Today we will be discussing vouchers and school choice.  

President Trump just signed an executive order entitled “Expanding Educational Freedom and Opportunity for Families,”  which directs the Department of Health and Human Services to issue guidance that explains how states receiving block grants for families and children can use that money for faith-based and private institutions within the next 90 days. 

Let’s first cover what voucher systems and school choice are.  

How do they work? 

• The state allocates money for a student’s education  
• The state distributes the money to the student’s family in the form of a voucher  
• The family uses the voucher to pay for private school tuition and fees  

The family may still need to pay the difference between the voucher amount and the school’s tuition.

Currently, 87% of families are public school families.  

Much of the cost of our local public schools are funded by local property taxes, state and federal funds. 

School choice vouchers are a way for parents to be able to use public funds to pay for private school tuition. The money is usually given to the family in the form of a certificate, or voucher, that can be used to pay for tuition at a school of their choice.  

Vouchers often do not cover the cost of most private schools, so low income families are not able to use them. Private schools don’t have to take vouchers, and they are able to turn students away for any reason. Private schools do not have to work with special needs students.  Many of the private schools are religious, and don’t accept LGBTQ students.  

Normally if a student leaves public school for private school, the public school still keeps the state and local funds for that family. 

Many costs in a school are fixed, such as salaries , building maintenance, utilities, etc. They don’t change much if a few students leave.  With vouchers, the tax dollars intended for public school follow the student to fund  private school, reducing funding for the public school while still leaving it with the same expenses. 

The vast majority of kids who use these vouchers already attend private schools (80-90%). So, vouchers simply pulled public school dollars away from the public school and into the private school, subsidizing the tuition of the students that already went there, leaving special needs kids and families that can’t afford the cost of private left in public schools that have now lost significant funding, ultimately redistributing wealth from the bottom to the top.  

Both President Trump and Project 2025 have called for the closure of the Department of Education, which will affect funds for Title 1 students and schools, IDEA and civil rights enforcement.

Title 1 provides federal funds to schools with high percentages of low-income students. These funds pay for extra educational services to help at risk students achieve and succeed regardless of any disadvantages through no fault of their own. 

Nationwide, some 50,000 public schools (14.9 million or 64% of students) from preschool to high school receive Title 1 funds.  

Title I funding directly benefits teachers and students in suburban, rural, and urban schools across the country. Districts use this funding to provide direct student support services and to hire and retain teachers. Project 2025’s proposal to eliminate Title I funding would lead to the loss of teacher positions, high teacher-to-student ratios, and a lack of school-based programs and quality instruction. This would be devastating to local schools, students, families, and communities. 

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) is a federal law that ensures children with disabilities have access to free and appropriate public education. IDEA also provides special education and related services for eligible children 

Private schools don’t have to follow IDEA, they don’t have the same oversight or requirements that public schools do, for example many private schools don’t require their teachers to be certified. Studies show that students’ performance does not improve in private schools, and often goes down.  

Vouchers also don’t cover the cost of transportation widening the gap of who can afford private school even with the vouchers.  They don’t have free or reduced lunch.  

The history of vouchers  – Following the Supreme Court decision in 1954 of Brown Vs. Board of education, Southern states funded school vouchers to allow white students to avoid legal orders to integrate and attend private academies, known as segregation academies at the time.  

This past year several states voted against vouchers systems, Nebraska, Colorado, and Kentucky voted down bills to expand school choice.  

We can look to other states that have already enacted voucher programs to see how they are doing.  

Arizona was the first state in the nation to enact a universal school voucher program. The Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA), as it is called, provides roughly $7,000 of taxpayer dollars per child to cover a wide array of broadly defined “educational expenses,” including private school tuition, home-schooling, and other private expenses—with very few strings, if any, attached.   

Enrollment has skyrocketed, quickly surpassing 70,000 students by the beginning of 2024.  

Recent audits revealed that private school parents, and now voucher recipients, have used the funds very questionable expenses, including kayak lessons, horseback riding lessons, home gyms, televisions, and more.  Earlier audits conducted prior to the most recent expansion revealed similarly questionable uses. 

Voucher laws generally do not require any sort of disclosure from private schools about their finances, how they operate, or how they measure student achievement. Arizona’s is one of the least accountable voucher programs in the nation. 

Arizona’s ESA voucher program was first enacted in 2011, but it came with eligibility requirements that limited access to students with disabilities. In 2022, the program became universal, available to every student in the state. Politicians running the legislature helped sell universal vouchers under the ruse that they would help low-income students.  

When it was being debated, educators and community organizations urged opposition to the program. They warned that far from serving lower income families, vouchers would serve private school families, siphon valuable funds from public schools, and disrupt and destabilize the state budget, which is exactly what happened.  

 A 2023 analysis revealed that most universal ESA recipients in Arizona live in areas with median incomes ranging from $81,000 to $178,000. Just 5 percent come from ZIP codes where the median income is under $49,000.   

An earlier Grand Canyon Institute report found that 80 percent of voucher applicants did not attend a public school, meaning they were are already attending private schools or being home schooled. 

This disturbing trend can be seen in other states that have enacted sweeping voucher laws. When Ohio expanded access to its “EdChoice” voucher program in 2020, the percentage of participating students who were already enrolled in private school jumped from 7 percent in 2019 to 55 percent in 2023. And new data from the Iowa Department of Education reveal that two-thirds of students in that state who received a voucher were, again, already enrolled in private school, and only about 13% of recipients had ever previously attended a public school. 

In addition, far from saving taxpayer dollars—a selling point from voucher proponents— Arizona’s general fund pays out more for ESAs than it does to pay for a public school education, according to research by the Joint Legislative Budget Committee (JLBC), the state legislature’s independent analysts. For example, the per pupil allocation is $900 less for high school public school students than for students whose education is funded through an ESA. 

Overall, Arizona’s ESA voucher program is projected to cost $950 million next year, $320 million of which is unbudgeted, costing cuts to other important areas in Arizona, such as water infrastructure. 

Newly elected Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs reports that the program, “lacks accountability and will likely bankrupt the state…. It does not save taxpayers money, and it does not provide a better education for Arizona students.”   

The damage won’t stop with public schools. Because ESA vouchers are funded from the state general fund, over budgeted spending of the program will jeopardize other services and programs. 

“If other states want to follow Arizona, well—be prepared to cut everything that’s in the state budget,” Marisol Garcia, Arizona Education Association VP warns. “Health care, housing, safe water, transportation. All of it.”  

In Florida it was reported that their voucher program would cost $1.3 billion by those politicians pushing its approval. Experts stated that it would cost $4 billion.  An analysis of the Sunshine State’s private school voucher program reveals the total cost to taxpayers is $3.9 billion annually. Public schools lost over $2 billion in funding.  

Illinois recently became the first state to end its voucher program. In November 2023, lawmakers chose not to fund the tax-credit scholarship program, which was draining up to $75 million of state money.  

“Public money belongs in public schools, and we are glad our lawmakers believe that, too,” said Illinois Education Association President Al Llorens. “Eighty percent of our public schools in Illinois are underfunded. We need to focus on providing the necessary funding to our public schools so that all children in Illinois continue to have access to a high-quality, public education.”  

Part of the push for vouchers comes from the concern over post covid test scores, which have not yet recovered to pre pandemic numbers. (see our post on test scores here.)

The last decade of research on vouchers strongly suggests they actually lower academic achievement. In Louisiana, two separate research teams found negative academic impacts as high as -0.4 standard deviations, which is extremely large by education policy standards, and declines that continued for years. Those results were published across top journals for empirical public and education policy. Similar results in Indiana found impacts closer to -0.15 standard deviations. To put these negative impacts in perspective: Current estimates of COVID-19’s impact on academic trajectories hover around -0.25 standard deviations.

Even with such data, school privatization groups have also been quite successful at restructuring and rebranding vouchers to make them more attractive to many lawmakers and, to some extent, the public.  

Sadly, there is a lot of money behind vouchers, and many lawmakers are simply responding to their donors, who push school choice. Heritage Foundation and M4L have been pushing school choice for years in an effort to push public funds to private religious schools.  

Read more about M4L history HERE

A federal mandate on how states handle education, whether discussing school choice, or other executive orders about curriculum, contradicts the argument that the same administration has for the importance of states rights. 

NJ does have an Interdistrict Public School Choice Program that enables approved choice districts to enroll K–12th grade students who do not reside within their districts without cost to their parents. “The program increases educational opportunities for students and their families by providing students with school options outside of their district of residence and giving parents the power to select a school program that best serves their child’s individual needs.” 

Our local Assemblywoman Dawn Fantasia has spoken about her support of school choice/vouchers. She has also shown she aligns with M4L and has testified in Trenton alongside Morris County M4L chairperson from Roxbury. 

When you hear about school choice, pay attention to who is saying what. Who are they affiliated with and what do they or their donors stand to gain on the privatization of our public schools?

Remember FACTS, not fear!