The Problem with School Vouchers

During our second episode, we take a look at the long history of school voucher programs and the state’s hidden agenda to increase religious education and further segregate our school system. At a time when public education is already underfunded, we can’t afford programs that allow wealthy families to use public funds for private and religious education. In this episode, we look at the cost of these programs and the true motives behind them.

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The Cost of Extremism - Episode 2

Jill: Extremists across the country are attacking our freedoms, and kids and families are paying the price. This is the cost of extremism.

Jennifer: As soon as you switch to a system where the schools do the choosing, and that's really what school choice is, discrimination is built into that.

Ashana: We're building systems based on instability, which actually doesn't make sense if your goal is to educate children.

Jess: It's just fewer dollars going into our schools, which are already struggling.

Jill: Episode 2, School Vouchers. In recent years, we've seen a surge of attacks against public education. The phrase school choice has been recklessly thrown around amidst the culture wars that riddle our education system, all in an attempt to gain control of what is being taught to our children and further segregate our schools. And at the middle of the fight are school vouchers. You may have heard those words before, whether it was from the mouth of former United States Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, or from programs being pushed by right wing politicians. But what does that even mean?

Renee: So school vouchers are, basically, the state decides that it will give taxpayer funds, money collected from taxpayers, either directly to private schools, or to parents to then go spend at private schools.

Jill: Renee Sekel is at the forefront of the fight against school vouchers. As a mom of three kids in Cary, North Carolina, she calls herself an accidental advocate. And the last five years, she's gone on to fight for public education through her group, Save Our Schools, North Carolina, and her podcast, Advocacy Bites. And she's the deputy director of North Carolina for Red, Wine and Blue. If anyone knows public education, it's Renee.

Renee: They harm public education for a number of reasons, but the most critical one is for most places, education funding is set on a per child level. But if you take one kid out of the school, you still need a school building. You still need the teacher for their classroom. You still need all of the things to run the school that you did before that child left. If you take 19 kids out of a 20 kid classroom, you still need to provide an education to that 20th child. But now you have 19 kids less worth of funding to do it.

Jill: It gets even more complicated when you look at states such as Missouri, where rural communities take a large hit to their funding. Jess Piper sees this in her own town of 480 people. She was a teacher for 16 years, then after running for state representative, she focused her attention organizing and educating people on the issues that impact her state as executive director of Blue Missouri and host of the podcast Dirt Road Democrat.

Jess: So vouchers are basically a scam, taking public tax money and giving it to people who are running private or religious schools. For a child like mine, it's really impactful because she's in a tiny little school, she goes, there's 15 kids in her entire 6th grade class, and we don't have, there's no reason to give me a voucher, because I wouldn't have anywhere to take it, right? I'm rural.

But what happens is the, the state is sending fewer dollars to my daughter's school, because it's not going into the kitty, right? It's not going into that big fund anymore. Missouri is already 49th in educational funding. They only send 32% of a school's budget. Wealthy areas, it's not as impactful, but in places like mine we don't have the tax base to support the other 68% that would come from, you know, property taxes. So my daughter has fewer, you know, new textbooks. They don't get new playground equipment. They have to raise money for, you know, band instruments and raise money for uniforms for the cheerleaders and the football players. It's just fewer dollars going into our schools, which are already struggling.

Jill: This push for school vouchers isn't coming out of nowhere. The United States has a long history of using these practices to further segregate schools and promote discrimination, going back to the infamous case of Brown v. Board of Education. This was the landmark 1954 Supreme Court case in which the justices ruled unanimously that racial segregation of children in public schools was unconstitutional.

Jennifer: A lot of the discourse we're hearing right now about about school choice in its various guises, things like like school vouchers, tax credit scholarships, education savings accounts, they're being talked about and marketed as though they're a new idea, and really the idea is quite old.

Jill: Jennifer Berkshire has focused her writing career around all things education. She's written a book about the destruction of public education titled A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door, along with being involved with countless articles, another upcoming book and her podcast, Have You Heard.

Jennifer: They're often associated with a libertarian economist named Milton Friedman. And, and we don't have to venture too far into the weeds here to, to sort of, you know, to get the idea that, that instead of having taxpayer funded public institutions, parents would get some portion of that money to spend on whatever kind of school that they picked. And Friedman was quite explicit that the amount of the school voucher would shrink over time, that the real goal was to make education a product that parents paid for themselves, just like we pay for so many other products.

And when you really see this idea take hold, is in the aftermath to the Supreme Court decision, Brown versus Board of Education. And that's this real, that's this momentous decision that orders the integration of public education in America. And it sets off an intense backlash, especially in the South, but really all over the place. And, and one of the things that you see happening is that you see organizations and, and state governments in the South saying, you know, what if, instead of integrating our schools, we gave parents vouchers and let them use state funding to attend what were then called segregation academies.

Jess: We had that desegregation and you had folks, a lot of white folks saying, I'm not sending my white kid to school with black kids. What am I going to do? And so a lot of, you know, really racist lawmakers got together and said, Hey, we'll fund you. We'll give you money, tax money, to take your white kid and take them to a place. And they called them segregation academies. So, I mean, we don't need to wonder what the real goal was because they were very transparent, but that's how they started. Right. And so defunding public schools in any way is automatically going to be a form of classism, racism, that sort of thing, right?

Jill: The blatant racism that spurred the creation of school vouchers is still present today in the conversation around school choice. While segregation might have been deemed illegal, that doesn't mean it disappeared. Racism, classism, and ableism are a constant presence in the argument for school vouchers, no matter what way you look at it.

Jennifer: As soon as you switch to a system where the schools do the choosing, and that's really what school choice is, discrimination is built into that, right? And so you have schools that are saying like that school did, well, we're not going to accept gay kids. We're not going to accept kids that are on an IEP. We're not going to accept kids whose parents aren't married. Now, you know, we have to acknowledge that our public education system is, you know, it falls short in so many key ways. And one of them is that our schools are now more segregated than they were, you know, 50 years ago.

Renee: This is one of the reasons that we call it actually school's choice. It's not school choice. It's school's choice. Private schools inherently, like, the inherent aspect of private schools is their exclusivity. They don't have to enroll everybody. That doesn't necessarily have to be nefarious. If you are starting a private school and decide that you have an ideal class size of 15 students and you only want to serve four grades, you can say, 60 kids can enroll in my school. And child 61, no matter how wealthy they are, no matter how wonderful they are, isn't going to get admitted. Because the private school has decided that that's what it's choosing.

But of course we see other really insidious choice as well. A lot of private schools either do not accept kids with disabilities at all. Or services for children with disabilities are an upcharge. So on top of the tuition, which may or may not be fully covered by the voucher, a kid who needs services first off has to give up all the civil rights provided to them in the public school system, but then has to pay for those services out of pocket.

Jill: Ashana Bigard knows firsthand what it's like to see her child impacted by the lack of resources available to students and charter schools. Education has been the cornerstone of everything for her. So when her son was impacted by this school model, she fought back.

Ashana: My son is high functioning on the autism spectrum, but he's high functioning, having good grades, good tests. But he was supposed to be getting services socially, emotional development, how to talk, how to start conversations. He left his school being owed 45 hours of services. I'm an educational advocate and I fight for education and that happened to my son. That is what it is like for me, an educational advocate. Who knows the law, who knows that IEPs are covered by federal law, they are not to be played with. It doesn't matter because there's no accountability mechanisms when the schools break the law.

I just attended an IEP meeting for a six year old. And this six year old had had a severe head injury. And so he had some behavioral issues. They said they were putting him in his own classroom, which sounded fine to the mom, but the mom did not know what that classroom looked like. So it turned out the classroom they had him in didn't have any windows, looked kind of like a closet. He was the only person in it with a teacher all day. He had no desk. He had no chair. He was just sitting in this room all day. So his IEP said he was to get services, and those were the services they were providing. It took the father to actually see it, and he was like, I went to prison, I know what that is. That's punishment for prisoners. You cannot do this to my six year old.

So I tell people, when you have a system of systems, it's harder to monitor them, A, and B, when there's no accountability, when they break state and federal law, what is to stop them from doing it over and over again? So they do. Constantly.

Jill: Ashana's kids are part of the New Orleans school system in Louisiana, which is seen as a sort of dream model for school privatization in the eyes of school choice advocates. New Orleans was the stage for the largest school reform effort in this country's history, which resulted in all of their schools becoming charter schools. In 2004, right before Hurricane Katrina destroyed the city, only 54% of high school students were graduating on a yearly basis. After Katrina, the state of Louisiana saw this as an opportunity to take the schools and hand them over to independent groups to manage and turn into charter schools. Sounds like a dream deal, right? You have a city full of charter schools to choose from, and you get to pick whatever is best for your family. You think that there's no way you can lose in this situation. But like we said before, school choice means that the school gets to do the choosing, not the parents.

Ashana: We have something called the One App, and you can select up to eight schools, and supposedly you're supposed to get your school of choice. And it's supposed to be a blind system that, you know, is around equity and fairness.

Well, here's the situation. These are the three things I know about from first hand experience and helping parents navigate one app. Our one app system, which is blind, sends white children to only five schools in our city. The top five schools. It sends English language learners to only about four schools in this city. The one app tends to send… the majority of our kids are failing schools that are not around where they live. It's a very interesting system because most people are not getting what they need or want and there's only a select few people who do and if you put a different income level in, you get a different selection of schools. Which should be, it is against the law because that's economic discrimination.

But what's the law? I mean, our segregation is on par with Zimbabwe in New Orleans. Like, that's our alignment. Because we're not just segregated by race. We're segregated by race and income. There are a lot of people who want that.

Jill: So this ambitious attempt at school reform is failing its students and its city, and it's not just limited to New Orleans. Statistics compiled by EdChoice shows that as of 2023, there are an estimated 312,000 recipients of school vouchers. Indiana's Choice Scholarship Program is the nation's largest voucher program with over 50, 000 students. The 2023 Choice Scholarship Program report notes that a growing majority of those recipients are white and from affluent families. In 2022 through 2023, only 28.1% of voucher households had an income below $50,000. And it was found that most of the students would be attending private schools with or without the financial help from vouchers. As compared to the 9.5% of Black voucher students, 62% of voucher students are white, despite the fact that these schools tend to be located in increasingly racially diverse neighborhoods.

Ashana: We're building systems based on instability, which actually doesn't make sense if your goal is to educate children. And I tell people, New Orleans, duplicating New Orleans as a portfolio city is going to set generational poverty back. Do you like making money? Do you like your city and your community being somewhere where people want to be and can thrive? Then you have to care about poor Black children and education. And so if we have a working school system that's actually treating our children like whole children, we can have better cities, we can make more money, we can have a better draw, to have people come to our city, stay in our city, say good things. You don't have to care about Black children to understand the importance of education and how that links up with every other system, even business. So, do you wanna copy this model? Hell no.

Jill: It's not just large urban cities that are being impacted by this vision of school vouchers and school privatization. In a small Missouri town like Jess Piper's, the options are even more limited.

Jess: When we think about private schools, most of them are going to be religious in a place like mine. I mean, we don't have, you know, an academy set up for liberal arts. When we talk about a private school out here, it's going to be a religious school. Right. And so you're going to have that religious indoctrination. So when people say that they want to give public funds to these private institutions because they think that they perform better, which they do not, but they have this notion in their head that they're, you know, going to a school with uniforms and lush gardens and all these leather bound books and fantastic places when they're really in the basement of, you know, the local First Baptist Church with someone without a teaching degree and kids doing worksheets or working on iPads all day long, right? But there is that religious infusion of curriculum.

And that's another problem too. There is a local school that I could take a voucher to, not high school, but K through eight, but we aren't religious folks. And I don't, my daughter, I don't want my daughter, you know In that right now, and I don't think it's appropriate to use religion in schools. It's a basic fundamental thing. It's a separation of church and state. We don't do that. We don't give state money to churches. Well, we do. We shouldn't.

Jill: For the last 60 years, evangelical Christians have had a turbulent relationship with public education. Religion played a central role in public education from its inception to the 20th century. Kids read Bibles in schools and prayed at sporting events, adhering to the country's Protestant majority. But that all began to change in the 1960s thanks to the landmark U. S. Supreme Court ruling Engel v. Vitale, which struck down prayer in public schools and drew a stricter line between church and state. This decision angered religious parents for years, so much so that Ronald Reagan played to evangelical voters in his 1984 election campaign by condemning, quote unquote, God's expulsion from public schools. The conservative Christian distaste for public schools grew strong, and with it, new plans were developed.

Though no legislation was enacted, various plans for private school choice were introduced during the Reagan years, including voucher and tuition tax credit plans, ensuring the support of the evangelical community. And it continues to grow to this day. As of 2020, U. S. government statistics show that there are over 32,000 private schools in the country, and 84% of those are religious.

Renee: If you're not Christian in a heavily Christian area, and your choices are the now completely underfunded public school or the school that's going to punish you for not being Christian, that's not a choice at all. That kid's losing and society loses. That sounds very grandiose. But what I mean is part of the magic of public schools and part of the public good is that all sorts of kids come together from all sorts of different backgrounds.

Jill: So who are the driving forces behind this push for school vouchers? Who would want a system that pushes religious indoctrination and discrimination? Well, it's not that hard to find an answer.

Renee: I think there are two main schools of thought behind school choice, and they are different, but kind of converging in interests. On the one hand, you've got the traditional conservative anti-tax Milton Friedman types, right? Those are the folks that believe that taxation is theft, period. That we don't need public schools, period, because that is a level of state government involvement that they just think is wrong. So they would have public schools completely eliminated. And unfortunately, I think those are the folks driving the bus.

They're being aided and abetted by the second group that believes that the state should fund education, but they don't believe that public schools are a public good. They believe them to be an individual good. And so that it's not only their duty as a parent, but it's their right to have the state fund whatever they think is best for their child. So, if they want their kid to go to a school where the only children they're surrounded with are white, wealthy, straight, Christian kids, then that is their right and the state is not, should not have any say in that, except for to fork over the funds.

Jess: I want everyone to know that this is on purpose. You don't land in this position accidentally. Your lawmakers have been working against you, your community, and your children for donations so that they could stay in power and consolidate power. And so we speak truth to power. We say, this is bad for my kid. This is bad for my school. I think the ultimate goal is privatizing for money and then closing down a lot of rural schools, a lot of urban schools and putting the kids to work. See, we know this is true because they're rolling back child labor laws at the same time.

I think that the end result is to get rid of education in places like mine, for children like mine. And if the libertarian goal, and they've said this part out loud, if you can afford to send your child to school, great. But if you can't, too bad. I mean, I don't know what to do for you. They will provide a rudimentary, you know, education, reading, writing. arithmetic, and then send them out by sixth or seventh grade. Betsy DeVos a couple years ago was interviewed and she was talking about choice in rural areas. And people said, like I say, there's no choice out here. What is your plan? And she said, well, I envision a world where kids could listen to ebooks while they're out in the fields. And right there, that lets you know, she does not think my kid deserves an education. And I don't know what she thinks happens in fields. They're on, they're on combines. So I don't really trust eight and seven and eight year olds listening to an ebook driving a combine. So that lets you know, she's completely out of touch too. But the whole point of it is this, they don't want everyone educated. They do not.

Jill: Jennifer Berkshire sees a conservative push for a future where K through 12 education takes a similar path as higher education.

Jennifer: I mentioned Milton Friedman and the fact that, you know, he was quite clear about the fact that he wanted the value of the voucher to shrink over time. And so, you know, that vouchers were a way station, and you wanted to get parents to get used to paying for at least part of the cost themselves, and then more and more of that over time. Just the way we think about college and you know, we now look at our higher education system and who thinks of that as you know as a model? It saddled people with debt, right, and you know opportunities are so constrained by how expensive it is. And we're you know, we're trying to figure out a way to do it better. And so the idea that you would have deep-pocketed groups selling the privatization of our K-12 system as like a vision for the future, I think, is really alarming.

Jill: Things might look dire, but at the end of the day, the general public doesn't want school vouchers. In fact, they vote against it every chance they get.

Jennifer: One of the reasons that they're constantly coming up with new ways to sell this is that historically, whenever the public has been given a choice to weigh in on whether they want school vouchers, and that is using taxpayer funding to pay for private religious schools that don't have to take all kids, the public always says no. You cannot find a single example where voters have been given an opportunity to say yes or no to a school voucher program and have said yes.

Jess: The biggest line item in most state budgets is education. And that is the last thing that, in America, that we have not privatized. It's the last good and holy thing that we've been like, no, this is something that all kids should be able to access and so we're going to keep it, you know, free and fair.

So it's, you know, the DeVos family, the Kochs, all of these people have wanted their money, their hands on this money for decades. And now they're, we're actually seeing them doing it. I want to remind your listeners that anytime, every time vouchers have been put to a public vote, nobody has ever passed them. No state, no constituents have ever said, the majority of us want vouchers. So that lets you know right there. It is not popular. So we have sometimes unelected officials or gerrymandered officials taking money from donors and then passing through this legislation really quickly.

We saw it in Arkansas. We saw it in Iowa. It went through within a few days. They just pushed it through before people could find out what was going on and push back on Sarah Huckabee Sanders in Arkansas. We didn't want this. We don't want this. You're closing our schools. And so, you know, it's a little, you get what you vote for, but also here's the thing. There's a lot of people that don't have anyone to vote for but a Republican on their ticket.

Jennifer: It's easy to get the impression just reading the, the mainstream media and whatever's coming across your Facebook feed, it's really, it's easy to come away with a sense that these candidates are, they are cleaning up, right? That they are, whether they are running against critical race theory. And then onto the endless list that, you know, it just keeps growing. So it was critical race theory, then social and emotional learning. Sometimes it's complaints about things like school district equity plans. Sometimes it's transgender bathrooms and things that target LGBTQ kids. The reality is that they are quite doing poorly in elections. They're losing about 75% of the time and when they are, they are up against candidates who offer an affirming vision for what schools should do and the kinds of, of education that every kid should be provided, they do really poorly.

Now, 25% is not nothing. It's important to pay attention to places where this kind of slash and burn rhetoric is effective. And if nobody runs against them, right, like you're basically just opening, opening the door.

Jill: So, what can we do to help save public education before it's too late?

Renee: This whole American experiment, or whatever you want to call it, I think public schools are what helps make that work. Because when we decide that everybody deserves an education, we lift everybody up. To improve public education, we have to acknowledge, we have to get to at least minimum adequate funding. We cannot keep expecting more and more of our schools and providing fewer and fewer resources. So we've got to get there first. And I hate to say that because it's very dull, right? You've just got to fund the schools. Nobody wants to hear that, but it's true.

Jennifer: The answer is to do exactly what groups like yours are doing. So first is to effectively push back when you see these kinds of divisive culture war campaigns. And that's where I think that you are, you're such a model for doing that. And for really making sure that we understand what parents actually care about, and they care about things like fully funded public schools. They care about having adequately trained teachers in every classroom, keeping students safe. And, and really, you know, providing a safe and affirmative space for all kinds of kids.

But it also means that we have to figure out how to reclaim a language that we've lost. And that is the language of a common good or a public good. We've lost the ability to make that kind of larger, stirring case for public education as an institution that benefits all of us. And that's where I think that we need to learn from the lessons of successful grassroots campaigns. And, and so it's, you're not going to get it from experts or even education historians like my collaborator. It is out there, it is people making the case in their own communities for why we have this thing, why we need to pay for it, why you need to run for office.

Jess: It's the common good, right? It's the… we got together hundreds of years ago and decided it was worth our money to make sure that every kid in our community had an education, that they understood what democracy was, that they understood how to fight for democracy. It's that. The common goals. That's why we read the same books, right? So that we all have a common language. We all know who Atticus Finch is. We all know what he did, right? Because we read the books. We all read Shakespeare. We all studied slavery.

And so by pulling those things out of our curriculum, by making sure that we're divided, that making sure that we're angry and making sure that our children can't read above, you know, a fifth or sixth grade level, they've got you know, people who can continue working in whatever factories, whatever they want, you're right. It's the common good. My community is where we vote. You know, the school is… that's, that's where everything happens on Friday nights, everybody goes to the football game, whether you got a kid or playing or not, right, because what else are you going to do? So by them, you know, making our schools implode, they're actually making our communities go away. To lose our schools would devastate our communities.

Jill: Well funded, successful public schools make our communities stronger. And we aren't going to let extremists take that away from us. Speak out about the use of vouchers in your own state. Vote for candidates who advocate for fully funded public schools and support the teachers fighting for your child's education. Public education is central to our freedom, so we can and should be doing more to protect it. Organizations like Red Wine and Blue can give you the tools and resources needed to take these first steps towards fighting extremism in our own communities. So get involved and help save our schools.

The Cost of Extremism

The Problem with School Vouchers

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