When all the votes have been counted this November, it looks like three of every five U.S. governors will be from the Blue Team. This means that in school voucher states that flipped to Democrats (Ohio, Iowa, Georgia, Nevada, and Texas), there will be opportunities to do something about taxpayer dollars going down the bottomless private school voucher sinkhole.
Whether you call them educational savings accounts, opportunity scholarships, tuition tax credits, or some other rhetorical masking of the toxic "school voucher" label, the new governors who work toward ending school vouchers and charter schools can proudly point to their actions to do something for voters about affordability, corruption, and the erosion of democracy. This first post is about affordability.
Taxpayer funded school voucher programs are unaffordable unless states are willing to underfund public school programs, scale back infrastructure projects, and fire public school personnel. In Arizona, the cost of its Empowerment Scholarship Act school voucher program grew from $2.2 million in 2011-2012 to $1 billion in 2025-2026.
In Texas, the cost of Greg Abbot's universal school voucher program is projected to be even more unaffordable and more damaging to the state's public schools.
This ballooning pattern holds true, regardless of which state these corporate welfare plans are being pushed onto citizens who don't want them. In Florida, for instance, an independent audit submitted to the state legislature exposed a chaotic multibillion-dollar mess, with almost $300 million unaccounted for, overpayments to some groups of private schools, underpayment or no payment to others, and improper payments to still others.
Below are two charts that show the runaway growth of Florida's unaffordable school voucher programs. Table 2 shows state voucher costs for K-12 regular ed student, and Table 3 reflects expenditures for K-12 students with disabilities.
