of “duplicate” signatures – which Protect Education rightfully argued double counts the rejection of duplicates. This matters because (due to the fake petition circulated by voucher-pushers) there were over 20,000 duplicate signatures on petitions — people wanted to make sure they signed the right one. Protect Education’s argument was that if the county recorders’ reports result in invalidating ~100,000 signatures and the law says that for every signature removed for being a duplicate one valid signature must be kept, you cannot prove that happened unless every signature is checked. That wasn’t done, the math is off, and this results in a double count of many duplicates.

When all was said and done, the Court rejected around 40,000 signatures, leaving Protect Education ~12,000 signatures short, around 3% of the number we turned in.

This was not the outcome we wanted, but we hold our heads high knowing that we fought a fight that matters deeply, that we are on the right side of history, and that we had hundreds of thousands of conversations with Arizona voters about the critical importance of public education and the devastating impacts of private school vouchers. Those conversations matter, and as we pivot to effecting change in this election and flipping the state legislature, they will make the winning difference.

Prop 145 Also Kicked Off the Ballot: It is a small consolation that Prop 145 (HCR2048, the poison-pill referral designed to block Protect Ed and any effort to regulate vouchers in Arizona, disguised as “military scholarships”) was also kicked off the ballot. A lower court ruled it unconstitutional and the Arizona Supreme Court upheld that ruling this week. A “yes” vote on that measure would have enshrined ESA vouchers into our state constitution, so we are relieved.

📋👟 It’s TIME: Vouchers are not on the ballot, but electing a new legislature that will enact the Protect Education Act’s reforms IS. We must also elect pro-public ed school board members and statewide officials like Dr. Ruiz for Superintendent of Public Instruction, PLUS achieve NO votes on Props 320, 318, and 144.

There are 8 target districts to flip the state legislature to one that is pro-public education – and we only have 11 weeks left to educate voters!!! We are asking our volunteers to “adopt” a district and commit to volunteering there – whether in person (canvassing or driving canvassers), or by phonebanking virtually with us.

  • LD2 (NW Phx, Deer Valley)
  • LD4 (NE Phx, Scottsdale, Paradise Valley)
  • LD9 (Mesa+)
  • LD13 (Chandler, Sun Lakes, Gilbert)
  • LD16 (mostly Pinal)
  • LD17 (Marana, NW Tucson)
  • LD23 (Yuma, plus parts of Maricopa, Pinal, Pima)
  • LD27 (NW Phx, Glendale, Peoria)

To ADOPT a district, sign up TODAY! → bit.ly/SOSAZPledge

Categories Accountability, Arizona, Budget Cuts, Closing schools, Elections, Funding, Privatization, Vouchers

Peter Greene: Federal Voucher Money Will Not Go to Public Schools

By dianeravitch
August 18, 2026 //
2

Will the federal voucher program benefit public schools? Peter Greene says no. It is not intended to send funds to public schools, but to subtract them. How else can states afford the tuition of almost every child currently enrolled in religious and private schools? The states don’t intend to increase the funding pie. As voucher schools grow–with your tax dollars–public schools will experience budget cuts. Some will close. This is what Linda McMahon, Betsy DeVos and their allies want.

Peter Greene writes on his blog Curmudgucation:

Remember “backpacks full of cash”? It was a phrase coined by reformster Jeanne Allen that captured the way that taxpayer-funded vouchers turned private school students into couriers, bagmen who simultaneously delivered and laundered taxpayer dollars so that public money could be directed to private religious schools. We may someday be nostalgic for the era in which such manipulations were necessary– “Once upon a time, not only was the government not required to fund religious organizations, but they were actually rquired NOT to.”

Vouchers were always an elegant solution to the question of “How do we get public money to private schools?” Private schools were already funded by a stream of students carrying backpacks stuffed with their parents’ cash. To get government-to-school funding going would require a whole other stream to be created, but vouchers could just hop onto the stream that already existed. Parents could stuff the backpacks with taxpayer dollars as well as their own.

It’s important to keep this model in mind when discussing one of the hot issues around the federal voucher system.

Voucher fans argue that federal vouchers will benefit public schools, which is a careful choice of wording because the federal vouchers will not go to schools– they will go to families, to shove into their child’s cash backpack.

For private schools, that’s a distinction without much difference, because vouchers pack new cash into the same old funding stream. But for public schools, it’s a completely different issue.

The public school funding stream is taxpayer to government to school district. There is no public school version of a funding stream fed by individual students carrying backpacks full of cash. That is, in many ways, antithetical to the public school mission.

In the private school backpack model, the size of the student’s backpack determines where they can go with that load of money. A large backpack full of loads of cash? You get to go to Philips Exeter. A fanny pack loaded with a small, lonely stack? You get to go to Bob’s Strip Mall Academy.

How the market treats you depends on how big and how stuffed your backpack full of cash is.

The public system is designed to work differently. All the cash comes into one big pool, and every student gets to swim in it regardless of what their family’s contribution might have been. (Does it work perfectly? No, particularly because of the ties to housing. The irony here is that the public mission is undermined by market forces in the housing market).

Point is– federal voucher dollars are not going to go to public schools unless the public schools can figure out a way to create the new funding stream for students carrying cash backpacks, and that create a whole new set of issues. If a special tutoring program is available to Susie because she has a backpack of federal voucher money, then why shouldn’t that tutoring be available to any or all students, regardless of backpack status?

Addendum: If a district already has a program that charges fees, then the federal voucher would help families pay that fee, but that would result in zero new revenue for the district.

If a public school sets up a program for backpack-bearing students to pay for a basic service, how do we square that with the mission of providing the same basic service for all? If a public school sets up a program for backpack-bearing students to “buy” an extra service, how do we justify only providing that special service to some students?

These dilemmas are unavoidable because, again, the federal voucher program will not give money to schools, but to students. For private schools, that will mean business as usual. For public schools, that will mean a new business model that will have to somehow co-exist with the traditional public service mission. There are undoubtedly some public districts out there well-positioned to wrestle with this issue, but it would be great if governors and districts put some real thought and discussion into the issue, because federal voucher dollars will only make it to public schools via a new and potentially troubling path.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Closing schools, Education Industry, Funding, Privatization, Trump, Vouchers

Indiana: Republicans Have Systematically Undermined Public Schools, Where 87% of Students Are Enrolled

By dianeravitch
August 13, 2026 //
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Indiana once took pride in its public schools. Not any more. Since the Republican Party took charge of state government, public schools have been neglected and underfunded.

Veteran educator Vernon Smith was elected to the state legislature after his retirement. He wrote this article, which appeared in the Chicago Tribune.

He wrote:

Sixteen years ago, Republicans assumed full control of Indiana’s state government, holding the governor’s office and winning majorities in the House and the Senate. Since achieving this trifecta, the Republican supermajority has systematically cut funding and programs that made this state work for the people who live here.

Nowhere has this been more apparent than the state’s complete neglect of public schools for nearly two decades. Since taking power, the Republican supermajority has done everything in its power to undermine public education, and Indiana’s children are worse off for it.

Let me explain where years of Republican education policy have gotten us. Last month, the Network for Public Education released a report revealing Indiana ranks 45th out of 50 states in support of public education. Last year, only 31.2% of students showed proficiency on both the math and ELA sections of the ILEARN test. More than half of fourth graders can’t read proficiently, and nearly seven-in-ten eighth graders aren’t proficient in math.

A record number of school districts across the state — nearly 40 — have turned to ballot referenda to secure the money they need this year because the state won’t properly fund them and has cut their local funding sources. These are the results of Republicans chipping away at Indiana’s public school funding for years.

Consider where their priorities lie. More than 87% of Hoosier children attend traditional public schools. Yet year after year, the supermajority pours its energy and political capital into expanding charter schools and private school vouchers for the children of families who were, in most cases, never going to need the state’s help in the first place. The legislature has made it clear: they have no issue abandoning working-class Hoosiers in favor of giving an extra leg up to the most fortunate among us.

When Indiana first opened the door to charter schools and voucher programs, lawmakers sold it as a lifeline for children of color and children in poverty whose assigned schools were failing them. But once the door was propped open, my Republican colleagues expanded it year after year, extending vouchers to families making well over six figures. If this were truly about rescuing kids who’d been failed by the system, it would have stayed targeted at the kids who needed rescuing. Instead, it grew into a subsidy for everyone but the working-class families the program was designed to serve.

None of this is by accident. The supermajority was warned by Democrats, education professionals and concerned Hoosiers of the consequences that their policies would inflict on our schools. It is the direct, foreseeable and self-inflicted result of almost two decades of choices made by men and women who have mistaken their own supermajority for a mandate to neglect the children they were elected to serve.

Districts across the state are being forced to ask voters to approve referenda to raise their own local property taxes just so schools can keep the lights on and pay their teachers. Let’s not pretend this educational belt-tightening is born of necessity. Indiana has nearly $4 billion in surplus and reserve funds, which is more than enough to return to our previous, robust support of public education. Our schools and the children attending them are being asked to make do with less while the state sits on more money than it knows what to do with.

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I do not say this lightly, and I do not say it out of partisan loyalty. I say it as a man who spent nearly 20 years as a school principal and six years as a teacher before I ever spent a day in the Statehouse. I have seen firsthand what happens when a school has what it needs, and I have seen what happens when it doesn’t.

I am telling you, plainly: Indiana’s Republican supermajority has had 16 years to prove it knows the difference too. It does not. If it did, we would not rank 45th in the nation for public school support. We would not be watching our children fall further behind their peers in other states while the people entrusted with fixing it offer nothing but superficial, special-interest-backed policies that don’t address the underlying issues.

This is where years of unchecked Republican domination have gotten us: two decades of failure and of backs turned on the generation that makes up the future of this state, this nation and the world beyond.

For 16 years, they have stood before us and promised that this would finally be the year public education in Indiana gets fixed. And for 16 years, they have failed to deliver on that promise. The only question left is how much longer Hoosiers are willing to take their word for it and allow more children to fail academically

Categories Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Extremism, Funding, Indiana, Privatization, Republicans, Vouchers

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

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

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

Article I, Section 3;

Religious Freedom

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

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

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

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

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

Go figure.

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

She wrote:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Carol Burris: The Hoax of “School Choice”

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

Here it is:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tennessee: Big Money Backing Marsha Blackburn for Governor

By dianeravitch
July 28, 2026 //
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Andy Spears reports that the Walmart billionaires are supporting MAGA Marsha Blackburn in the race for Governor of Tennessee.

The Waltons of Arkansas are totally committed to eroding public schools and privatizing public funding, so Blackburn is promising to expand state support for vouchers.

Spears writes:

The youngest son of Walmart founder Sam Walton is now on the Marsha Blackburn bandwagon.

The latest campaign financial report indicates that pro-Blackburn Team Tennessee PAC received $100,000 from Walton in the last reporting period.

The Walton family has long supported private school discount coupons – otherwise known as school vouchers. These schemes divert funds from working-class families to wealthy families to use as tuition discounts at private schools. 

Walton joins payday predators Advance Financial, Pennsylvania billionaire and privatization advocate Jeff Yass, the CEO of Jimmy John’s, and General Motors in supporting Blackburn and her reverse Robinhood economic and education agenda. 

Blackburn has pledged to further expand Tennessee’s $300 million school voucher scheme if the 74-year-old career politician wins the Governor’s race. 

Tennessee’s Race to the Bottom: In a Corvette with a Driver Fueled by Jimmy John’s

Categories Billionaires, Education Industry, Elections, Privatization, Tennessee, Vouchers
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