A Tsunami of Private School Tuition Vouchers at Public Schools’ Expense: Is There Anything We Can Do?

In my state, Ohio, it seems almost inevitable that the legislature will expand publicly funded vouchers for school privatization as part of the two year state budget to be passed by June 30th.

The Ohio House of Representatives has been holding hearings on House Bill 11—a universal “Backpack” Education Savings Account school voucher plan (including for private schools, homeschooling and family micro-schools), which the Legislative Service Commission estimates would cost $1.3 billion in its first year of operation.

The Ohio Senate, on the other hand, in a proposed Parent Educational Freedom Act (Senate Bill 11), would offer all students in grades K-12 a voucher—worth $5,500 for elementary school and middle schoolers and $7,500 for high school students—an investment which the Legislative Service Commission (LSC ) costs out at an additional $528 million in each year of the FY 2024-2025 state budget. Senate Bill 11 would also increase the homeschooling income tax credit from $250 to $2,000 (which the LSC estimates would cost an additional $38 million in FY 2024 and $44 million in FY 2025).

And in the Governor’s proposed FY 2024-2025 state budget, there is yet a third proposed school voucher expansion.  While right now families living at 250 percent of the federal poverty line can qualify for EdChoice vouchers, eligibility would be expanded in this year’s biennial budget to include students whose family income is up to 400 percent of the federal poverty line, or $120,000 per year.  The Legislative Service Commission says this might cost the state $172 million every year.

With Ohio’s gerrymandered, supermajority Republican legislature, citizens can be pretty sure one of these plans will move forward.

Right now, proposed laws to privatize public schools with various types of publicly funded school vouchers are being considered in many of the state legislatures.  Last month the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reported: “Every child deserves a quality K-12 education that equips them for long-term opportunities and success. But this year, at least half of the states are considering school vouchers bills that undermine the promise of public schooling. School vouchers raise the risk of harm to students, do little to expand opportunity, and cut funding to public schools.”

A primary reason there is so much state legislative activity to enact or expand school vouchers is the big money behind the far-right school voucher lobby. Diane Ravitch recently shared information gathered by Inside Philanthropy: “Dark money and disclosure rules make it difficult to pinpoint the funders that support vouchers or how much they are spending on these efforts… One reason it’s so hard to track is that a lot of that money is going through donor-advised funds which don’t have to identify which individual Donor-Advised Fund holders are making specific grants. The conservative… DonorTrust, for example, and its affiliated Donors Capital Fund have been moving money to groups that support vouchers.” According to Inside Philanthropy, voucher-supporting organizations getting large amounts of dark money from DonorsTrust include the Heritage Foundation, the American Federation for Children, the Independent Women’s Forum, and The Cardinal Institute.

It’s not all dark money, however. Some of the money being invested in voucher lobbying can be traced. Inside Philanthropy identifies the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation as, historically, a huge investor in pro-voucher advocacy.  Today the organizations it funds in Wisconsin include the Bradley Impact Fund, the Badger Institute, and the Wisconsin Center for Law and Liberty. Outside Wisconsin, the Bradley Foundation is supporting the Buckeye Institute (Ohio) and the Goldwater Institute (Arizona). The Bradley Foundation together with a number of organizations funded by Charles Koch and DonorsTrust dark money have consistently funded a network of far right state think tanks through the State Policy Network, which works hand in hand with the American Legislative Exchange Council—also funded by Bradley, Koch, and DonorsTrust. Betsy DeVos helped found and is a big financial supporter of the American Federation for Children, which, Inside Philanthropy explains, has recently provided substantial funding behind lobbying for vouchers in Idaho, Texas, Nebraska, and Michigan.  Finally “The libertarian Cato Institute, which Charles Koch helped create… supports a form of school voucher called “Scholarship Tax Credits.”  And even the Gates Foundation recently granted $1 million to the Reason Foundation, “a libertarian organization that supports vouchers and opposes public schools.”

If you are a supporter of public education, and in your state you face proposed legislation for school vouchers, you are unlikely to convince conservative Republicans to vote against vouchers. The issue has become purely ideological—a matter of core belief.  The late political theorist Benjamin Barber almost perfectly characterizes the divide between supporters of public institutions and the radical marketplace individualists: “Privatization is a kind of reverse social contract: it dissolves the bonds that tie us together into free communities and democratic republics. It puts us back in the state of nature where we possess a natural right to get whatever we can on our own, but at the same time lose any real ability to secure that to which we have a right. Private choices rest on individual power… personal skills… and personal luck.  Public choices rest on civic rights and common responsibilities, and presume equal rights for all. Public liberty is what the power of common endeavor establishes, and hence presupposes that we have constituted ourselves as public citizens by opting into the social contract. With privatization, we are seduced back into the state of nature by the lure of private liberty and particular interest; but what we experience in the end is an environment in which the strong dominate the weak… the very dilemma which the original social contract was intended to address.” (Consumed, pp. 143-144)

Even though it will likely be impossible for any of us to convince state legislators who are strong ideological supporters of school privatization to change their minds, that doesn’t mean we all just give up. Remember that your letter to the editor or your legislative testimony will help form, support, and solidify overall public pressure on your legislators.  You are also likely to wake up other citizens who haven’t been paying attention and to activate a wide reservoir of public opinion that already exists against the privatization of public schools.  Diane Ravitch explains: “Vouchers are not popular. There have been nearly two dozen state referenda about vouchers. Vouchers have always lost, usually by large margins.”

If you are planning to write a letter to the editor or to submit legislative testimony advocating the protection of your public schools from the theft of already scarce dollars in your state’s public school budget and the protection of the civil rights of your state’s students, here are four excellent and up-to-date resources:

First:    The Fiscal Consequences of Private School Vouchers, a new report from Public Funds Public Schools—a project of the Education Law Center and the Southern Poverty Law Center—addresses what it costs states to fund vouchers for private schooling and specifically what it costs the public schools themselves as states siphon out money for the vouchers.  The report’s authors, are Samuel E. Abrams, the director of the National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education at Columbia University’s Teachers College and his colleague Steven J. Koutsavlis. They explain: “The claim that it costs less to educate students with private school vouchers than in public schools ignores numerous realities. Voucher programs shift key expenses to parents; often subsidize private tuition for families who would never have enrolled in public schools; do not dilute fixed costs for public education systems, and concentrate higher-need, more-costly-to-educate students in already underfunded public schools.”  “As states transfer millions of dollars to private hands, there are fewer available state resources for projects that serve the public good, from mass transit to public parks, libraries, and schools.” And yet, “Voucher programs, even with significant expansion during the last one to two decades, still serve only a small percentage of the nation’s children.”

Second:     In State Policymakers Should Reject K-12 School Voucher Plans: Proposals Would Undermine Public Schools, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities’ Iris Hinh examines many of the voucher programs currently being considered by the state legislatures. Hinh also provides background on how various voucher plans work and how they threaten public schools: “School vouchers reduce overall state revenues to fund services like education…. In some… cases they can be designed to divert money that’s already been designated for public schools through their state funding formula… And since the largest share of state spending is on public education, reducing overall state revenues almost inevitably reduces the available funding for public schools, especially as school voucher programs grow.” “While public schools must adhere to federal civil rights protections, students using vouchers to attend private schools can be explicitly or implicitly denied opportunities based on their race and ethnicity, gender presentation, and disability… Siphoning public dollars to fund private schools does not guarantee that all students will be admitted and adequately supported at private schools.”

Third:    In School Vouchers: There Is No Upside, Michigan State University Professor Josh Cowen, who has been conducting voucher research for more than two decades, enumerates what current research demonstrates about serious damage wrought by the widespread expansion of vouchers across the states: “First, vouchers mostly fund children already in private school… Second… Although a few tiny studies from the late 1990s and early 2000s showed small gains in test scores for voucher users, since 2013, the record is dismal… Third… the typical private school in line for a voucher handout isn’t one of the elite private schools…. The typical voucher school is what I refer to as a sub-prime provider…. The fourth pattern is related: kids flee those sub-prime schools… Fifth comes the issue of transparency and oversight… If we’re going to use taxpayer funds on these private ventures, we need to know what the academic results are… Finally… Imagine you simply knew that written into the legislation for voucher programs is the explicit right of private schools to turn down any child they wanted to reject so long as something about that child varied from the school’s so-called ‘creed.’” Here is a summary of Cowen’s research comparing public school achievement levels with the collapse in academic achievement after students carrying vouchers have been enrolled in private schools.

Fourth:     In State of the States: Governors and PK-12 Education Policy, a short new resource from the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center Chalkboard. Rachel Perera explains why it is better to think of voucher programs “as subsidizing private school tuition for families that can already afford to send their kids to private school.” She adds that families in rural areas “don’t have any school choices besides their local public schools… While 82% of families have access to one or more private elementary schools within a 5 mile radius, that number drops to only 34% for families living in rural areas.” “(S)tatewide voucher programs.. do not boost academic achievement…. (and) students attending private schools do not have the same civil rights protections as students attending public schools.”

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New Report: When Legislators Expand Vouchers, They Divert Dollars Desperately Needed in Public Schools

Politicians promoting publicly funded school vouchers to pay for private education tell us that increasing state spending on vouchers—whether old-fashioned private school tuition vouchers, tuition tax credit vouchers, or education savings account universal vouchers—won’t take money away from the public schools that serve the mass of American children. This is a case of pure political deception. Flat-out lying.

The Fiscal Consequences of Private School Vouchers, a new report from Public Funds, Public Schools—a project of the Education Law Center and the Southern Poverty Law Center—addresses what it costs states to fund vouchers for private schooling and specifically what it costs the public schools themselves as states siphon out money for the vouchers.  Its authors are Samuel E. Abrams, the director of the National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education at Columbia University’s Teachers College and his colleague Steven J. Koutsavlis.

Abrams and Koutsavlis begin: “Over half the states and the District of Columbia have enacted some type of voucher program. This report explores how voucher programs and spending have evolved in seven states that have operated these programs long enough to reflect on their track records: Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Louisiana, Ohio, and Wisconsin… In each of these states, the number of vouchers distributed climbed sharply from 2008 to 2019… At the same time… these voucher states’ efforts to fund public schools—which serve a significant majority of students—have declined. The portion of state gross domestic product (GDP) allocated to funding primary and secondary public education in all of the states we reviewed decreased, despite the fact that public school enrollment generally increased over the same period.” (emphasis in the original)

The number of students taking publicly funded vouchers for private schooling has increased rapidly: “The number of students using vouchers in the fall of 2012 was 212,000.  By 2021, that number had topped 600,000. While that sum in a country with nearly 50 million students in public PK-12 schools is small, the trend is significant…. The programs are expensive to operate, with studies showing they typically cost more per student than public schools. And many of the nation’s public schools remain chronically underfunded although they serve the vast majority of the nation’s children.”

Although politicians who promote vouchers often say that educating students with vouchers is cheaper, Abrams and Koutsavlis show why this is a lie: “The claim that it costs less to educate students with private school vouchers than in public schools ignores numerous realities. Voucher programs shift key expenses to parents; often subsidize private tuition for families who would never have enrolled in public schools; do not dilute fixed costs for public education systems, and concentrate higher-need, more-costly-to-educate students in already underfunded public schools.”

And voucher programs send students to schools where their rights are not protected: “(D)ata show that voucher programs exacerbate racial segregation. Moreover, private schools accepting vouchers are not subject to many of the anti-discrimination laws that protect students with disabilities, LGBTQ+ students, and other vulnerable groups, who may—sometimes unknowingly—give up their rights when they move to private schools.”  Further: “Private schools participating in voucher programs are generally not subject to the same regulatory standards as public schools.”

The report describes the fiscal consequences of voucher expansion in each of the seven states, for example in Florida: “No state comes close to Florida in the allocation of public funds to private schools.”  Florida has a number of voucher programs; the authors focus on the three largest: “We focus here on the first three voucher programs—the McKay, Gardiner and Tax Credit Scholarship Programs.  In 2019, these served approximately 151,000 students.  This total represented 5.4 percent of the state’s 2.8 million PK-12 students.  In fiscal year 2008, total spending in Florida for its initial tax credit and conventional voucher programs amounted to $241,219,945. By fiscal year 2019, total spending for these two programs and the Gardiner ESA program had reached $996,257,636, an annual growth rate of 13.8 percent. While Florida increased its spending on these three programs by 313 percent from fiscal year 2008 to fiscal year 2019, the state decreased its per-pupil funding for public education over this time period by 12 percent… This decline in per-pupil funding in Florida cannot be attributed to economic duress.  It coincided with a 3.4 percent annual growth rate in GDP for the state from 2008 to 2019…. In terms of educational effort, measured as the percentage of state GDP allocated to PK-12 funding, this decline shows Florida to be retreating significantly in its commitment to public education at the same time it substantially increased its funding of private schooling.”

In every one of the seven states, the report examines the rapidly growing investment of tax revenues into vouchers and the concurrent drop in public school spending.  Abrams and Koutsavlis conclude: “The pattern of education spending in these seven voucher states is unmistakable. Private school voucher programs are initially proposed as limited in size and scope, then grow as existing programs are expanded, and/or additional voucher programs are established.”

But as the vouchers grow, legislators’ fiscal support for public education drops: “As states transfer millions of dollars to private hands, there are fewer available state resources for projects that serve the public good, from mass transit to public parks, libraries, and schools.” And yet, “Voucher programs, even with significant expansion during the last one to two decades, still serve only a small percentage of the nation’s children.”

Americans for Prosperity in Ohio: What is the Koch-Funded Buckeye Blueprint’s Education Plan?

We ought to suspect that someone has been investing heavily to push school privatization in Ohio. Last summer our legislature passed a budget that radically expanded state funding for private school tuition vouchers, allocated more money for charter schools, made every one of the state’s 610 school districts eligible for charter school operators to open schools, and allocated so much money for school privatization and tax cuts that legislators felt they couldn’t pass a stand alone bill that would have established the full six-year phase in of the Cupp-Patterson public school funding plan.

I cannot name all of the far-right organizations investing in the promotion of school privatization in Ohio, but one new initiative, launched in February, is Americans for Prosperity-Ohio’s Buckeye Blueprint.

The Buckeye Blueprint, describes itself in overblown hyperbole as, “a new grassroots campaign that seeks to build a bolder and better state by bringing people together to build bottom-up movements around policy priorities at the state and local levels. This will be accomplished by empowering concerned citizens to participate in the legislative process by building greater awareness of critical legislative opportunities for change…. Americans for Prosperity-Ohio is driving long-term solutions to the country’s biggest problems.”

In Advancing Educational Opportunities for Everyone, the Buckeye Blueprint campaign announces the campaign’s education agenda—beginning with a celebration of the Ohio Legislature’s expansion of publicly funded private school tuition vouchers last summer: “Governor DeWine, Speaker Cupp, and, most notably, Senate President Huffman, deserve credit for steps taken in the most recent Budget that increased educational opportunity through vouchers.”

Advancing Educational Opportunities for Everyone also plugs Ohio’s Backpack Bill, HB 290, a bill being discussed in the legislature to establish a universal Education Savings Account voucher program that would give every Ohio family public dollars to choose a school or spend the public dollars on any so-called educational activity the family prefers including home schooling. The Buckeye Blueprint website explains: “Passage of universal Education Savings Accounts… would put more parents in a better position to make the best choices for their kids.” Americans for Prosperity-Ohio wants us to follow the lead of our neighbors, Indiana and West Virginia, by expanding all kinds of vouchers: “Hoosier & Mountaineer families are feeling the benefit of bold reform in the last 12 months while Buckeye families seeking opportunity are currently under attack in our courts.”

Glowing language frames an individualistic agenda that claims its purpose is to expand educational opportunity, but the buzzwords show that Americans for Prosperity-Ohio is not a bit concerned about the needs of our state’s 1.8 million students in the public schools. Instead the Buckeye Blueprint demands that Ohio’s citizens pressure the legislature to: “Fund students, not schools,” for the purpose of unlocking “each individual’s unique potential.” The Buckeye Blueprint prescribes that, as an alternative to a system of public schools, the Ohio Legislature should offer, “credit for learning, wherever it occurs; (provide) the freedom to enroll in a variety of courses inside and outside of a child’s school; (provide) funded accounts that can be used for a variety of educational uses; (and ensure) public schools of choice.”

The Buckeye Blueprint refers parents and education advocates to another website: Yes. Every Kid, where we can find the “yes. policy framework”: “Does this policy contribute to a diversity of solutions?” “Does this policy empower families to choose what works best?” “Does this policy allow students to customize their education?” “Does this policy ensure funding is attached to the student?”

To refute this sort of slick, individualist appeal, it is helpful to remember that public education is designed to balance our society’s obligation to meet the needs of each particular student with the public responsibility for maintaining a system that secures the rights of all of our state’s students. Public schools are not only publicly funded, but they are expected to be universally available and accountable to the public by law and through the oversight of locally elected school boards.

In Consumed, the late political philosopher, Benjamin Barber explains precisely where campaigns like the Buckeye Blueprint go wrong in their individualist ideology and why school privatization will undermine our society and inevitably disadvantage the most vulnerable children:

“Through vouchers we are able as individuals, through private choosing, to shape institutions and policies that are useful to our own interests but corrupting to the public goods that give private choosing its meaning.  I want a school system where my kid gets the very best; you want a school system where your kid is not slowed down by those less gifted or less adequately prepared; she wants a school system where children whose ‘disadvantaged backgrounds’ (often kids of color) won’t stand in the way of her daughter’s learning; he (a person of color) wants a school system where he has the maximum choice to move his kid out of ‘failing schools’ and into successful ones.  What do we get?  The incomplete satisfaction of those private wants through a fragmented system in which individuals secede from the public realm, undermining the public system to which we can subscribe in common. Of course no one really wants a country defined by deep educational injustice and the surrender of a public and civic pedagogy whose absence will ultimately impact even our own private choices… Yet aggregating our private choices as educational consumers in fact yields an inegalitarian and highly segmented society in which the least advantaged are further disadvantaged as the wealthy retreat ever further from the public sector.  As citizens, we would never consciously select such an outcome, but in practice what is good for ‘me,’ the educational consumer, turns out to be a disaster for ‘us’ as citizens and civic educators—and thus for me the denizen of an American commons (or what’s left of it).” (Consumed, p. 132)

For all the specific reasons our society would be worse off with the expansion of vouchers at the expense of public schools and would be even more damaged by a universal Education Savings Account program like Ohio’s proposed HB 290 Backpack Bill, we can turn to the resources at Public Funds Public Schools, a collaboration of the Education Law Center and the Southern Poverty Law Center.  Public Funds Public Schools has posted a catalogue of research, gathered into eight categories:

• Private School Vouchers Don’t Improve Student Achievement.
• Private School Vouchers Divert Needed Funding from Public Schools.
• Private School Voucher Programs Lack Accountability.
• Absence of Oversight in Private School Voucher Programs Leads to Corruption and Waste.
• Private School Vouchers Don’t Help Students with Disabilities.
• Private School Vouchers Don’t Protect Against Discrimination.
• Private School Vouchers Exacerbate Segregation.
• Universal Private School Voucher Programs Don’t Work.

Public Funds Public Schools summarizes this research into several two-page fact sheets:

• Research Shows Private School Vouchers Don’t Work for Students and Harm Public Schools.
• The Myth of Cost Savings from Private School Vouchers
• Vouchers for Private Virtual Education are Misspent Public Money.

Benjamin Barber precisely defines how privatization damages a society. His words perfectly describe what it will mean if states like Ohio continue to expand, at public expense, private school tuition vouchers and Education Savings Account programs like Ohio’s proposed Backpack Bill:

“Privatization is a kind of reverse social contract: it dissolves the bonds that tie us together into free communities and democratic republics. It puts us back in the state of nature where we possess a natural right to get whatever we can on our own, but at the same time lose any real ability to secure that to which we have a right. Private choices rest on individual power… personal skills… and personal luck.  Public choices rest on civic rights and common responsibilities, and presume equal rights for all. Public liberty is what the power of common endeavor establishes, and hence presupposes that we have constituted ourselves as public citizens by opting into the social contract. With privatization, we are seduced back into the state of nature by the lure of private liberty and particular interest; but what we experience in the end is an environment in which the strong dominate the weak… the very dilemma which the original social contract was intended to address.” (Consumed, pp. 143-144)

The Challenge of Pushing Back Against This Year’s Wave of State Legislation to Expand School Vouchers and Education Savings Accounts

This year there are bills in state legislatures all over the country to start up or expand school vouchers—money awarded out of state education budgets to cover private school tuition. In some cases the bills are for Education Savings Accounts that would give parents something like a credit card for a limited amount of tax money they could spend on any education services in lieu of enrolling their children in public schools.

For NPR’s State Impact Oklahoma, Robby Korth reports that just this week, the Oklahoma Legislature defeated a bill prioritized by Governor Kevin Stitt—the Oklahoma Empowerment Act, which would have started up an Education Savings Account voucher program with money for private school tuition as well as educational supplies for homeschooling. Stitt and Senate leader Greg Treat promise, however, they will be back, maybe by trying to slip the program into the fine print of a future, several-thousand-page state budget.

Last week Erin Einhorn of NBC News consulted EdChoice, formerly the Rose and Milton Friedman Foundation for EdChoice, for an accurate count of current state-by-state legislation: “Seventy-four measures have been introduced in state legislatures this year to create or expand voucher programs, said Robert Enlow, the president and CEO of EdChoice, a national organization that supports vouchers and other alternatives to traditional schools. And supporters of ballot referendums are gathering signatures in at least four states. The new efforts come on top of the 22 states that already added or expanded vouchers last year—a ‘ginormous’ year for the programs, Enlow said.”

One of those ballot initiatives, for an education savings account program in Michigan, is being spearheaded by none other than Betsy DeVos.  Einhorn reports: “A ballot referendum that DeVos is backing in Michigan, with nearly $400,000 from her family and an organization she supports, would give parents up to about $8,000 per child per year for tuition, tutoring or expenses like school supplies.” DeVos calls the campaign for this referendum the Let MI Kids Learn Campaign. Fortunately public school parents and supporters are pushing back with a campaign to oppose DeVos’s efforts: Don’t Sign.

Einhorn emphasizes the dogged determination of wealth-backed school privatizers as one cause for the recent upsurge in proposed legislation and ballot initiatives, but she also interviews a professor of education policy who believes that right now voucher support may have been bolstered by COVID fatigue and ugly far-right political attacks on the public sector: “In the past, the debate over vouchers ‘was more about school quality’ and the free market principle that parents exercising educational choice would force schools to compete and improve, said Josh Cowen, an education policy professor at Michigan State University. ‘Now’, he said, ‘with studies finding that vouchers have not significantly improved school quality, it’s also about ‘creating a narrative that public schools are teaching our children things that we—whatever ‘we’ means—collectively disagree with or are skeptical about.’ The language supporting vouchers today is infused with ‘deep state hostility,’ Cowen said. ‘The government wants to impose a certain kind of education on you and your children.’ That dynamic is playing out in states including South Carolina, where an education savings account bill dubbed the Put Parents in Charge Act would create the state’s first voucher program, and Idaho where Gov. Brad Little signed off on a $50 million ‘Empowering Parents’ program this month.”

While the bills and referendums for voucher expansion across the states differ, Einhorn quotes the Education Law Center’s Jessica Levin—who leads Public Funds Public Schools a pro-public school/ anti-voucher project of the Education Law Center and the Southern Poverty Law Center.  Levin describes the similarity of much of the legislation from state to state: “Many have language similar to model legislation put out by the American Legislative Exchange Council and other conservative groups… It’s a very aggressive and well-funded push… They are constantly shape-shifting or changing tactics.”

There are several brief accessible resources to support advocacy against the startup or expansion of vouchers. Levin’s project, Public Funds Public Schools, produces easily downloadable fact sheets to assist advocates trying to push back against state bills or referendums to launch or expand school vouchers and education savings accounts. The first, Research Shows Private School Vouchers Don’t Work for Students and Harm Public Schools, summarizes research showing that, “For many years, studies of voucher programs across the country have found no improvement in student achievement… Many of the rights and protections that apply to students in public schools do not apply to students using vouchers to attend private schools. In fact, students may face discrimination when they try to enroll in a private school or after they are admitted.” In fact, vouchers have been shown to exacerbate school segregation.

Another Public Funds Public Schools fact sheet documents The Myth of Cost Savings from Private School Vouchers. In fact, “vouchers are more expensive than public schooling… Vouchers (tend to) subsidize private education for students would not otherwise have attended public schools” and who were never enrolled in the public schools in the first place.  “Voucher programs concentrate students who require increased resources in public schools.”  The costs for special programming—English language learners and disabled students, for example—must then be covered from public school budgets.  Finally, “voucher programs do not change fixed costs in public schools”—costs for services the public school district is required to provide even if some students leave for private schools.

The Network For Public Education provides a pointed fact sheet on the danger of Education Savings Account vouchers (ESAs), Do Education Savings Accounts Lead to Better Results for Families?: “ESAs provide a huge loophole for unaccountable use of public money… Most of these programs release their funds to parents in exchange for the parents agreeing to forego their right to public education… A state auditor’s office in Arizona identified more than $102,000 in misspending on education savings account money in just a five-month period, including… parents who did not submit required quarterly expense reports and parents who purchased prohibited items…  ESAs are not truly savings accounts. They give parents ways to spend someone else’s—the taxpayers’— money…. Worst of all, they place students in unaccountable systems, where many will be under-educated.”

The Public Funds Public Schools website catalogues research reports to help advocates accurately correct myths and misconceptions spread by the promoters of vouchers. And the website has a bill tracker where advocates can research the status of bills which have been introduced in any of the 50 state legislatures to start up or expand vouchers.

It is worth paying close attention to what is happening in your state. Here in Ohio, where I live, over 100 school districts have filed a lawsuit against the state’s huge and growing EdChoice voucher program.  In their lawsuit, these school districts document exactly how, when the legislature quietly expanded EdChoice vouchers in last summer’s state budget, the cost of the voucher expansion subsequently blocked the legislature’s capacity fully to implement a new public school funding plan legislators passed in the same budget bill:

“Because public funds are finite, funding EdChoice Program Vouchers out of the foundation funding designated for public school districts inevitably depletes the resources designated by the legislature for educating Ohio’s public school students. H.B. 110 (the state budget bill) initially incorporated the salient features of the …Fair School Funding Plan  …. However, due to the ballooning effects of the EdChoice program, the enacted version of H.B. 110 funded only up to one-third of the increases required by the proposed Fair School Funding Plan over the next two fiscal years.” “(T)he Fair School Funding Plan was not fully funded due to the ballooning costs of the EdChoice Program. Only 16.67% of the Fair School Funding Plan is being funded through Fiscal Year 2022 and 33% of the Fair School Funding Plan will be funded through Fiscal Year 2023, as specifically delineated in H.B. 110.  This means the General Assembly will meet only a fraction of its constitutional obligation, by the standards it has adopted, to provide a thorough and efficient system of common schools for Fiscal Year 2022.”

Public school parents, teachers and school districts are realizing that protecting public schooling has become a long and ongoing fight. Betsy Devos and her friends have demonstrated a decades-long commitment to  destroying public education, and they are not going to quit anytime soon.

Lots of New Voucher Proposals Popping Up in State Legislatures: Did Betsy DeVos Leave a Legacy?

Despite that Trump’s privatizer-in-chief, Betsy DeVos has left Washington, D.C. and that President Biden has focused on supporting neighborhood public schools and finally getting them open full time after months of COVID-19 disruption, there is growing concern about the number of bills currently in state legislatures to expand vouchers of all kinds—plain old private school tuition vouchers, tuition tax credit vouchers, and education savings accounts.

The Washington Post‘s Valerie Strauss reports that the Network for Public Education has tracked bills for new voucher programs or expansions of vouchers in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Missouri, and New Hampshire.  Strauss reminds us that Betsy DeVos’s skewed understanding of the meaning of public education has not disappeared from the fifty statehouses: “DeVos and her allies, especially Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), publicly called for a definition that essentially said: If public dollars are used for any kind of schooling that makes it public education—even if the public has no say in how a school operates.”  She quotes DeSantis: “Look, if it’s public dollars, it’s public education.”

Why have so many voucher bills been introduced in state legislatures right now? The Huffington Post‘s senior education reporter Rebecca Klein explains: “In the few weeks of 2021, state legislators have introduced a wave of new bills designed to expand or create new voucher, tax credit and education savings programs.  While these programs are often controversial—eliciting staunch opposition from public school groups and teachers unions—advocates say they have seen new momentum after a wave of Republican wins in statehouses and a pandemic that has forced millions of schoolchildren to learn from home.  So far, new legislation related to private school choice has been introduced in over 15 states during 2021.”

After exploring the details of some of the state legislative proposals to expand school privatization, Jeff Bryant considers why they are appearing now: “What’s telling about these bills is that proponents of school privatization clearly see the need to quickly ram through their proposals because popular opinion is not necessarily on their side. Whenever school choice proposals are subjected to popular vote, they generally fare poorly.” But, continues Bryant, “School choice proponents also see the crisis caused by the pandemic as an opportunity to advance their cause.  Many parents are beyond distraught with their children’s situation. Also, in communities with high rates of viral spread, which is most of America, state and local governments have generally not invested in the personnel and resources that are essential to safely reopen schools for in-person learning. Politicians and school choice advocates, many of whom are also complicit in the lack of investment in local schools, see this systemic failure as their chance to vastly expand taxpayer funding for privately operated schools… It’s true the pandemic is driving great numbers of parents to abandon public schools to search for other providers, such as for-profit online charter companies, private schools, brick-and-mortar charter schools, and privately operated learning pods and microschools.”

Education Week‘s Andrew Ujifusa adds: “With millions of children still shut out of closed school buildings due to the coronavirus pandemic, many parents have looked for months for different options to provide an education for their children. In the early weeks of 2021, lawmakers in nearly a third of the states have responded with bills intended to establish or expand on things like tax-credit-scholarships and education savings accounts.”

Howver, Ujifusa wonders: “Is it a groundswell or a mirage?… (F)ans of school choice… see a pretty straightforward dynamic that will help their issue. In addition to traditional legislative measures, the interest in learning pods—which are informal groups set up by parents to help groups of students during school building closures—could be another source of energy for the movement… But the extent to which many families might simply wish for a return to normalcy and for their children to go back to their prior schools, extracurricular activities, and social networks, could also play a big role in how much K-12 education choice grows in the pandemic’s wake.”

Klein Quotes Catherine Dunn of the Southern Poverty Law Center Action Fund, which is part of Public Funds Public Schools, a coalition of organizations opposed to the privatization of public education “We’re not seeing a lot of bipartisan support for the proposals we’re tracking — it’s a result of a lot of the gains from Republicans (in state legislatures) who are pushing these through.”

And it is not as though these bills are all sailing through without controversy. In Depth New Hampshire‘s Garry Rayno describes a confrontational hearing before the New Hampshire House Education Committee where the legislators debated “education freedom accounts” neo-vouchers designed to give parents freedom to use state tax dollars to choose from an array of in and out of school services the parents believe are educational: “A multi-hour public hearing before the House Education Committee drew testimony from as far away as Arizona and as close as Manchester as both sides turned out in force to make their case for or against House Bill 20, a priority of the Republican legislative leadership.  3,198 people signed in to oppose HB 20 while 600 people signed in support and five signed in as neutral. Due to high turn out the hearing was recessed and will resume next Thursday, February 11.”

Proponents of vouchers and tuition tax credits and education savings accounts define school choice as individual freedom from government and they conceptualize parents as consumers in a marketplace.  What they never mention is the cost to the public. How much money do the vouchers cost?  Where will the money come from?  When a few students leave and carry away the voucher, what is the cost to the students in the public schools?

At the end of January, Public Funds Public Schools, the collaboration of the Education Law Center, the Southern Poverty Law Center and Munger, Tolles & Olson LLP, released a fact sheet to clarify the financial loss to public schools when legislatures establish voucher programs.  Here is some of what they would caution state legislatures considering starting up or expanding voucher programs:

“Voucher programs concentrate students who require increased resources in the public schools.  Because private schools can refuse to admit or provide adequate services for students with disabilities, English learners, and others who may require increased resources for an equitable education, these students are more frequently educated in public schools.  Private schools participating in voucher programs may also ‘counsel out’ or expel students they deem ‘high cost.'”

 “Pubic schools, which serve the vast majority of students, have substantial ‘fixed costs.’  Because students who participate in voucher programs exit their pubic school districts from different schools, grade levels and classrooms, districts are not able to proportionally reduce facilities, staff, programs, and other fixed costs to fully offset the loss of funding that is diverted to voucher programs.”

Finally: “Voucher programs subsidize private education for students who would not otherwise have attended public school.  It is not true that voucher programs simply shift funds that would have been spent on public school student to pay for their private education.  When states establish private school voucher programs, families already paying for or planning to use private education often participate… It is inaccurate to assume that students receiving a voucher switched from public to private education.”

DeVos Privatization Schemes Are Blocked by Courts and Likely to Be Further Blocked by Congress

Betsy DeVos, a lifelong supporter of private and religious schools and the expansion of tax-funded tuition vouchers for private schools, has pursued the privatization of public education throughout her tenure as U.S. Secretary of Education. In recent months DeVos devised a way to divert to private schools some of the funding Congress appropriated for public school CARES Act relief, and this month DeVos has persisted by working with Sen. Ted Cruz to insert her $5 billion Education Freedom Scholarship tuition tax credit program into a new Senate coronavirus relief package.

Famous for disdaining public institutions, DeVos once declared: “Government really sucks.”  Everyone has worried for over three years that Betsy DeVos might succeed in radically expanding school privatization from her perch in the Trump administration, but, despite all the rhetoric, she hasn’t succeeded.  Now her CARES Act initiative has been struck down, and her tuition tax credit scheme is headed nowhere.

Court Permanently Blocks DeVos CARES Act Distribution Favoring Private Schools

In July, Betsy DeVos imposed a binding rule to favor distribution of a significant portion of last spring’s CARES Act relief money to private schools at the expense of the public schools serving the nation’s poorest children.  Last Friday, in NAACP v. DeVos, the third court decision on DeVos’s CARES Act rule in recent weeks, a federal judge permanently blocked DeVos’s plan.

POLITICO’s Michael Stratford explains: “U.S District Judge Dabney Friedrich, an appointee of President Donald Trump, ruled that DeVos ran afoul of the CARES Act when she required public schools to send a greater share of pandemic assistance to private school students than is typically required under federal law.  The judge sided with the NAACP, which had brought the legal challenge against DeVos’ policy, criticizing it as a ploy to divert emergency aid away from needy public schools toward more affluent private-school students.  Several other judges had already preliminarily blocked DeVos’ rule in certain states, but Judge Friedrich’s ruling—which is final—goes further in striking down the entire rule as illegal.  The ruling will apply nationwide.”

In the statutory language of the CARES Act, Congress directed that CARES Act public education relief be distributed in accordance with the method of the Title I Formula, which awards federal funds to supplement educational programming in public school districts serving concentrations of low-income children. Public school districts receiving Title I dollars are also expected to provide Title I services to impoverished students attending the private schools located within their district boundaries. In the binding guidance she imposed in July, DeVos demanded that per-pupil CARES Act relief for private schools be based on each private school’s full enrollment, not merely on the number of the private school students who qualify for additional services because their families are living below 185 percent of the federal poverty line.

Public Funds Public Schools, a coalition including the law firm of Munger Tolles & Olson L.L.P., the Education Law Center, and the Southern Poverty Law Center, represented the plaintiffs in NAACP v. DeVos.  Public Funds Public Schools commented on the ruling: “The court’s ruling grants a nationwide vacatur of the rule, bringing much-needed certainty to public schools across the country that they will have the full amount of CARES Act funds to which they are entitled.”

Along with the NAACP, additional plaintiffs included public school parents from Maryland, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, Florida, Tennessee, Nevada, Mississippi, Alabama, and Washington, DC, as well as Broward County Public Schools in Florida, the DeKalb County School District in Georgia, the Denver County School District in Colorado, the Pasadena Unified School District in California, and Stamford Public Schools in Connecticut.

With Sen. Ted Cruz, DeVos Again Pushes for $5 Billion Federal Tuition Tax Credit Program

DeVos’s favorite school privatization scheme—a federal tuition tax credit voucher program DeVos has called “Education Freedom Scholarships” and which she has unsuccessfully tried to insert every year into the federal budget—has now been proposed by Sen. Ted Cruz as part of a new, very meager Senate Republican coronavirus relief bill. Cruz’s idea is already so controversial that it is holding up negotiations on the bill.  You will remember that the House passed the HEROES Act to lay down its bid for $3 trillion in further relief last May 15. The U.S. Senate has not yet agreed to a plan.

On Sunday, the Washington Post‘s Erica Werner explained: “Talks on additional coronavirus relief legislation broke down in August and have remained stalled.  Lawmakers will return to the Capitol on Tuesday (September 8) and leaders in both parties say they hope to reach agreement on a new coronavirus relief bill. But they remain far apart, and it’s unclear whether a deal will be possible. Democrats are unwilling to agree to legislation that spends less than $2 trillion, while Republicans say that figure is too high. Senate GOP leaders have been hoping to try advancing a slimmed-down bill costing about $500 billion, but they’ve struggled to reach agreement even on that. The latest hang-up involves a push by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) for a school-choice provision opposed by some fellow Republicans.”

CNN reporters Manu Raju. Phil Mattingly and Ted Barrett describe Cruz’s latest push for the privatization of education: “Cruz’s proposal would essentially provide reimbursement–in full–for donations to state-based nonprofit scholarship funds that help families with tuition and other education expenses for private K-12 schooling.”

No one believes the relief package into which Cruz seeks to insert his tuition tax credits is serious legislation headed toward enactment.  The Washington Post‘s Erica Werner and Laura Meckler explain: “The $5 billion tax credit proposal has long been championed by DeVos, and President Trump has offered his support for school choice as part of his reelection campaign. Now the measure is being pushed behind the scenes by Sen. Ted Cruz…. But his move is opposed by a number of other members of the Senate Republican conference—some on the merits, others for strategic reasons.  They will need to resolve the impasse to finalize the legislation.  The bill is meant to be a negotiating tool with Democrats, though a previous measure with a similar goal went nowhere last month.  Senate Republicans are seeking to pass a targeted bill as a way of countering a bill recently passed by House Democrats that sought to boost funding for the U.S. Postal Service.”

In the U.S. House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi has staunchly stood behind the need for a much more generous COVID-19 relief package than the Senate has been willing to consider. Pelosi has insisted, for example, on funding significant relief for the unemployed and at the same time alleviating a deepening fiscal crisis in state and local governments. It is impossible to believe the Democratic majority in the U.S. House of Representatives will ever buy into the skinniest possible Senate proposal that not only leaves out desperately needed coronavirus relief but also privatizes public education. Although Betsy DeVos is known for her persistent devotion to school choice, the U.S. House has been equally persistent in rejecting DeVos’s school privatization overtures.