Former entertainment entrepreneur Linda McMahon is now U.S. Secretary of Education. She released her first statement, reiterating Trump’s attacks on “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” as well as “gender ideology” (I.e. recognizing the existence of ONLY the male-female binary and not recognizing those who are LGBT, such as Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent, who is openly gay).
McMahon’s views are closely aligned with those of Moms for Liberty. Check out the website of the America First Policy Forum, where McMahon was chair of the board.
This statement was released by the department’s press office.
When I took the oath of office as Secretary of Education, I accepted responsibility for overseeing the U.S. Department of Education and those who work here. But more importantly, I took responsibility for supporting over 100 million American children and college students who are counting on their education to create opportunity and prepare them for a rewarding career.
I want to do right by both.
As you are all aware, President Trump nominated me to take the lead on one of his most momentous campaign promises to families. My vision is aligned with the President’s: to send education back to the states and empower all parents to choose an excellent education for their children. As a mother and grandmother, I know there is nobody more qualified than a parent to make educational decisions for their children. I also started my career studying to be a teacher, and as a Connecticut Board of Education member and college trustee, I have long held that teaching is the most noble of professions. As a businesswoman, I know the power of education to prepare workers for fulfilling careers.
American education can be the greatest in the world. It ought not to be corrupted by political ideologies, special interests, and unjust discrimination. Parents, teachers, and students alike deserve better.
After President Trump’s inauguration last month, he steadily signed a slate of executive orders to keep his promises: combatting critical race theory, DEI, gender ideology, discrimination in admissions, promoting school choice for every child, and restoring patriotic education and civics. He has also been focused on eliminating waste, red tape, and harmful programs in the federal government. The Department of Education’s role in this new era of accountability is to restore the rightful role of state oversight in education and to end the overreach from Washington.
This restoration will profoundly impact staff, budgets, and agency operations here at the Department. In coming months, we will partner with Congress and other federal agencies to determine the best path forward to fulfill the expectations of the President and the American people. We will eliminate unnecessary bureaucracy so that our colleges, K-12 schools, students, and teachers can innovate and thrive.
This review of our programs is long overdue. The Department of Education is not working as intended. Since its establishment in 1980, taxpayers have entrusted the department with over $1 trillion, yet student outcomes have consistently languished. Millions of young Americans are trapped in failing schools, subjected to radical anti-American ideology, or saddled with college debt for a degree that has not provided a meaningful return on their investment. Teachers are leaving the profession in droves after just a few years—and citing red tape as one of their primary reasons.
The reality of our education system is stark, and the American people have elected President Trump to make significant changes in Washington. Our job is to respect the will of the American people and the President they elected, who has tasked us with accomplishing the elimination of bureaucratic bloat here at the Department of Education—a momentous final mission—quickly and responsibly.
As I’ve learned many times throughout my career, disruption leads to innovation and gets results. We must start thinking about our final mission at the department as an overhaul—a last chance to restore the culture of liberty and excellence that made American education great. Changing the status quo can be daunting. But every staff member of this Department should be enthusiastic about any change that will benefit students.
True change does not happen overnight—especially the historic overhaul of a federal agency. Over the coming months, as we work hard to carry out the President’s directives, we will focus on a positive vision for what American education can be.
These are our convictions:
Parents are the primary decision makers in their children’s education.
Taxpayer-funded education should refocus on meaningful learning in math, reading, science, and history—not divisive DEI programs and gender ideology.
Postsecondary education should be a path to a well-paying career aligned with workforce needs.
Removing red tape and bureaucratic barriers will empower parents to make the best educational choices for their children. An effective transfer of educational oversight to the states will mean more autonomy for local communities. Teachers, too, will benefit from less micromanagement in the classroom—enabling them to get back to basics.
I hope each of you will embrace this vision going forward and use these convictions as a guide for conscientious and pragmatic action. The elimination of bureaucracy should free us, not limit us, in our pursuit of these goals. I want to invite all employees to join us in this historic final mission on behalf of all students, with the same dedication and excellence that you have brought to your careers as public servants.
This is our opportunity to perform one final, unforgettable public service to future generations of students. I hope you will join me in ensuring that when our final mission is complete, we will all be able to say that we left American education freer, stronger, and with more hope for the future.
This article appeared in The New York Review of Books. As daily newspapers have shrunk or abandoned their book reviewing, the NYRB stands out as the nation’s leading journal of literature, the arts, and politics. It takes books seriously. This is an essay-review about the history of vouchers. I reviewed Josh Cowen’s outstanding book The Privateers, about the cabal that engineered the expansion of vouchers. I hope you will consider subscribing to the New York Review of Books and reading Josh Cowen’s important book.
For decades, the term “school choice”—and the programs it signifies, which divert public money to private schools—was widely and rightly dismissed as racist. Now it’s the law in thirty-three states.
Minnijean Brown, Thelma Mothershed, and Melba Pattillo, three of the first Black students to attend Little Rock Central High School, with Arkansas NAACP president Daisy Bates (third from left), 1957
Donald Trump promised that he will make public funds available to private as well as religious schools in every state, and this is what his party wants, too. Over the past quarter-century, Republicans have assailed America’s public schools by supporting vouchers, which divert money from public education systems to subsidize tuition at private and religious schools.
But most voters today do not favor vouchers. In fact, since 1967 no state referendum on vouchers has ever passed. In 2024 three states had referenda on the ballot, and vouchers were again defeated. Voters in two of those three states, Kentucky and Nebraska, cast ballots overwhelmingly for Trump—and in both states public funding for private schools was decisively rejected. The story of how Republican politicians have twisted this widespread popular opposition to vouchers into pervasive education policy across the country is one that requires a deeper historical view.
This opposition to public funding for private schools changed on May 17, 1954, when the Supreme Court ruled, in the Brown v. Board of Education decision, that de jure racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. The Court’s decision had little to do with school funding, but it set off a frantic search among white elected officials in the South to find, or create, a legal mechanism through which to protect racial segregation. The overwhelming majority of southern whites considered the prospect of racial integration repugnant, and their elected officials were determined to block it.
Until the mid-1950s most Americans believed that the government should not underwrite the cost of private and religious schooling. Catholic organizations had periodically sought public subsidies for their schools on grounds of fairness; as taxpayers, they said their schools were entitled to receive the same funds as public schools. But they were repeatedly rebuffed by Congress, the courts, and state legislatures; most state constitutions explicitly prohibited the use of public funds for religious school tuition.
Southern governors and legislators found the rationale and language they sought in the writings of Milton Friedman, a prominent libertarian economist at the University of Chicago, who in 1955 published an essay called “The Role of Government in Education.” The paper argued in favor of parents’ rights to choose any school they wanted, as well as educational freedom, the right for a child not to attend a neighborhood school—music to the ears of segregationists. Friedman said that the government should finance schools but should not be expected to administer them. He recommended that government distribute money—in the form of what he called vouchers—to parents for each of their school-age children, and that parents should be free to spend this allotment at any institution, whether its operations were for-profit or nonprofit, religious or secular, so long as the school met certain minimum educational standards defined by the local government.
If Black parents wanted their children to attend a segregated Black school, Friedman said, or if white parents wanted their children to attend a segregated white school, or if parents wanted their children to attend an integrated school—all should be equally free to do so. Competitive private enterprise and parental choice, he asserted, would promote a “healthy variety of schools” while making teachers’ salaries “responsive to market forces.” He predicted that private schools would “spring up to meet the demand.”
Southern governors used Friedman’s rhetoric and arguments to fight the implementation of the Brown decision. They adopted his endorsement of “freedom of choice” as well as his belief that private schools would provide a better education than “government schools”; indeed, advocates of vouchers began to refer to “public schools” as “government schools,” a term of derision that continues to appear in our ongoing debates about “school choice” today. As the historian Nancy MacLean demonstrated in “How Milton Friedman Exploited White Supremacy to Privatize Education,” a 2021 paper posted by the Institute for New Economic Thinking, Friedman taught southern leaders that the best way to protect Jim Crow schools was to use “race-neutral arguments” and to “embrace both an anti-government stance and a positive rubric of liberty, competition, and market choice.” As a result, seven states—Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia—enacted laws to subsidize the private school tuition of families fleeing the prospect of desegregated public schools.
In the following decades, existing private schools for white students expanded, and new private schools opened—“white flight academies” or “segregation academies”—to enroll students whose parents opposed racial integration. Often the enrollment of a single Black student in a previously all-white public school was enough to spur an exodus of white families. This happened in New Orleans in 1960 when six-year-old Ruby Bridges enrolled at the William Frantz Elementary School. She had to be escorted into the school each day by federal marshals, on the direct orders of the federal judge J. Skelly Wright. Each day Ruby withstood the screaming of angry white parents at the schoolhouse doors. And Ruby was the only child in her classroom; only a handful of white students remained in the school.
As late as 1965, less than 3 percent of Black children in the South attended schools with white children. Until then southern states engaged in a strategy of “massive resistance” to school integration, blocking the implementation of the Brown decision by providing “tuition tax credits” (a form of vouchers) so that white students could go to all-white private schools, by intimidating Black students so that they would not apply to attend white public schools, or by closing public schools altogether.
Virginia was at the forefront of this “massive resistance.” In 1959 its general assembly repealed the compulsory school attendance law and allowed localities to close their public schools. Prince Edward County was ordered by two courts to integrate its schools but chose instead to shutter its entire public school system. Officials provided tuition grants (vouchers) for white students to attend all-white private schools but made no such arrangements for Black children. Some Black families organized makeshift schools, but for five years there were no public schools for Black students in Prince Edward County. It wasn’t until 1968 that the Supreme Court outlawed Virginia’s tuition grants to private all-white schools.
After the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in 1965, which made federal funding available to public schools, the federal government had the legal and financial tools to end resistance to integration. Federal courts across the South struck down laws authorizing public funding for vouchers and private schools, as well as any other state laws intended to block racial desegregation. The US Office of Education informed school districts across the South that they would not receive federal funding unless they desegregated promptly. Because of this well-known history, the term “school choice” was so closely associated with resistance to the Brown decision that it was widely and rightly dismissed as racist. It fell into disrepute for decades.
Now, seventy years after Brown, vouchers have not only been rehabilitated, since the 1990s they have been enacted in various forms in thirty-three states and the District of Columbia. Some of these programs are euphemistically called “education scholarships” or “tuition tax credits” or “education savings accounts,” but the fundamental principle is the same in all of them: public money pays for private school, even—in fact, most often—for religious schools. Republican-controlled legislatures in states such as Florida and Arizona enacted voucher programs that started small (in 1999 and 2011, respectively), intending to “save poor kids trapped in failing public schools” or supposedly only for children with disabilities. Over time these programs expanded, increasing the number of eligible students. Now both states have removed all limits, and every student, regardless of family income, is eligible for a tuition subsidy, at a cost to taxpayers that is expected to rise to $1 billion a year in Arizona and $4 billion in Florida.
Josh Cowen, a professor of education policy at Michigan State University, explains this remarkable turnaround of voucher policy in his superb book The Privateers: How Billiionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers. Cowen has researched vouchers for most of his career. He worked with teams of academics who received millions of dollars in federal and philanthropic funds to study the results of voucher programs in different cities and states. Like many of his fellow researchers, he hoped that vouchers would provide better education for low-income students. But three years ago he published an article in The Hechinger Report, a nonpartisan education journal, in which he bluntly declared that vouchers were a failure.
Cowen explained that his initial enthusiasm for vouchers cooled as the evaluations were released. He participated in a study of Milwaukee’s vouchers from 2005 to 2010 that concluded that “there was very little difference on test scores” between students in public schools and carefully matched students in voucher schools. Furthermore, when low-income and Black students left voucher schools and returned to public schools, their academic performance in reading and math improved. At the same time that the Milwaukee study ended, a new report showed “shockingly bad early test score results for students in the Louisiana voucher program in the years following Hurricane Katrina.” Those poor results persisted and were replicated by studies in Ohio and Indiana.
The Privateers tells the story of how and why public policy on funding private and religious schools changed. As the consistent failure of state referenda shows, vouchers were never a popular idea; it was the politicians’ dependence on big campaign donors that made school choice a staple of Republican rhetoric. The widespread adoption of vouchers, Cowen explains, was basically a policy coup staged by billionaires who were libertarians or religious zealots or both. Cowen explains
how a small band of interconnected and insular groups of conservative advocates, tightly networked to some of the wealthiest and most influential players in right-wing US politics, invented a rationale for school privatization largely from nothing and out of nowhere.
He describes the agenda of that “network of scholars, lawyers, donors, and activists” as religious nationalism.
The main organizations in this movement to break down the wall of separation between church and state were two right-wing philanthropies, the John M. Olin Foundation and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, which funded both the Harvard professor of government Paul Peterson and the libertarian lawyer Clint Bolick. The Bradley Foundation, based in Milwaukee, supported the creation of the nation’s first publicly funded voucher program in that city in 1990 and played a crucial part in funding the three pillars of the voucher movement: research, policy advocacy, and litigation. Peterson became the point person for voucher research and advocacy; he also mentored a cohort of graduate students at Harvard who became the nation’s most prominent evaluators of voucher projects.
Bolick, who ran the libertarian Institute for Justice (funded by the billionaire Koch brothers), oversaw litigation and appeared on behalf of the Milwaukee and Cleveland voucher programs in state and federal courts. When more money was needed for research or litigation, members of a secretive right-wing group called the Council for National Policy were available to help; the CNPincluded the Koch brothers and the DeVos family, who used their fortune from the multilevel marketing company Amway to fund conservative candidates and think tanks and deployed their philanthropy to advance public funding of religious schools. Reviewing the players and their strategy, Cowen concludes that “there is nothing in education policymaking today that comes close to the conservative political apparatus accessed by and…even driving, at times, the creation of evidence on behalf of school vouchers.”
In 1990 the political scientists John Chubb and Terry Moe published Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools, in which they asserted that school choice would heal American education; the book was funded by the Olin and Bradley Foundations. Many seemed to have forgotten the racist origins of school choice. Chubb and Moe argued that small-d democratic politics was a handicap for public schools because it kept them in the grip of vested interests, like teachers’ unions and associations of school superintendents. The result of this stasis, they claimed, was poor academic performance. They maintained that “reformers would do well to entertain the notion that choice is a panacea.” School choice “all by itself,” they claimed, could transform American education. The book was a sensation in the education world because it offered a simple solution to complex problems and, of course, gave ideological and scholarly weight to the growing movement for charter schools and vouchers.
That same year, the Milwaukee voucher program started at the behest of the local Black leaders Howard Fuller, a militant social worker who became Milwaukee’s school superintendent, and Polly Williams, a state legislator. Fuller and Williams were disappointed by the academic performance of Black students in public schools. The Bradley Foundation, which was eager to see a demonstration of the success of vouchers in its hometown, quickly provided funding. The Milwaukee Parental Choice Program began as a project that enrolled 341 low-income students in seven private schools. By 1994 it had increased to 830 students in twelve schools.
The legislation authorizing the voucher program required that the students take a state test and that the results be evaluated by an independent researcher. The state superintendent, who opposed vouchers, appointed John Witte, a professor from the University of Wisconsin, to conduct the evaluation. When Witte eventually concluded that the program had minimal impact on students’ academic outcomes or attendance and that voucher recipients returned to public schools at high rates, voucher advocates denounced him as biased. Cowen says that Witte was fair and that his study was accurate.
The loudest voice deploring the negative evaluation of the Milwaukee voucher program was that of Peterson, who wrote a letter to TheNew York Times eviscerating the Witte study for minimizing the academic gains of the students and the importance of parental satisfaction. Cowen points out that Peterson was a political scientist with minimal experience in statistical evaluation. Peterson worked with his then graduate student Jay P. Greene on a study, funded by the Bradley and Olin Foundations, of the Milwaukee program. They concluded that, contrary to the state evaluation, vouchers produced significant academic benefits. The voucher system produced these positive results, they wrote, despite legislative burdens such as income limitations and the exclusion of religious schools.
Peterson and Greene’s favorable review persuaded the Republican-controlled Wisconsin legislature to renew and expand the voucher program in 1995 by including religious schools and increasing the number of participants to 15,000. The inclusion of religious schools led to a court battle that voucher advocates eventually won, litigated by Bolick and the high-powered lawyer Kenneth Starr, who later became famous for his part in the investigation of President Bill Clinton. The Bradley Foundation underwrote his firm’s fee of $300,000 for one month of work, Cowen writes.
Meanwhile the voucher push shifted to Ohio, where the Republican governor wanted Cleveland to be a model for the nation. The program was designed for low-income students, but—unlike in Milwaukee—it did not exclude religious schools; nearly all of the fifty-two participating schools were Catholic. The official evaluator, the Indiana University professor Kim Metcalf, found “few overall differences in student achievement,” but once again Peterson and Greene dismissed the official evaluation and produced their own report—this time funded by the Walton Family Foundation in addition to the Olin Foundation—which showed “large gains” for voucher students. Cowen notes that Peterson’s work was typically reported in newspaper editorials (usually the pro-voucher Wall Street Journal), not in peer-reviewed scholarly journals.
Cowen points out that Peterson’s research findings were more clearly directed toward the Supreme Court than toward other scholars: he filed an affidavit on behalf of the Cleveland program in the crucial 2002 case Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, which concerned the legality of public funding of religious schools. The Court decided 5–4 in favor of including religious schools in the voucher program—a significant reversal of numerous decisions upholding the separation of church and state. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor cited Peterson and Greene’s work in her concurring opinion.
Since that Supreme Court decision, vouchers have been sold to the public as a way to “save poor kids from failing schools.” School choice has been described as “the civil rights issue of our time” by Betsy DeVos, Ted Cruz, and Donald Trump. Republican elected officials adopted school choice as party dogma, and state after state enacted laws authorizing vouchers, despite a distinct lack of public support. Voters in Utah rejected vouchers in 2007, voters in Florida rejected vouchers in 2012, and voters in Arizona rejected vouchers in 2018, but the Republican leaders in all three states ignored the referenda and continued to expand voucher programs. Republican legislatures and state courts have also ignored explicit provisions in state constitutions that forbid the public funding of religious schools, claiming that the voucher goes to the parents, not to the religious schools where they pay for tuition. Where there’s a will, partisans find a way.
Voucher advocates continually promised academic gains, especially for the poorest students, but after 2010, as the voucher programs grew in scale, the academic results turned sharply negative. Cowen realized that poor kids were actually harmed by using them. Low-income students did not use vouchers to enroll in elite private schools, which mostly did not accept these students—either because they were behind academically or because the voucher was worth far less than the school’s tuition—but to enroll in religious schools whose teachers were uncertified or in pop-up private schools created to capture the government money. When the outcomes were disappointing, the right-wing foundations and Republican officials promoting vouchers moved the goalposts: test scores didn’t matter, they said, but graduation rates and parental satisfaction did. When the test scores and the graduation rates were surpassed by local public schools, the pro-voucher foundations, elected officials, and researchers shifted to a different rationale, one that was “always the underlying goal,” Cowen argues: to satisfy the “values” of parents. Just as segregationists in the 1950s invoked “the right of parents” to avoid integration, voucher advocates in the twenty-first century believe that parents “have the express right to use public dollars to self-segregate.”And these advocates claim that parents have the right to receive taxpayer support for their children to attend religious schools; denying them that “right,” they argue, infringes on religious freedom.
Cowen describes how he came to this understanding. From 2013 to 2016 two teams of researchers—one from MIT and another from the Walton-funded Department of Educational Reform at the University of Arkansas—reached the same dire conclusions about vouchers in Louisiana: they “caused unprecedented large, negative impacts on student achievement.” The Louisiana voucher students were mostly Black and low-income. They entered voucher schools at the fiftieth percentile in math; after a year in private school, they dropped to the twenty-sixth percentile. They improved in the second year but remained behind their peers in public schools. This was solid evidence from two separate groups of researchers “that voucher interventions actually caused damage” to the poor students they were supposed to help. Voucher advocates insisted that the experiment needed more time and that it was overregulated by the state.
The bad results kept rolling in: from Indiana, where independent evaluators documented negative outcomes in 2015; from Ohio in 2016, in a study funded by a conservative think tank; and from Washington, D.C., where evaluators found poor results in 2017 and 2018. Cowen concludes that
no explanation then or now has fully explained the learning loss displayed in locations so different as Louisiana, Indiana, Washington, and Ohio as does the simplest one: that for all of Milton Friedman’s purported brilliance, and for all the millions of dollars pumped into the effort by Betsy DeVos, Charles Koch, and the Bradley Foundation, the idea simply did not work. The bigger and more recent the voucher program is, the worse the results have been.
Republican-led states simply ignored the evidence that low-income students who used vouchers fell behind their peers in public schools, and they continued to enact the policies, thanks to large contributions from right-wing billionaires to the campaigns of like-minded state officials. Furthermore, several of the Republican-dominated states removed income restrictions and other limitations, thus abandoning the rhetoric of “saving poor kids from failing schools.” A dozen states currently have “universal” voucher programs, meaning that any family may apply for a voucher, without regard to their income. Tennessee enacted universal vouchers only weeks ago. Other states are likely to follow their lead.
Cowen reports that, with or without income restrictions, the majority of applicants to voucher programs were not trying to leave public schools; they were already attending private schools. This is the case in every state with vouchers. Right now between 65 and 80 percent of students who claim vouchers are using them to pay the tuition of private schools where they were already enrolled. Vouchers are also used in many states to pay the expenses of parents who teach their children at home. In Arizona, according to reports in The Arizona Republic and ProPublica, parents have used their “education savings accounts” to buy trampolines, swing sets, expensive Lego sets, horseback riding lessons, kayaks, trips to Disney World, chicken coops, skiing trips, cowboy roping lessons, and ice-skating lessons. Republican governor Doug Ducey led the campaign to make public funds available to all students in the state. His successor, Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, predicted in 2023 that the state’s voucher program could cost nearly $1 billion, with over 53 percent of all new funding paying for 8 percent of Arizona’s students.
Just as troubling to Cowen as the academic results of the voucher project is the publicly funded discrimination that these schools make possible. Right-wing rage in response to the pandemic enabled the eruption of the so-called culture wars over masking, vaccines, and teaching about race and sexuality in schools, as well as the presence of these topics in library books. In 2022 Christopher Rufo, the right-wing provocateur who first raised an alarm about “critical race theory” in public schools (few public school teachers had ever heard of the term; it refers to a course usually taught in law schools, if at all), called on conservatives in a speech at Hillsdale College to promote universal distrust in public schools in order to arrive at “universal school choice.” This distrust was fueled by right-wing groups, which made wild accusations about teachers allegedly “grooming” their students to be gay or Marxist, and about the curriculum allegedly turning students against their own country.
Vouchers appeal to those who want to escape lessons about racism, diversity, or gender equality. Religious and private schools that receive publicly funded vouchers are not bound by civil rights laws, and many openly bar the admission of LGBTQ+ students and the hiring of LGBTQ+ staff. Some bar students with disabilities. Some religious schools accept only students who are members of their own religion.
Trump issued an executive order on January 29 titled “Expanding Educational Freedom and Opportunities for Families,” which called for the diversion of federal funds to underwrite tuition at private and religious schools. He claimed that “rigorous research demonstrates that well-designed education-freedom programs improve student achievement and cause nearby public schools to improve their performance,” which according to Josh Cowen’s book The Privateers is not true. Trump issued the order on the same day as the release of the latest national test scores by the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Florida, which has a robust voucher program, experienced a sharp decline in its scores, the state’s lowest in twenty years on this test.
Cowen considers the manipulation of culture-war issues like race and gender to be a feature of vouchers, not a bug. Groups like Moms for Liberty and Parents Defending Freedom use the clarion call of “parents’ rights” to condemn the discussion of race and LGBTQ+ issues, as well as access to books about these subjects, in public schools. Such groups want to censor what is taught to all children, even those whose parents disagree with them and want their children to learn about race, gender, and sexuality. Imagine teachers in a segregated Black school being told by the state that they cannot teach accurate Black history. Why should those parents have no rights?
Cowen writes that the learning loss of poor children who used vouchers was larger than the learning loss caused by the pandemic, and at this point the evidence against their efficacy is overwhelming. Yet more states adopted vouchers in 2022 and 2023 than in any previous legislative sessions. Texas is the only large Republican-controlled state that has not enacted legislation to implement them, owing to the combined opposition of parent groups, Democrats, religious leaders who believe in the separation of church and state, and rural Republicans defending their district’s only public school. Yet Governor Greg Abbott has said that vouchers are his highest priority. He received millions of dollars from billionaires to defeat many of the rural Republicans who opposed vouchers. The issue will soon come to a vote in the legislature.
The reality is that when states offer charter schools and vouchers, public schools lose. Each time students leave for private alternatives, public schools must reduce their teaching staff, increase class sizes, and cut back on curricular offerings. States cannot afford to pay for three different school systems. Is the goal to eliminate public schools? That argument seems inherent to some who share Friedman-style thinking.
What does Cowen recommend?
Fund public schools. It really is that simple…. The more money we spend on schools, the better off children are, not simply academically, but in later-life outcomes like higher wages and fewer encounters with the criminal justice system.
Wealthy parents spend amply to educate their children—to make sure that they have certified teachers, small classes, a well-supplied library, and a curriculum that includes the arts and sciences as well as physical education and time for play. And, of course, wealthy children never go without food or medical care. We should give the same to all children.
Bear in mind that highly segregated private schools are subsidized by taxpayers in states that have enacted universal vouchers. The politicians today are fulfilling the fever dreams of segregationist governors in the South in the 1950s.
ProPublica reports:
Private schools in the United States are, on the whole, whiter than public schools, with fewer Black, Hispanic or Latino students. This may not be a surprising statistic because private schools can often be expensive and exclusionary, but it’s not a simple one to pin down. There is no central list of private schools in the country, and the only demographic data about them comes from a little-known voluntary survey administered by the federal government.
While reporting our project on Segregation Academies in the South last year, we relied on that survey to find private schools founded during desegregation and analyzed their demographics compared to local public school districts. Our analysis of that survey revealed, among other things, Amite County, Mississippi, where about 900 children attend the local public schools — which, as of 2021, were 16% white. By comparison, the two private schools in the county, with more than 600 children, were 96% white.
In the course of our reporting, we realized that this data and analysis were illuminating and useful — even outside the South. We decided to create a database to allow anyone to look up a school and view years worth of data.
Today, we are releasing the Private School Demographics database. This is the first time anyone has taken past surveys and made them this easy to explore. Moreover, we’ve matched these schools to the surrounding public school districts, enabling parents, researchers and journalists to directly compare the makeup of private schools to local public systems.
Until now, much of this data was difficult to analyze: While the National Center for Education Statistics, which collects the data, provides a tool to view the most recent year of Private School Universe Survey data, there was no easy way to examine historical trends without wrangling large, unwieldy text files.
As debates over school choice, vouchers and privatization of education intensify, making this repository of private school data accessible is more important than ever. The information is self-reported, but we have attempted to flag or correct some obvious inaccuracies wherever possible.
For schools, you can filter results by state, religious affiliation, school type and enrollment range. For some schools, you can also filter by founding year. By default, we only show results for schools that have responded to the survey at least once in the last few years, but you can turn off this filter to also include older data in your search results.
For public school districts, users can filter by state and sort results to see where the most students are attending private schools, as well as the gap between the district’s largest racial group and the school’s share of those same students. Because private schools can draw students from different districts, comparing their racial composition to a single district’s public schools is imperfect. Still, these comparisons can offer valuable insights into broader patterns of segregation and access.
Before the inauguration of Trump, The New York Review of Books invited me to write about his education agenda. I read three important documents in which his views and goal were spelled out: the education chapter in Project 2025; Agenda 47, Trump’s campaign document; and the website of the America First Policy Institute, the organization led by Linda McMahon, Trump’s choice for Secretary of Education. The three documents overlap, of course. Trump intends to privatize education; he despises public schools. He wants to eliminate the Department of Education. He and his supporters are obsessed with “radical gender ideology,” and they blame public schools for the very existence of transgender students. The election of Trump, it was clear, would mean the end of civil rights protections for LGBT students and a determined effort to defund and destroy public schools.
The NYRB invited me to participate in an interview.
This article is part of a regular series of conversations with the Review’s contributors; read past entries here and sign up for our e-mail newsletter to get them delivered to your inbox each week.
In “‘Their Kind of Indoctrination,’” published on the NYR Online shortly before Donald Trump’s second inauguration, Diane Ravitch writes about the troubling future of American public education. Referring to the president’s infamous remark from his first campaign—“I love the poorly educated”—Ravitch warns that his second term is likely to lead to “more of them to love.”
A historian of education, Ravitch worked on education policy in both George H. W. Bush’s and Bill Clinton’s administrations. She has spent her career analyzing the national and state policies that reshape public schools, like laws that implement high-stakes testing or that divert taxpayer money to charter schools. In addition to writing nearly two dozen books—including The Troubled Crusade: American Education, 1945–1980 (1983), Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools (2013), and, most recently, Slaying Goliath: The Passionate Resistance to Privatization and the Fight to Save America’s Public Schools (2020)—Ravitch posts regularly about American education policy on her widely read blog. Her memoirs will be published later this year by Columbia University Press.
I reached out to Ravitch to discuss the current state of American education, the forces threatening it, and her vision for how public schools can better fulfill their democratic promise.
Regina Martinez:How did you start writing about education? Were you influenced by your time in public schools in the South?
Diane Ravitch: I started writing about education when I was in college. The first paper I ever wrote was for a political science class in my freshman year at Wellesley in 1956. It was about the politics of the Houston public school system in the early 1950s, when I was a student there. Voters elected a new school board every two years, and control went back and forth between a group of far-right extremists, who saw Communists lurking everywhere, and moderates who just wanted to make sure that the schools were running well. At one point, books about Russia were removed from the high school library’s shelves. Under the moderates, we heard assembly speakers who spoke of racial and religious tolerance; under the Minute Women, the female wing of the John Birch Society, we were warned to beware of Communist influence. Also, while I was attending them, the schools were racially segregated.
In “Their Kind of Indoctrination,” you write, “One can only imagine the opprobrium that will be visited upon teachers who are not certified as patriots.” How do you imagine this will impact the teaching profession? What might it mean for teacher recruitment in the future?
The threat of political surveillance is chilling, as it would be in every profession. In many states, especially “red” states, teachers have to be careful about what they teach, what reading they assign, and how they handle topics related to race and gender. Trump recently issued an executive order stating that he would cut off the funding of schools that “indoctrinate” their students by teaching about “radical gender ideology” and racism. His effort to impose thought control is illegal but that hasn’t stopped him from trying.
This sort of political censorship is happening in K–12 schools but also in higher education. The number of people choosing to prepare to be teachers plummeted in the wake of the Bush-Obama emphasis on standardized testing. The threat of political loyalty screening can only make matters worse.
One of President Trump’s recent executive orders reauthorized federal agents to detain children at schools. What actions if any can schools, families, and students take to resist the incursion of the security state into schools?
The determination of the Trump administration to raid schools is terrifying for children and for their teachers, whose job it is to protect their students. Imagine a child being arrested in his or her classroom. It is indeed frightening. Many districts have urged teachers to get legal advice from the district legal officers. At the very least, educators should demand to see a warrant. If ICE agents are armed, resistance may be futile. Elected leaders will have to develop contingency plans, if they have not done so already.
You worked on education policy under both President George H. W. Bush and President Bill Clinton. What, if anything, was different about your work between a Republican and a Democratic administration? How do you think the Department of Education—and federal education policy more generally—has changed since the early 1990s?
I served as assistant secretary for education research and improvement under President Bush. Then President Clinton appointed me to the national testing board, known as the National Assessment Governing Board. There was a continuity of policy from the first President Bush to Clinton, and then from Clinton to the second President Bush to President Obama.
The first President Bush wanted to reform American education through voluntary measures. He convened a meeting of the nation’s governors in 1989, and they agreed on a set of six goals for the year 2000. He thought that the goals could be reached by exhortation, at no cost. The goals were indeed aspirational (they hoped, for example, that American students would be first in the world in mathematics and science by the year 2000), but no one had a plan for how to reach them, nor was there any new funding. President Clinton got credit for drafting them, so he and Bush shared that commitment. He was willing to spend real money to help states improve their schools, and added two more goals (one about teacher training, another about parent participation). He also believed that the nation should have national standards and tests. None of the goals was reached by the year 2000, except for having 90 percent of students graduate from high school. But that goal was a matter of definition. If it meant that 90 percent should graduate high school in four years, we did not meet that goal. If you counted the students who graduated in five or even six years, we surpassed it.
Since you launched your education blog in 2012, it has become a popular forum for discussions about education and democracy. Looking back, are there any positions you’ve shared on the blog that you would reconsider or approach differently today? Are there positions you took or predictions you made that you’re particularly proud of?
I started blogging two years after publication of The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Have Undermined Education. In that book, I renounced views that I had advocated for decades: competition between schools, relying on standardized testing as the measure of students, merit pay, and many other policies connected to accountability and standardization.
What I have learned in the past fifteen years has made me even more alarmed than I was then about the organized efforts to destroy public education. That book has a chapter about “The Billionaire Boys Club.” I focused on the venture philanthropy of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation. These billionaires used their philanthropy strategically to fund privately managed charter schools, high-stakes standardized testing, and a system that evaluates teachers by the test scores of their students and closes schools where students got low scores. I opposed all of these measures, which were endorsed by both the second Bush administration and the Obama administration. I demonstrated in that book and subsequent books that these strategies have been failures and are enormously demoralizing to teachers. They also turned schools into testing factories, crushing creative thinking and the joy of teaching and learning.
In the years since, I have learned that “the Billionaire Boys Club” is far larger than the three families that I mentioned. In my last book, Slaying Goliath, I tried to make a list of all the billionaires and the foundations that support charter schools and vouchers, and it was long indeed. Even now, I continue to come across billionaires and foundations that should be added to the list. What I suspected was that charter schools paved the way for vouchers by treating schooling as a consumer good, not a civic responsibility. What I did not realize was that the voucher movement is even more powerful than the charter movement. Its constituency is not just right-wing billionaires like the Koch brothers and the DeVos family, but Christian nationalists, white supremacists, extremist organizations like the Alliance Defending Freedom and the American Legislative Executive Council, affluent parents who want the state to subsidize their private school tuition, and Catholic leaders who have always believed that the state should underwrite Catholic schools.
There has been a lot of discourse recently about declining rates of literacy due to AI, the pandemic, phones, or a host of other causes. How significant do you think this risk is? What might be done to reverse the trend?
I too am concerned about declining rates of literacy, as well as declining interest in literature. In my field of study, I believe that standardized testing has been a culprit in shortening the attention span of children of all ages. Students are expected to read short snippets, then to answer questions about those limited passages. In the early decades of the twentieth century, the College Board sponsored college entrance examinations in which students were assigned works of literature in advance, then asked to write about what they had read. Teachers and professors read their essays and graded them. Now the exam answers may be read by a machine or by a person hired off Craigslist to read swiftly, giving only a minute or two to each written answer.
In my dreams, I would change expectations and ask high school teachers to assign books that are worth reading, then require students to write three or four pages about why they did or did not like the book.
While I welcome the expansion of the canon to include works by women and by people of color, I would also welcome a revival of interest in the great works that were once considered the classics of Western literature. In too many high schools, the classics have not just been marginalized, they have been ousted. That is as grave an error as ignoring the works of those who are not white men.
Given the increasing momentum behind the privatization of education, how do you envision the next generation advancing public school advocacy? What do you anticipate will be their greatest challenge?
Public schools are one of the most important democratic institutions of our society. In many states, they enroll 90 percent of all students. They have always enabled children and adolescents to learn together with others who come from backgrounds different from their own. There is a major movement today, funded by right-wing billionaires, to destroy public schools and to replace them with religious schools, private schools, and homeschooling. It is called “school choice,” but the schools choose, not the students or families. Private schools are allowed to discriminate on any grounds and are not bound by federal laws that prohibit discrimination and that protect those with disabilities. Racial and religious segregation will increase. More students will attend schools whose purpose is indoctrination, not building a democratic society.
The greatest challenge facing those who believe in the value of public education is that the money behind privatization is enormous, and it is spent strategically to win political allies. To my knowledge, there is no billionaire funder for public education as there are for privatization. In the world of public education advocacy, there are no equivalents to the Koch money, the DeVos money, the Walton money, the Texas evangelical billionaires Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks, the Pennsylvania billionaire Jeff Yass. I have been president of an organization called the Network for Public Education since 2013, and our annual budget is a pittance compared to the privatizers’ organizations. One pro–school choice organization spent as much on their annual dinner party as our entire annual budget.
The other side of this struggle to save public education is the reality that important Democrats still believe that school choice helps poor Black and Hispanic kids, despite overwhelming evidence that this claim is not true and is in fact part of the hustle. Representative Hakeem Jeffries, Senator Cory Booker, Governor Jared Polis, and Senator Michael Bennett are a few of the Democrats who have dampened the interest of their party in fighting for public schools.
What makes me hopeful is that the reality is becoming clearer with every passing day: those who are concerned for the common good must support public schools, not undertake to pay the tuition of every student who chooses not to attend public schools. Privatization benefits some, not all, not even most. Public money should pay for public schools. Private money should pay for private schools.
I was invited to write about the Trump agenda for education by The New York Review of Books. This is a publication I love to write for, because it’s the most distinguished literary-political-cultural publication in the nation. In addition, the editing process is arduous and careful. Every word, every sentence was carefully scrutinized. I happen to love close editing because it is a demonstration of seriousness. The editors at NYRB are very serious.
Remember the claim that vouchers would “save poor kids from failing public schools”? As we see in state after state, it’s not true. Josh Cowen wrote in his new book The Privateers that voucher researchers have known for years that vouchers don’t help poor kids; in reality, vouchers actually hurt poor kids. The poor kids don’t go to elite private schools; they mostly go to religious schools with uncertified teachers. The greatest benefit of vouchers goes to wealthy kids, who use the money to subsidize their private school tuition. In every state with universal vouchers, the majority are used by students who are already attending private schools.
If you have read Josh Cowen’s new book about the failure of vouchers, called The Privateers, this story would not surprise you.
Louisiana ‘s academic results for poor kids has been consistently dismal. The state plans to increase the voucher program and weaken or remove regulations. That’s a way to help failing voucher schools evade accountability.
School vouchers were supposed to be an academic lifeline for Louisiana’s neediest children.
Under a 2012 law, the state would pay for poor students in struggling public schools to attend private or parochial schools where, it was promised, they would receive a better education.
But more than a decade since the statewide voucher program began, after Louisiana has spent half a billion taxpayer dollars to send thousands of students to private schools, data show the state’s lofty promise has not panned out.
On average, voucher students at private schools fare worse on state tests than their public-school peers, according to scores examined by The Times-Picayune and The Advocate. In 2023, just 14% of voucher students in grades 3-8 met state achievement targets, compared with 24% of low-income students at public schools.
“If the goal was to improve achievement, then the program is not succeeding,” said Doug Harris, an economist at Tulane University who has written about Louisiana’s voucher program.
Even voucher proponents acknowledge the lackluster results
“Louisiana is kind of famous for having one of the weakest, or maybe the weakest, private scholarship program in the country,” said Ginny Gentles, a school-choice advocate and former U.S. Department of Education official, while interviewing Louisiana Superintendent of Education Cade Brumley on a podcast last year. Brumley agreed that “it’s called the worst (voucher) program in the country” and “has its limitations.”
The private schools that get about $6,800 per voucher student face scant oversight. Unlike public schools, most don’t receive state ratings because they enroll too few voucher students. But 30 private schools were graded last year, and nearly 80% earned Ds or Fs.
State regulations forbid F-rated private schools from enrolling new voucher students. Brumley waived that rule in recent years, allowing even the worst-performing schools to take in more students and tax dollars.
“These kids, there’s no price we won’t pay to make sure they get a good quality education,” Gov. Jeff Landry said while promoting the program at a Catholic school in Metairie last year.
While the scholarship program will replace vouchers, many of the same private schools already have signed up — including over 20 with D or F ratings.
“It makes absolutely no sense,” said Ashana Bigard, a New Orleans public school parent and advocate. The voucher schools struggled academically, “so we’re going to give them more kids?”
But proponents insist the scholarship program, which includes fewer regulations, will attract stronger schools and achieve better results than vouchers.
“I think what we learned is that a private-school choice program is only as good as the quality of the private schools that are enticed to participate,” said Patrick Wolf, an education policy professor at the University of Arkansas who studied Louisiana’s vouchers.
In that program, he added, the “quality level appears to have been quite low.”
Early results disappoint
Louisiana first offered vouchers in the 1960s to parents fleeing school desegregation, before resurrecting them decades later as a refuge from struggling public schools.
“Parents and kids should not be trapped in a failing school,” then-Gov. Bobby Jindal said when the statewide voucher program launched in 2012, adding that all children deserve “an excellent education.”
One of several Republican-led states to adopt vouchers, Louisiana targeted its program to families with incomes at or below 250% of the poverty line with children in public schools rated C or lower. Participating private schools had to admit all applicants, charge no more than the voucher amount and administer the state’s annual LEAP test to voucher recipients.
“We’re talking about some of the worst results we’ve ever seen in the history of education research,” said Josh Cowen, an education policy professor at Michigan State University who opposes vouchers.
The low scores persisted for several years, especially in math. It was a far cry from Jindal’s assertion that vouchers would give students access to an excellent education. (Jindal did not respond to a request for comment.)
Voucher proponents posited that the private schools’ curriculums could be misaligned with the state tests or the program’s rules could have deterred higher-performing schools from joining. Less than a third of the state’s roughly 400 private schools participated in 2012, and those that did tended to be Catholic, have declining enrollment and charge low tuition.
“It was a very heavily regulated program and it tended to attract schools that were more desperate for the money,” said Michael McShane, director of national research at EdChoice, a pro-voucher group.
Advocates point to surveys showing many parents who receive vouchers are happy with their children’s schools. They also say public schools improve when forced to compete with private schools for students.
Last school year, nearly 6,000 students received vouchers, costing taxpayers $45 million. More than 75% of those students attended private schools where fewer than 1 in 4 voucher students achieved “mastery” on the state tests, meaning they’re ready for the next grade level, according to an analysis of state data by The Times-Picayune and The Advocate. At least 26% went to schools where fewer than 1 in 10 voucher students achieved mastery.
The raw scores don’t show where students started academically and whether the voucher schools helped them grow. But the state’s rating system tracks students’ academic progress, giving schools credit for boosting student achievement even if their scores remain low.
Even by that measure, 11 of the 30 voucher schools that received ratings last year earned Fs, 12 got Ds and five earned Cs. Just two earned Bs.
Lakeside Christian Academy in Slidell posted some of the worst results last year: Fewer than 5% of its voucher students achieved mastery. The school, which enrolled 79 voucher students, earned Fs three years in a row.
Principal Buffie Singletary said voucher students typically arrive at the school far behind, with limited reading skills, making it difficult to catch them up.
“It’s just really hard,” she said.
Under state regulations, F-rated private schools can keep their current voucher students but may not enroll more. But Brumley used his authority as state education chief to pause that rule, saying in memos that he sought to promote stability and parental choice.
The move has been a boon for schools like Redemptorist St. Gerard, a Catholic school in Baton Rouge. It earned an F in 2023, then enrolled nearly 40 new voucher students the following year, for a total of 134. In 2024, just 8% of those students achieved mastery.
School leaders did not respond to a request for comment.
Jackson Parish Schools Superintendent David Claxton said if the state is going to give private schools tax dollars, they should be held to the same standards as public schools.
“You still want parents to have choice,” he said, “but let’s make it a fair playing field.”
At first, lower-income families will be eligible for the tax-funded scholarships, which will replace vouchers, but eventually, all will be eligible. Offering private school subsidies to all families, regardless of financial need, is a priority for Trump.
“With President Trump, we will continue working towards education freedom for all!” Landry posted on X last month.
Unlike with vouchers, private schools that participate in the scholarship program can decide which students to admit and how much to charge them. Rather than use the state test, they can choose which assessment to give students. And the schools will no longer be rated by the state.
“LA GATOR has fewer of the regulations that typically scare away high-quality schools,” Wolf said.
But critics are doubtful that the top-performing private schools will enroll students with the greatest academic needs. Instead, those students will likely land at less-selective private schools with more open seats, which tend to be lower performing.
“The fact that you’re getting rid of the regulations doesn’t solve that problem,” said Harris, the Tulane researcher.
As Landry and others set high expectations for the new scholarship program, the voucher results loom large.
Last year, as the Legislature considered a bill to establish the scholarship program, state board of education member Conrad Appel expressed misgivings to a state education official, according to an email obtained through a public records request. (In a recent interview, Appel emphasized that LA GATOR was designed to avoid the voucher program’s mistakes.)
With vouchers, “we ended up taking kids from bad public schools and basically encouraging them to go to even worse private schools,” he wrote. “I am afraid that the push to allow parental choice may mean a repeat of history.”
Editor’s note: This story was corrected to reflect that 24% of low-income public school students in grades 3-8 achieved mastery or above on the state tests in 2023, not 23%.
Annie Martin and Leslie Postal of the Orlando Sentinel have repeatedly exposed the fraud baked into Florida’s voucher program. It began in 1999 with the modest ambition of offering choice to low-income students in “failing schools.” It expanded to provide vouchers for students with disabilities. In past articles, they surveyed voucher schools and identified academic deficiencies, such as uncertified teachers and principals, and Bible-based textbooks. Now, they report on what happened after the state removed all income limits in 2023. Florida now offers money for all students, regardless of family income.
Most of the students getting the voucher money are not low-income, do not have disabilities, and are not escaping bad public schools.
The students getting vouchers are already enrolled in private schools. They don’t need the extra money but they are happy to take it.
They write:
A block from Winter Park’s tony Park Avenue sits St. Margaret Mary Catholic School, where tuition can top $14,000 a year for a K-8 education.
But at this school in the heart of one of Central Florida’s wealthiest communities, about 98 percent of students used taxpayer-funded scholarships worth roughly $8,000 to help pay tuition last year.
Only three percent of St. Margaret Mary’s students got that state financial aid just one year earlier.
The change – repeated at schools around the state – is one powerful measure of how a 2023 Florida law has supercharged a school voucher initiative that was already the nation’s largest.
Once reserved for low-income students and those with disabilities, state scholarships, often called vouchers, are now available to all – and they’re fueling an unprecedented pipeline of public money, estimated at $3.4 billion this year, into private, mostly religious schools across the Sunshine State.
All that money is doing more than just expanding Florida’s voucher program. The new rules are transforming it.
Since their emergence as a conservative educational talking point four decades ago, vouchers have been pitched as a way to provide “school choice” – the opportunity for families who couldn’t otherwise afford private education to escape a substandard neighborhood public school.
But when lawmakers dropped the income limits on Florida’s programs, the key element of the 2023 law, the system became something else:
Choice for lower-income families plus a wide-open taxpayer subsidy for the better off. More than 122,000 new students started using vouchers for the first time in the 2023-24 school year, and nearly 70 percent were already in private school, many in some of Florida’s priciest institutions, according to data from Step Up For Students, the nonprofit that administers most of the state’s scholarships. About 40 percent came from families too wealthy to have qualified previously.
So in many cases the new law did not expand these new families’ options. Instead, it provided state subsidies for the choices they had previously made and were able to afford on their own.
The implications of that shift are vast, an Orlando Sentinel analysis has found.
• Voucher use has jumped by 67% since the new law was approved. • Individual private schools are seeing even bigger surges, creating new reliance on taxpayer funding. The Sentinel found nearly 250 schools where the number of students using vouchers jumped by at least 100 children in the first year after the law changed. At St. Margaret Mary, the growth pushed total annual voucher funding from $65,000 to $3.5 million – in just one example of the multi-million dollar windfalls. • A significant amount of the money is flowing to Florida’s most expensive private schools, many of which served few voucher students in the past: Campuses that advertise annual tuition of $15,000 or more added more than 30,000 voucher students last year. • The proportion of private school students with state scholarships has topped 70% this school year. Ten years ago it was less than a third. • More Florida students use vouchers — a total of 352,860 — to attend private campuses than are enrolled in public schools in Osceola, Orange and Seminole counties combined.
Program critics say Florida is now spending an inordinate amount of its education resources on the wrong people – rather than focusing on system improvements that would be good for all students.
“This is just a subsidy for wealthier people — people who already have the advantage,” said state Rep. Kelly Skidmore, a Democrat from Boca Raton who voted against the expansion.
Skidmore is among those who fear the impact of the voucher explosion on public schools – which are losing money as students shift to private education – and the implications of handing millions in taxpayer dollars to private schools over which the state has little control.
These schools are free, as the Sentinel has reported previously, to hire teachers without college degrees, teach history and science lessons outside mainstream academics and discriminate against LGBTQ students and staff. They do not face the same accountability requirements as their public counterparts, whose students’ test scores and graduation rates are publicly reported. Without such numbers for private schools, it’s difficult to assess the impact of Florida’s voucher program on the quality of education students receive.
Nevertheless, the voucher push shows no signs of abating, with more than 10% of all K-12 students in Florida now receiving the subsidy.
On Jan. 10, Gov. Ron DeSantis celebrated Florida’s “choice revolution” at Trinity Christian Academy in Jacksonville, which now enrolls more than 1,200 voucher students.
“The debate about school choice I think is over. Clearly you’re better offering choice than not offering choice,” DeSantis said.
An Orlando mother of four sent them to The First Academy, affiliated with First Baptist Church of Orlando, where high school tuition is more than $24,000 a year. Nearly 90% of the students use vouchers now, up from about 20% two years ago. She paid the full cost for her two oldest, who graduated, and can afford to pay for her two youngest, but is delighted to take the state subsidy.
Florida is spending $3.4 billion annually to subsidize the state’s most affluent families.
Is it surprising that Florida’s NAEP scores fell to their lowest point in 20 years? The state is not investing in its public schools, which enroll the overwhelming majority of its students.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott is holding hostage the more than five million students in public schools while he demands vouchers for kids who are already enrolled in private and religious schools. Abbott has refused to increase funding for the state’s public schools unless the legislature approves vouchers, most of which will subsidize the affluent.
Last year, the legislature refused to approve vouchers. Since then, Abbott engineered the defeat of several anti-voucher Republicans. He’s hoping to win approval in the current session. Vouchers will pass easily in the state senate. We will see what happens in the House, where rural Republicans stood against vouchers in the past, before Abbott’s purge.
Abbott is playing Reverse Robin Hood. He is stealing from the poor to pay for the rich. Billionaires like Jeff Yass, the richest man jnnOennstlvsnia, and Betsy DeVos of Michigan, are funding his intransigence with millions in campaign contributions.
Two years ago, during the 2023 legislative session, superintendents of Texas schools were optimistic that state lawmakers would boost public-education funding. After all, soaring inflation was straining the already meager finances of districts across the state, and lawmakers had at their disposal a $32.7 billion budget surplus. Spending some of that money on the urgent educational needs of the state’s children might have seemed like an uncontroversial proposal.
Instead, the unthinkable happened: Legislators left Austin without putting any significant new money into schools or giving teachers a raise. The consequences have been dire.
Texas’s public schools were already among the most poorly resourced in the country: Our per-student funding is about 27 percent less than the national average. The basic allotment—the minimum amount of funding per student that school districts receive from the state—has been stuck at $6,160 since 2019. That would need to be upped by about $1,400 just to keep pace with rising costs. Public education advocates worry that lawmakers will provide only face-saving increases to the basic allotment in 2025 while diverting billions to private schools.
Many school leaders have had to undertake draconian austerity measures. Nearly 80 percent of districts have reported challenges with budget deficits. Given the stakes, 2025 could be a pivotal year for Texas’s public-education system….
Texas Monthly spoke to a group of superintendents to ask about how they were coping. They all spoke about the budget cuts and unfunded mandates (like requiring the hiring of police officers without providing funding). One superintendent, Jennifer Blaine of Spring Branch, said:
JB, Spring Branch: We don’t have anywhere else to cut. We are cut to the bone. I consolidated everything I could, and I cut everything that I could. If we have to cut further, you’re talking about severely impacting academics in the classroom and, quite frankly, safety and security. Five and a half million kids are in Texas public schools, and I don’t understand how our legislators and our governor don’t see this as a crisis. If we don’t educate these kids to the highest levels and prepare them for postsecondary success, we’re going to crumble as a state. I don’t know where the disconnect is. Education is the great equalizer. But nobody is talking about that, and I think it’s a missed opportunity because this is not going to end well.
The title of the article in the print edition was “A Legislature That Will Spend at Least as Much Per Pupil as Louisiana.”
Governor Greg Abbott of Texas insists on vouchers. He has promoted them in every legislative session. Last year, he called several special sessions of the legislature, solely to get his vouchers passed. He failed and failed and failed. Since last year, he collected millions of dollars to spend defeating anti-voucher Republicans. He spent it on a campaign of lying about them, barely mentioning vouchers but accusing the refuseniks of opposing extra funding for public schools (they opposed extra money for public schools linked with vouchers), he accused them of failing to support Trump on the border, he threw dirt and lies, and he defeated several of those anti-voucher Republicans for their perfidy.
AUSTIN – Texas Gov. Greg Abbott insisted Monday that he would accept nothing less than a robust, universal school choice voucher program, and he resisted calls to join the plan with blanket increases in public school funding.
As he did in Sunday’s State of the State speech, Abbott committed to raising public teacher pay, but on his terms and largely in the form of merit increases
A plan to allow families to use public dollars on private schools is the centerpiece of his legislative agenda for the legislative session that ends in June. Abbott said his success last year in using the primaries to oust House Republicans who voted against school choice dictates that any plan approved by lawmakers be universal and substantive.
Political Points
“An overwhelming majority of Texans want school choice,” Abbott said during an interview in the Governor’s Mansion with The Dallas Morning News. “I won all of those races because the voters want school choice, so now there’s no reason for us to ratchet back on what we’re going to do, especially knowing full well that what we’re seeking to achieve here right now is exactly what the voters of Texas want. Most important is what the parents across the state of Texas want.”
Abbott will make a campaign-like stop Tuesday in support of school choice at a private Christian school in Athens.
In Monday’s interview with The News, Abbott also stressed his commitment to helping President Donald Trump with his immigration policies, discussed the mechanics of lowering property taxes and said his relationship with Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and House Speaker Dustin Burrows was better than ever.Related:Texas Senate committee approves ‘school choice’ bill on party-line vote
The governor said he was hopeful his agenda, which includes seven emergency items, would be approved by Texas lawmakers.
School choice tops his wish list.
Abbott is backing Senate and House plans that would devote $1 billion for education savings accounts to help families pay for private school expenses and tuition. He wants voucher-type assistance available to any Texas student who wants it.
Public school advocates say they are concerned about the impact universal school choice would have on public education. In the past, a coalition of rural Republicans and urban Democrats in the Texas House have been able to block voucher-style plans, but Abbott says he has 79 votes in the 150-member chamber to approve school choice.
“We bent over backwards to try to provide a compromise position last session,” Abbott said. “They weren’t going to negotiate at all. They said they don’t want anything other than ‘not school choice.’”
Abbott said public education is being funded at historic levels, adding that private schools in Texas were not on “equal footing” with public schools that use taxpayer dollars to build facilities.
“We’re talking apples and oranges here,” Abbott said. “There’s so much money and so much expansion. Spending on the education side has been on the administrative side. We’ve got to ratchet back the spending on administration and devote that money to where it belongs and where it’s most useful, and that is paying our teachers.”
Teacher pay raises would be partly across-the-board because it would come in the basic allotment. The bulk, however, should be devoted to merit increases, Abbott said.
“We want to ensure that we’re putting teachers on a pathway to be able to earn a six-figure salary,” he said. “Some will be across the board. A lot will be a merit.”
A Senate proposal would add $4.9 billion to the Foundation School Program for teacher pay and changes to the Teacher Incentive Allotment. Teacher pay would increase $4,000 for all teachers, plus an additional $6,000 for rural teachers.
State Rep. Rafael Anchia, D-Dallas, disagrees with Abbott, saying public schools are not adequately funded because of inflation and unfunded mandates, including paying for increased school security.
“The unfunded mandates that both he and the Legislature put on local school districts, we need to make them whole, because it’s the right thing to do,” Anchia said. “We asked them to increase security, and we said we would pay for it.”
Anchia said $5 billion devoted to public education is sitting unspent.
“We should fully fund public schools based on the historic reform bill that we passed in 2019 and release the funds that he withheld during the last biennium for public education,” Anchia said. “He held these funds hostage to get his subsidy of private schools, also known as the voucher scheme, done.”
Abbott says schools could have had that money, but they rejected his education savings account plan.
Anchia said he hoped pay raises would become a reality.
“I’m all about driving money through the formulas down to the local districts, where they know how to make investments better than any politician in Austin,” he said.
Another major agenda item for Abbott is taxes. Texas has a $24 billion budget surplus to work with, and the governor wants property taxes reduced on top of the historic $18 billion property tax cut he signed in 2023.
Abbott said local tax increases often mitigated the 2023 property tax cut, and he said he hopes to sign legislation that would require local tax increases to be approved by two-thirds of voters.
“Reducing property taxes going forward is only going to work if we tie the hands of the taxing authorities to make sure they’re not going to be able to increase property taxes,” Abbott said.
Governor Bill Lee was determined to get a universal voucher bill, regardless of which families get the money or what it costs the state. Since Republicans control the legislature, he got what he wanted. The plan will be phased in.
The legislature knows that most vouchers will subsidize private school tuition. They probably know that vouchers don’t raise academic achievement. They surely know that Tennessee students did well on the national test, NAEP, compared to most other states. And they know that paying the tuition of all the students who attend religious schools and private schools will be a heavy financial burden.
The only thing that is not clear is which billionaire or billionaires was behind the state Republicans’ readiness to sabotage their public schools.
Tennessee lawmakers on Thursday approved Gov. Bill Lee’s universal private school voucher bill, creating a new track for educating K-12 students statewide.
The 54-44 vote in the House, where Democrats and some rural Republicans joined to oppose the program, came after four hours of debate, including dozens of failed attempts to add amendments aimed at strengthening accountability and protections for students with disabilities, among other things.
The Senate later voted 20-13 to pass Lee’s Education Freedom Act.
The Republican governor called the bill’s passage “a milestone in advancing education in Tennessee.” He is expected to quickly sign his signature education bill.
“I’ve long believed we can have the best public schools & give parents a choice in their child’s education, regardless of income or zip code,” he said on social media.
Tennessee joins a dozen states that have adopted similar programs allowing families, regardless of their income, to use public tax dollars to pay for alternatives to public education for their children.
President Donald Trump this week signed an executive order that frees up federal funding and prioritizes spending on school choice programs.
Lee’s office did not immediately respond when asked if the federal order has implications, financial or otherwise, on Tennessee’s Education Freedom Act.
The new voucher program is scheduled to launch in the upcoming school year with 20,000 “scholarships” of $7,075 each to aid families toward the cost of a private education. Half of them will be for students whose family income is below a certain threshold — $173,000 for a family of four. Those income restrictions will be lifted during the program’s second year. The number of available vouchers can grow by 5,000 each year thereafter.
About 65% of the vouchers are expected to be awarded to students who already attend private schools, with 35% going to students switching out of public schools, according to the legislature’s own analysis of the proposal….
The packages will cost almost $1 billion this year in a state that has seen its revenues drop because of tax breaks for corporations and businesses enacted in 2024 under another initiative from the governor.
The Education Freedom Act itself will cost taxpayers at least $1.1 billion during its first five years, state analysts say, under a provision that allows the program to grow by 5,000 students annually.
In addition to providing some families with vouchers, the legislation will give one-time bonuses of $2,000 each to the state’s public school teachers; establish a public school infrastructure fund using tax revenues from the sports betting industry that currently contribute to college scholarships; and reimburse public school systems for any state funding lost if a student dis-enrolls to accept the new voucher.
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