Take 17 Minutes to Learn About School Vouchers

And if you are already educated about vouchers, there’s still more here that will surprise you about the biggest educational scam in American educational history. Pass it on. 

TN School Vouchers Are about Welfare for the Wealthy

CLEMMONS: “Please be aware — They’re trying to hide this data.” @jrclemmons.bsky.social calls out Republicans for killing McKenzie’s bill to require @GovBillLee to tell us how many voucher kids were already in private schools aka “WELFARE FOR THE WEALTHY” And now they want to double it

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— The Tennessee Holler (@thetnholler.bsky.social) February 12, 2026 at 4:53 PM

TN Politicians Are Dumber Than Mississippi Politicians

Mississippi Senate Kills Voucher Bill by Andy Spears

It took 84 seconds to end the school voucher movement

Read on Substack

TN Parents File Lawsuit to Stop Bill Lee’s School Voucher Privatization Plan

Lawsuit Alleges Tennessee's School Voucher Program is Unconstitutional nashvillebanner.com/2025/11/21/t...

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— James Horn (@schools-matter24.bsky.social) November 21, 2025 at 8:06 AM

Massive Fraud in AZ School Voucher Program

From News 12, Phoenix:

 PHOENIX — Home and private school parents with Empowerment Scholarship Accounts for their kids bought diamond rings and necklaces, Kenmore appliances, and even lingerie with education tax dollars, a 12News investigation has found.

Parents of ESA children also purchased more than 200 Apple iPhones, more than 50 smart TVs, and dozens of gift cards worth up to $500 each since last November, when the state Department of Education began automatically approving all ESA requests because of a massive backlog.

The 12News I-Team, through a public records request, also uncovered more than $3 million in purchases to Amazon, Costco, and Best Buy, with no indication of what was bought. There were also nearly $2,000 payments to a person identified as "me" and "Jamie the tutor," as well as for a purse.

Many of the purchases are considered "unallowable" under ESA guidelines, and Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne said his office eventually will claw back the money. A spokesman said Monday that parents may be referred to the Attorney General's Office for prosecution, and 400 accounts have been suspended because of improper spending.

"Most people are honest and request reasonable things," Horne said. "The unreasonable ones are about 1 percent, and we recover them afterwards….So, there’s nothing where people can get away with murder on things under $2,000.”

The I-Team's public records request was made after 12News uncovered that 1.2 million ESA requests totaling $124 million were automatically approved since late last year.

The Department of Education's website said the ESA program, which has about 90,000 kids and will cost the state $1 billion this school year, "may be the most accountable program in the state."

Beth Lewis, who leads Save Our Schools, Arizona, said that's laughable.

"Tom Horne has instituted this policy, which is, you know, the exact opposite of any sort of financial stewardship or responsibility," Lewis said. "We have no idea where the funds are going, and whether they’re being used to just improve people’s homes or pay for things that no other person in the state would ask people to pay for.”

The questionable -- and possibly illegal -- ESA spending was uncovered by 12News as a Maricopa County judge ruled last week that Arizona isn’t properly funding capital needs for its public schools, calling it unconstitutional.

In Judge Dewain Fox's 114-page ruling, the judge included several pictures of damaged roofs, cracked floors and peeling walls from various schools across Arizona to emphasize how some districts "languish with substandard facilities for years."

Other purchases automatically approved include:

• Two 1-carat diamond rings and several necklaces.
• Kenmore washers, dryers, and a range.
• Gift cards to Kohl's and Happy Moments, which can be used at restaurants and clothing.
• Gaming laptops.
• Apple iPods and watches along with warranties.
• Hotel and resort stays, including Knott's Berry Farm, Great Wolf Lodge and Hilton properties.
• Broadway tickets at ASU Gammage, including one for nearly $1,300.
• Airline tickets.
• Luxury clothing like Psycho Bunny.
• Maternity wear and corsets.
• Diapers.
• Dog food.
• High-end office furniture like a $1,750 Herman Miller Embody Ergonomic Office Chair.
• Sports camps.
• Dozens of Lego sets, including 15 for more than $1,000 each.
• Above-ground pools.
• Personal fitness training.
• More than 300 purchases at The San Diego Zoo and SeaWorld.
• Traeger grills.
• Electric bikes and mopeds.
• Massive inflatable water slides.
• Horse saddles.

Marisol Garcia, president of the Arizona Education Association, said it's shameful that ESA parents are making such luxury purchases when so many public schools are struggling.

She notes that numerous teachers are asking for donations for basic necessities like books, and added that public school employees would be fired if they made similar purchases as ESA parents.

"It just doesn’t happen. And there would be accountability, multiple layers of accountability," she said. "Hearing about these extravagant purchases breaks my heart."

Voucher Laws Supercharge Corruption and Thievery of Public Funds

The Texas Tribune and ProPublic have an important investigative piece on how private school bosses in Texas appropriate and misuse public funds to grow their businesses, hire their relatives, buy products and services from cronies, and take extravagant vacations—all without breaking any laws.  

The voucher scammers' “legal" diversion of public funds expands the form of illegal leeching done by charter schools with zero public oversight to enforce laws governing public school finance. With taxpayer funds now going to private schools where state education statutes do not apply, there are not even any laws to ignore.

And so voucher laws further undergird the unspoken theory and practice of viewing public monies, whether for education or otherwise, as unrestricted sources of welfare, not for the needy, but for the needless.

Public Assistance for the Privileged

Indiana Vouchers: Private School Coupons for Wealthy Families by Andy Spears

Program costs nearly $500 million, funds private school discounts for the rich

Read on Substack

A New Lucrative Wrinkle for Wealthy in MAGA’s “kill public education” Voucher Movement

 From Counterpunch, by Jeff Bryant:

. . . . An ‘Unprecedented Giveaway’ to the Wealthiest

It’s telling that the measure, originally called the Educational Choice for Children Act of 2025 when it was introduced and in committee, is now called “tax credit for contributions of individuals to scholarship granting organizations” and appears in the part of the [big awful pile of bullshit] bill devoted to “Additional Tax Relief for American Families and Workers,” rather than grouped with other education proposals in the Committee on Education and Workforce section.

But the subterfuge goes much deeper than the name, according to the speakers at the town hall, including Amy Hanauer, executive director of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP), who called the measure“the quintessential definition of a tax shelter.”

The tax advantages are derived from how the program is funded. As Hanauer explained, school vouchers would be funded by a tax credit system and a federally mandated network of scholarship granting organizations (SGOs), one in every state. Each SGO is its own nonprofit that can grant vouchers to parents who apply. When private individuals and corporations donate to an SGO, they would, in turn, receive a tax credit from the federal government that’s dollar-for-dollar equal to the amount of the donation—limited to 10 percent of a donor’s income.

The first advantage is that the reward for donating comes in the form of a credit rather than a tax deduction, which, as the Tax Policy Center pointed out, increases the value of the tax advantage because a credit is “subtracted directly from a person’s tax liability,” while the value of a deduction “depends on the taxpayer’s marginal tax rate, which rises with income.”

Those specifics make the voucher program a more attractive system for giving than other charitable causes.

Also, “no other charity, not pediatric cancer research, not disaster relief, not assisting disabled veterans, nothing gets this level of tax incentive,” said Hanauer, “no other charity has ever gotten this kind of one-for-one payback.” . . .

Utah Judge Rejects School Voucher Scheme

Utah Judge Rejects School Voucher Scheme by Andy Spears

Public money must be for public schools, ruling says

Read on Substack

Segregation Academies Across the South Are Getting Millions in Taxpayer Dollars

by Jennifer Berry Hawes and Mollie Simon

ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.

Series: Segregation Academies:Decades After Desegregation, Private Schools Still Divide

More in this series

Private schools across the South that were established for white children during desegregation are now benefiting from tens of millions in taxpayer dollars flowing from rapidly expanding voucher-style programs, a ProPublica analysis found.

In North Carolina alone, we identified 39 of these likely “segregation academies” that are still operating and that have received voucher money. Of these, 20 schools reported student bodies that were at least 85% white in a 2021-22 federal survey of private schools, the most recent data available.

Those 20 academies, all founded in the 1960s and 1970s, brought in more than $20 million from the state in the past three years alone. None reflected the demographics of their communities. Few even came close.

Northeast Academy, a small Christian school in rural Northampton County on the Virginia border, is among them. As of the 2021-22 survey, the school’s enrollment was 99% white in a county that runs about 40% white.

Every year since North Carolina launched its state-funded private school voucher program in 2014, the academy has received more and more money. Last school year, it received about $438,500 from the program, almost half of its total reported tuition. Northeast is on track to beat that total this school year.

Vouchers play a similar role at Lawrence Academy, an hour’s drive south. It has never reported Black enrollment higher than 3% in a county whose population hovers around 60% Black. A small school with less than 300 students, it received $518,240 in vouchers last school year to help pay for 86 of those students.

Farther south, Pungo Christian Academy has received voucher money every year since 2015 and, as of the last survey, had become slightly more white than when the voucher program began. It last reported a student body that was 98% white in a county that was 65% white.

Segregation academies that remain vastly white continue to play an integral role in perpetuating school segregation — and, as a result, racial separation in the surrounding communities. We found these academies benefiting from public money in Southern states beyond North Carolina. But because North Carolina collects and releases more complete data than many other states, it offers an especially telling window into what is happening across this once legally segregated region where legislatures are rapidly expanding and adopting controversial voucher-style programs.

Called Opportunity Scholarships, North Carolina’s voucher program launched in 2014. At first, it was only for low-income families and had barely more than 1,200 participants. Then last fall, state lawmakers expanded eligibility to students of all income levels and those already attending private school, a move that sparked furious debate over the future of public education.

“We are ensuring that every child has the chance to thrive,” Republican Rep. Tricia Cotham argued. But Democratic Rep. Julie von Haefen pointed to vouchers’ “legacy of white supremacy” and called the expansion “a gross injustice to the children of North Carolina.”

So many students flocked to the program that the state now has a waitlist of about 54,000 children. Paying for all of them to receive vouchers — at a cost of $248 million — would more than double the current number of participants in the program. Republicans in the General Assembly, along with three Democrats, passed a bill in September to do just that.

Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, vetoed the measure. But the GOP supermajority is expected to override it before the year’s end, perhaps as early as Nov. 19.

Opportunity Scholarships don’t always live up to their name for Black children. Private schools don’t have to admit all comers. Nor do they have to provide busing or free meals. Due to income disparities, Black parents also are less likely to be able to afford the difference between a voucher that pays at most $7,468 a year and an annual tuition bill that can top $10,000 or even $20,000.

And unlike urban areas that have a range of private schools, including some with diverse student bodies, segregation academies are the only private schools available in some rural counties across the South.

Josh Cowen, a professor of education policy at Michigan State, studies these barriers and sees where vouchers fall short for some: “Eligibility does not mean access.”

Of the 20 vastly white segregation academies we identified that received voucher money in North Carolina, nine were at least 30 percentage points more white than the counties in which they operate, based on 2021-22 federal survey and census data.

Otis Smallwood, superintendent of the Bertie County Schools in rural northeastern North Carolina, witnesses this kind of gulf in the district he leads. So many white children in the area attend Lawrence Academy and other schools that his district’s enrollment runs roughly 22 percentage points more Black than the county overall.

He said he tries not to be political. But he feels the brunt of an intensifying Republican narrative against public schools, which still educate most of North Carolina’s children. “It’s been chipping, chipping, chipping, trying to paint this picture that public schools are not performing well,” Smallwood said. “It’s getting more and more and more extreme.”

When a ProPublica reporter told him that Lawrence Academy received $518,240 last school year in vouchers, he was dismayed: “That’s half a million dollars I think could be put to better benefit in public schools.”

If lawmakers override the governor’s veto to fund the waitlist, Smallwood’s district could suffer most. In a recent report, the Office of State Budget and Management projected Bertie County could lose more of its state funding than any other district — 1.6% next year.

Across the once legally segregated South, the volume of public money flowing through voucher-style programs is set to balloon in coming years. Georgia, Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Florida and South Carolina all have passed new or expanded programs since 2023. (South Carolina’s state Supreme Court rejected its tuition grants in September, but GOP lawmakers are expected to try again with a revamped court.)

Voucher critics contend these programs will continue to worsen school segregation by helping wealthier white kids attend private schools; supporters argue they help more Black families afford tuition. But many of the states have made it hard to discern if either is happening by failing to require that the most basic demographic data be shared with the public — or even gathered.

This doesn’t surprise Cowen, who wrote the new book “The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers.” He said Southern legislatures in particular don’t want to know what the data would show because the results, framed by a legacy of racism, could generate negative headlines and lawsuit fodder.

States know how to collect vast troves of education data. North Carolina in particular is lauded among global researchers for “the robustness and the richness of the data system for public schools,” Cowen said.

North Carolina and Alabama are among the states that have gathered demographic information about voucher recipients but won’t tell the public the race of students who use them to attend a given school. In North Carolina, a spokesperson said doing so could reveal information about specific students, making that data not a public record under the Opportunity Scholarship statue.

For its $120 million tax credit program, Georgia does not collect racial demographic information or per-school spending. ProPublica was able to identify 20 segregation academies that signed up to take part, but it’s unclear how many are receiving that money or what the racial breakdown is of the students who use it.

“Why should we not be allowed to know where the money is going? It’s a deliberate choice by those who pass these laws,” said Jessica Levin, director of Public Funds Public Schools, a national anti-voucher campaign led by the nonprofit Education Law Center. “There is a lack of transparency and accountability.”

Advocacy groups that support widespread voucher use have resisted some rules that foster greater transparency out of concern that they might deter regulation-averse private schools from participating. Mike Long, president of the nonprofit Parents for Educational Freedom in North Carolina, is among those trying to rally as much private school buy-in for vouchers as possible.

“Their fear is that if they accept it, these are tax dollars, and therefore they would have to submit to government regulation,” Long said. “We’ve lobbied this legislature, and I think they understand it very well, that you can’t tie regulation to this.”

The share of Black students who have received vouchers in North Carolina has dropped significantly since the program's launch. In 2014, more than half the recipients were Black. This school year, the figure is 17%.

That share is unlikely to increase if lawmakers fund all 54,000 students on the waiting list. Because lower-income families were prioritized for vouchers, the applicants who remain on the list are mostly in higher income tiers — and those families are more likely to be white.

More Black parents don’t apply for vouchers because they don’t know about them, said Kwan Graham, who oversees parent liaisons for Parents for Educational Freedom in North Carolina.

Graham, who is Black, said parents haven’t voiced to her concerns that, “I’m Black, they don’t want me” at their local private schools. But she’s also not naive. Private schools can largely select — and reject — who they want.

The nonprofit Public Schools First NC has tallied admissions policies that private schools receiving vouchers use to reject applicants based on things like sexuality, religion and disability. Many also require in-person interviews or tours. Rather than overtly rejecting students based on race, which the voucher program prohibits, schools might say something like, “Come visit the school and see if you’re the ‘right fit,’” said Heather Koons, the nonprofit’s communications and research director.

Northeast Academy, Lawrence Academy and Pungo Christian all include nondiscrimination statements on their websites.

Back when segregation academies opened, some white leaders proudly declared their goal of preserving segregation. Others shrouded their racist motivations. Some white parents complained about federal government overreach and what they deemed social agendas and indoctrination in public schools. Even as violent backlash against integration erupted across the region, many white parents framed their decisions as quests for quality education, morality and Christian education, newspaper coverage and school advertisements from the time show.

Early on, Southern lawmakers found a way to use taxpayer money to give these academies a boost: They created school voucher programs that went chiefly to white students.

Courts ruled against or restricted the practice in the 1960s. But it didn’t really end.

“If you look at the history of the segregation movement, they wanted vouchers to prop up segregation academies,” said Bryan Mann, a University of Kansas professor who studies school segregation. “And now they’re getting vouchers in some of these areas to prop up these schools.”

More recently, Lawrence and Northeast academies both grew their enrollments while receiving voucher money even as the rural counties where they operate have lost population. Over three decades of responding to the federal private schools survey, both academies have reported enrolling almost no nonwhite children. And Pungo Christian has raised its average tuition by almost 50% over the past three school years. During that time, the small school has received almost $500,000 in vouchers.

None of the three academies’ headmasters responded to ProPublica’s request to discuss its findings or to lists of questions. And none have ever reported more than 3% Black enrollment despite operating in counties with substantial — even majority — Black populations.

One of the Democrats who helped Republicans expand North Carolina’s voucher program was Shelly Willingham, a Black representative whose district includes Bertie County, home of Lawrence Academy. He said he doesn’t love vouchers, but the bills have included funding for issues he does support.

He also said he encourages his constituents to take advantage of the vouchers. If there were any effort to make it more difficult for Black students to attend those schools, “then I would have a big problem,” Willingham said. “I don’t see that.”

Another Democrat who voted with Republicans was state Rep. Michael Wray, a white businessman and former House minority whip — who graduated from Northeast Academy.

Wray, whose voting record on vouchers over the years has been mixed, did not respond to multiple ProPublica requests to discuss his views. In 2013, he voted against the budget bill that established the Opportunity Scholarships. And in a recent Q&A with the local Daily Herald newspaper, when asked if he supports taxpayer money funding private schools, he responded: “I believe that when you siphon funds away from our public school budgets, it undermines the success of our schools overall.”

Rodney Pierce, a Black 46-year-old father and public school teacher, saw the voucher expansion in the state budget bill Wray voted for and felt history haunt him. Pierce had only one white student in his classes last year at Gaston STEM Leadership Academy. But about 30 miles across the rural county, white children filled Northeast Academy.

Pierce taught history, with a deep interest in civil rights. He’d studied the voucher programs that white supremacists crafted to help white families flee to segregation academies.

“This stuff was in the works back in the 1960s,” Pierce said.

He was so outraged that he challenged Wray, a 10-term incumbent, for his state House seat. Pierce won the Democratic primary earlier this year by just 34 votes. He faced no opponent in November, so come next year he will cut the House’s support of vouchers by one vote.

“Particularly in the Black community, we care about our public schools,” he said.

Many Black families also have little to no relationship with their local private schools, especially those that opened specifically for white children and are still filled with them. The only times Pierce had set foot on Northeast Academy’s campus was when he covered a few sporting events there for the local newspaper.

People there were nice to him, he said, but he felt anxious: “You’re in an academy you know was started by people who didn’t want their children to go to school with Black children.”

His own three kids attend public schools. Even with vouchers, he said, he wouldn’t send them to a school founded as a segregation academy, much less one that still fosters segregation. He finds it insulting to force taxpayers, including the Black residents he will soon represent — about half of the people in his district — to pay to send other people’s children to these schools.

Missouri Rejects Voucher Expansion

Voucher Expansion Rejected in Missouri by Andy Spears

Senate committee strips $50 million in voucher expansion funds from Gov's budget

Read on Substack

Billionaires’ 2025 Plan to Bankrupt TN Schools, Part 1: From Amway to Bill Lee’s Way

Betsy Devos and her family amassed their billions by exploiting untold numbers of people around the globe with delusional schemes of becoming rich by buying in to the Devos family’s de facto Amway pyramid scheme. With promises of wealth and financial independence spouted during capitalist cult revival rallies, generations of the gullible and desperate have fallen prey to the siren song sung by agents of the corrupt, immoral, and unethical Devos clan and their army of recruiters and marketers. (Check out this NBC segment of Dateline here, or read the transcript here.)

Hoping to escape its international reputation as a corporate bloodsucker based on recruiting, exploiting, and discarding its distributors, Amway is now rebranded as Quixtar.  

Co-founded in 1959 by Richard Devos,  the enormously profitable Amway scam grew alongside the Devos patriarch’s extremist conservative political commitments and the family’s white nationalist religious fundamentalism.  Richard Devos was instrumental in founding and financially supporting the Council for National Policy (CNP), an ultra-right  John Birch Society spin-off that sought to “remove all humanists from public office and replace them with pro-moral political leaders” (Dallek, 2022). DeVos served as CNP's President from 1986-88 and 1990-93.

For the Devos clan, “pro-moral” translates to mean Christian nationalist.  As the school voucher movement failed to justify its existence on sound policy or empirical grounds, libertarian and fascist oligarchs like the Kochs and the Mercers turned to white Christian nationalists like the Devoses to sell their educationally-bankrupt and racist school voucher privatization scheme. After all, the Devos empire was built on a foundation of zealous propaganda, and these were exactly the skills needed to sell a voucher scheme that had been demonstrated inferior to public schools in terms of educational value. 

And so Betsy Devos was the “chosen one” for the Lout’s first-term Education Secretary, not because of any educational knowledge she had but, rather, for her already well-established and zealous connections to a right-wing infrastructure built to destroy public education, specifically because of public education's non-sectarian, humane, and democratic foundations.  Betsy’s leadership and support of voucher marketing organizations like American Federation for Children and Alliance for School Choice placed her front and center as the mouthpiece, albeit an ignorant one, for the latest fascist scheme to destroy public schools.

But the fascist oligarchs needed something else to sell increasingly unpopular school voucher schemes besides a theocratic billionaire zealot intent upon establishing her version of a white heaven on Earth. They needed willing politicians, either guided by greed, ignorance, and/or religious zealotry. 

Enter Tennessee Governor Bill Lee.  

Dem VP Choice Should Support Public Schools

Pennsylvania's governor, Josh Shapiro, is one of the favorites for Harris's VP pick.  From where I sit, Shapiro's position on school privatization should eliminate him from the running.  

From Chalkbeat, May 2024:

Shapiro said during the [budget] address that he still supports some form of voucher funding for students in underperforming school districts to spend towards “extra tutoring, books and computers, or yes, going to another school.”

Shapiro added, “the Senate passed a proposal last year that included important elements of that, and it’s something I support and consider to be unfinished business.”

 

School Voucher Programs and White Nationalism

A great piece in Mother Jones about public education dollars being drained away to indoctrinate children in white nationalist "religious" schools.

Earlier this month, former President Donald Trump held his first campaign rally as a convicted felon at Dream City Church in Phoenix, Arizona, hosted by the arch-conservative student group Turning Point USA. This wasn’t Trump’s first appearance at Dream City Church; he also held a rally there with Turning Point USA in 2020. For events like this, it’s an ideal venue: A weekly attendance of around 21,000 believers makes this one of the largest churches not just in Arizona but in the nation.

Dream City, which didn’t respond to my questions for this story, is a mecca for special guests who blur the line between religion and politics. Its annual conference has featured notables like musician and pastor Sean Feucht, who participated in a White House prayer session for President Trump in 2019 and is currently leading a tour of prayer rallies at state capitol buildings across the country. The lineup for this year’s event also included David Barton, whose organization, WallBuilders, teaches K-12 students about the supposed Christian origins of America; Jurgen Mathesius, a pastor at San Diego’s far-right Awaken Church, which has become a stop on Mike Flynn’s ReAwaken America tour; and Jentezen Franklin, a televangelist who also spoke at the 2022 Pray Vote Stand Summit, which mobilizes conservative Christian voters to engage in political activism.

In addition to its thrumming weekly worship sessions and its blockbuster events, the church has another project: Dream City Christian Academy. The K-12 private school, which serves nearly 800 students, is part of Turning Point USA’s Turning Point Academy program, a network of 41 schools that describes itself as “an educational movement that exists to glorify God and preserve the founding principles of the United States through influencing and inspiring the formation of the next generation.” Dream City Christian Academy promises to “Protect our campus from the infiltration of unethical agendas by rejecting all ‘woke’ and untruthful ideologies being pushed on students.”

This politically charged approach to education likely isn’t for everyone—and because it’s a private school, it doesn’t have to be. Except for one thing: Dream City Christian Academy is one of a growing number of religious schools that are supported by public funds. . . .

Read on.

Bill Lee Loses School Voucher Battle, Again

Two days after a stunning repudiation of the Governor by production workers who voted 3-1 for unionization at the VW plant in Chattanooga, Bill Lee has surrendered once again to the reality that parents, school boards, teachers, and students do not want taxpayer money going to fund private schools, de-fund public schools, breach the separation of church and state, and rebuild the apartheid system of education in Tennessee.

It seems that Lee's failure this year could be due to his plan to keep the voucher scheme details secret, even from the Republican legislature, until the last minute, thus avoiding scrutiny from the public.  With the Senate and the House in the dark about Lee's Christian Nationalist scheme, each chamber moved forward with its own version of school coupons, thus making it impossible for all parties to come together at the last minute to shove through the Koch Bro scheme:

While Lee announced his vision for the program in November, he delayed releasing specific details on the plan until well into 2024. By that time, House and Senate Republicans had devised vastly different versions of the plan, and each chamber appeared entrenched in their positions.

So its back to the heifer barn for Bill Lee, where he will stand by for new voucher plans to be devised by his brain trust at Backwards U.

TN School Voucher Bill Will Cost Taxpayers Billions, Part 2

As with most school privatization plans, Tennessee legislators can count on a stable of bare-knuckled billionaires and millionaires to provide the cash to drive the current school voucher scheme that appears destined to become law--unless citizens who support public education raise enough hell to stop it.

The legislation (HB1183/SB0503) will provide, during the 2024-25 school year, just over $7,000 in state funding for 20,000 of Tennessee's just over one million K-12 students (including private school students). In Year 2 (2025-26), any or all of the parents of Tennessee's one million+ students may sign up.

Of the 20,000, half will be made available to students whose families’ income are below 300% of the federal poverty level, students with disabilities, and those who meet eligibility requirements for the existing ESA pilot program. The remaining 10,000 will be made available to any student currently entitled to attend a public school. 

Beginning in the 2025-26 school year, eligibility for the program would be opened to all Tennessee students, regardless of income or previous school enrollment. If demand exceeds available funding, previously enrolled program participants, low-income students, and students enrolled in public schools would be prioritized.

Based on conservative estimates of the Tennessee General Assembly Fiscal Review Committee, the costs will be staggering:

The total amount of scholarships awarded will result in an increase in state expenditures
estimated to be:

o $141,500,000 (20,000 x $7,075) in FY24-25;
o $343,147,000 (47,000 x $7,301) in FY25-26; and
o Exceeding $343,147,000 in FY26-27 and subsequent years.

If the voucher scheme led to 10 percent of Tennessee students in private schools by 2027 and moving forward, that would mean an additional $700,000,000+ every year for a state that is ranked 44th among states for K-12 funding.

How Will Local Education Agencies (LEAs) Be Affected?

Because the Republican voucher scheme does not include a hold-harmless provision, local school systems will be required to absorb the loss of state funding for their students who move to private schools. The information below is from the Tennessee General Assembly Fiscal Review Committee's Fiscal Memorandum, dated February 26, 2024:

The proposed legislation does not contain a hold-harmless provision for LEAs that
experience a decrease in local revenue due to students leaving the LEA to attend private
schools . . . .

Based on school voucher data from other states, the scholarships available to students
who are not subject to household income restrictions will be awarded to 60 percent of
students from private schools and to 40 percent of students from public schools . . . .

The total local decrease in revenue and decrease in state expenditures is estimated as
follows:

$101,525,200 ($89,905,200 + $11,620,000) in FY25-26; and

Exceeding $140,710,480 ($124,598,880+ $16,111,600) in FY26-27 and
subsequent years.

A loss in TISA funding would not necessarily be offset by avoiding the cost of educating
the student. Any offset or decrease in local expenditures would depend upon whether
certain cost-savings could be realized through staff reductions or service and resource
reductions.

However, it is assumed that LEAs will maintain spending levels despite a decrease in
student enrollment (pp. 3-5). 

In short, school systems who lose 10-15 percent of their students still must maintain physical plants, transportation systems, maintenance programs, and instructional programs for 85-90 percent of remaining students.  For a largely rural state, these costs could be devastating to budgets that are already bare bones.

 Do Vouchers Offer Improved Test Scores?

This new voucher scheme will be layered on top of the previous one that was implemented during the 2022-23 school year.  The data from Spring 2023 state tests demonstrate that the current push for school privatization is not driven by a desire for academic improvement:

In 2023, only 11.3% of program participants scored proficient on the math section of TCAP, compared to 33.7% of public school students. Similarly in English language arts, 22.8% of ESA recipients scored proficient, while 38% of public school students hit the benchmark.

 

TN School Voucher Bill Will Cost Taxpayers Billions

When it comes to state funding for public schools, Tennessee consistently ranks among states around 44th. In 2023, Tennessee earned an F in funding level, an F in funding effort, and a C in funding distribution.  

When it comes to state support for school vouchers, however, Tennessee is pushing to be among national leaders.  And if the current school voucher legislation passes that is now being crammed through the legislative process, Tennessee funding for public schools will take another huge hit.  

How big a hit?  Conservatively, the Republican voucher program, which they call Education Freedom Scholarships (EFS), will result in annual state expenditure increases of over $340,000,000.  So every three years Tennessee taxpayers will pay over a billion dollars for 2-5% of Tennessee's K-12 students to attend private schools, either secular or sectarian.

The information below is from a memo dated February 26, 2024 by the Tennessee General Assembly Fiscal Review Committee.

• Due to the universal nature of the program, it is assumed that students already attending
private school will seek the additional funding through the EFS Program.
• Based on school voucher program data from other states and the large pool of private
school students that would be eligible for the EFS, it is estimated that 47,000
scholarships will be awarded in the 2025-26 school year.
• The EFS Program is projected to grow in subsequent years following the 2025-26 school
year. However, due to the lack of multi-year data from other school voucher programs
across the country and different factors amongst those programs, a precise growth
estimate cannot reasonably be determined.
• The total amount of scholarships awarded will result in an increase in state expenditures
estimated to be:

o $141,500,000 (20,000 x $7,075) in FY24-25;
o $343,147,000 (47,000 x $7,301) in FY25-26; and
o Exceeding $343,147,000 in FY26-27 and subsequent years.

• The estimated annual growth in the program is conservative due to a limited amount of
data from other states with similar programs and the inability to establish participation
trends in those programs.
• Without a limitation on the number of participants beyond year one of the program, the
fiscal liability to the state created by the proposed legislation is significant.
• Should all 105,503 private school students receive a scholarship in FY25-26 (year two
of the program), the fiscal impact for FY25-26 would be an additional increase in state
expenditures of $572,506,018 [(105,503 x $7,406) - (47,000 x .60 x $7,406)] (p. 3).

Part 2: TN Voucher "Plan" Features Big Government with No Fiscal or Program Accountability

As promised in Part 1 yesterday, Gov. Bill Lee announced his latest planned school voucher scam in Nashville.  Alongside him was fellow unholy-rolling governor, Sarah H. Sanders of Arkansas infamy. 

Today I would like to present some research findings that clearly show the negative effects of school voucher programs on student achievement and student well-being. We know that Bill Lee and his Tennessee Taliban legislative supermajority don't, or can't, read research, but I am hoping that someone will translate the findings into something they might understand: Them voucher thangs ain't workin'.

Some clips are below from Brookings, which includes links to the research studies, themselves:

Part of the push for ESA vouchers comes from the lingering frustration over the pandemic-era school closures and concern over learning loss as measured by standardized tests. But on that question, the last decade of research on traditional vouchers strongly suggests they actually lower academic achievement. In Louisiana, for example, two separate research teams found negative academic impacts as high as -0.4 standard deviations—extremely large by education policy standards—with declines that persisted 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.

 Another link, with Executive Summary below:

Executive Summary
Vouchers to pay for students to attend private schools continue to command public attention. The current administration has proposed vouchers in its budget, and more than half of states are operating or have proposed voucher programs. Four recent rigorous studies—in the District of Columbia, Louisiana, Indiana, and Ohio—used different research designs and reached the same result: on average, students that use vouchers to attend private schools do less well on tests than similar students that do not attend private schools. The Louisiana and Indiana studies offer some hints that negative effects may diminish over time. Whether effects ever will become positive is unclear. Test scores are not the only education outcome and some observers have downplayed them, citing older evidence that voucher programs increase high school graduation and college-going. We lack evidence that the current generation of voucher programs will yield these longer-term outcomes. We also lack evidence of how public schools and private schools differ in their instructional and teaching strategies that would explain negative effects on test scores. Both questions should be high on the research agenda.

From Time Magazine, with a clip below:

And it’s not just the academic results that call into question any rhetoric around opportunities created by vouchers. Private schools can decline to admit children for any reason. One example of that is tied to the latest culture wars around LGBTQ youth, and strengthened in current voucher legislation. In Florida, a voucher-funded school made national news last summer when it banned LGBTQ children. In Indiana, pre-pandemic estimates showed that more than $16 million in taxpayer funding had already gone to voucher schools with explicit anti-LGBTQ admissions rules.

Voucher schools also rarely enroll children with special academic needs. Special education children tend to need more resources than vouchers provide, which can be a problem in public schools too. But public schools are at least obliged under federal law to enroll and assist special needs children—something private schools can and do avoid.

When we look at all the challenges to accessing education with these programs it’s clear that actually winning admission to a particular private school is not about parental school choice. It’s the school’s choice.

 

TN Voucher "Plan" Features Big Government with No Fiscal or Program Accountability

Each of ruby red states in the new Old Confederacy has its own niche attraction for Westerners and Northerners looking to move to a fascist-friendly community where narrowness of thought is highly valued if it happens to run in the same rut as the white male protestant power structure.  While all of the red states offer haven for white nationalists, anti-intellectuals, and conspiracy theorists, Florida is particularly attractive to those angry anti-vaxxers and anti-wokesters, while states like Tennessee and Arkansas draw thousands of Christian nationalist transplants each year who would be happy to jettison Constitutional guarantees against the establishment of a state religion. And as long anti-social media remains unhindered from expanding financial empires based the perpetuation of ignorance, divisiveness, and toxic myth, then the state of the Union will continue to suffer, even as disunion grows like cancer.

As Tennessee's governor, Bill Lee, seeks to further promote immigration of white Christians, a top governmental priority is the provision of state funds for parents to enroll their children in religious schools or other private schools at public expense. And so today, Lee will announce a proposed new program that will offer 20,000 parents next year a school voucher worth about $7,000 for tuition, books, uniforms, etc. In 2025-26, Lee plans to include all of 1 million students in Tennessee who are now eligible for free public schools, "regardless of income or previous school enrollment."

Now when we do a little back of the envelope math, you can see that the cost during the first year is going to run the State $140,000,000 on top of the normal allocation for public schools, including transportation, lunches, construction, maintenance, libraries, salaries, etc. 

Let's assume, after Year One, that 10 percent of the State's school-age parents decide to choose vouchers over public schools, where their kids now have athletic teams, theater, music, special ed, technical education--most of which will go bye-bye when their children enroll in the old Pizza Hut at the strip mall that has been turned into the Bill Lee Christian Nationalist Elementary School of Lee (Robert E.) County.

It's easy to see that the cost would be over the moon--$700,000,000 every year for 10 percent of TN's school children. That would be almost 15 percent of TN's contribution to the annual K-12 budget. All the while, the State must continue to fund the public schools that are not going away just because they lose 10 percent of the student body.  And it will lose most of the federal funding for the 100,000 students who end up in private schools.

What new taxes will be imposed on Tennesseans to pay for this fantasy thought disorder? 

And what about curriculum and standards?  

What about teacher qualifications?

Is Bill Lee prepared to put a resource officer in each of the Christian madrassas that he plans to open, just like in the public schools? 

Does Bill Lee have a plan to make sure children gain the necessary academic, social, and life skills to succeed at work and/or to go to college? 

Where's the accountability? Where is Bill Lee's and the Republican Supermajority's accountability?

It is way past time for the teacher unions, parents, grandparents, and other concerned citizens to fight, fight, fight the further erosion of another of our cherished institutions: public schools.  Let me know if you are engaged in an organized effort or would like to get involved: 

james.horn@cambridgecollege.edu

 

 

The DeSantis Final Solution for Public Schools

 While the Yalie would-be dictator, Ron DeSantis, has declared that he is Governor of the state where “woke goes to die,” more and more Americans increasingly view Florida as the state where businesses don’t go to relocate and where families don’t go to vacation or live anymore.

Does DeSatan care? Nah, he plans to be President when the bills for his authoritarian, racist, and homophobic policies come due for Florida taxpayers.

The latest budget crushing initiative is a case in point. DeSantis has pushed through school voucher legislation that will hand out an $8,500 voucher to any family in the state, whether poor or mega-wealthy status. And it doesn't matter if the private school reaping the benefit of Florida taxpayer generosity have accreditation, physical adequacy, qualified teachers, libraries, transportation systems, or playgrounds. As for the Constitutional issue of publicly-funded church schools, don't be silly.

Will this plan spell the end of public education in Florida? If not, school boards and parents across the state are likely to face a previously-unimaginable level of churn and chaos in whatever remains of public schools.

And how will private schools respond? Many will see this as an opportunity to rake in millions of extra dollars by raising tuition, as this news story has found already in Tampa.

As for that old-fashioned question regarding the educational value of school vouchers, the research hasn’t changed. It may be a good time review some of that research, even if, for now at least, it is less relevant in making policy than it has ever been in history.  

“Apples to outcomes?” Revisiting the achievement v. attainment differences in school voucher studies

The summer of 2022 has seen a flurry of legal and policy efforts to expand publicly funded private school choice programs. These include: the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Carson v. Makin, which ruled that voucher programs cannot exclude religious schools; Arizona’s creation of a near-universal voucher program; and various state-level actions, such as a ballot initiative led by Betsy DeVos to create a tax credit-based voucher program in my home state of Michigan.

Joshua Cowen

Professor of Education Policy - College of Education, Michigan State University

joshcowenMSU

I, and many others, have studied voucher programs for a number of years now. After more than two decades of research on vouchers, a general pattern has emerged in the results.

The effects of voucher programs on student attainment (how long students persist in school/college) appear at least somewhat positive while the effects on student achievement (what students know as measured by standardized tests) appear very negative. Voucher advocates also point to positive impacts on survey measures such as school satisfaction or safety as well, but studies employing these outcomes vary in quality and method and are not generally included as a major evaluation focus.

It’s also important to understand the timing of this research. The early voucher studies—roughly 1998 to 2005—focused on programs that were generally city-based and relatively small (e.g., in Milwaukee) and found some positive effects on student achievement. This is in stark contrast to more recent studies that have shown clearly negative effects on student test scores in places where vouchers have expanded into large programs, such as Louisiana, Indiana, Ohio, and Washington, DC. Some of these negative effects have been extremely disconcerting.

The effects from Louisiana, for example, approach 0.5 standard deviations in math—more than double some estimates of even the COVID-19 pandemic’s effects on learning loss. These initially harmful test score effects often seem to persist over time, too.

On the other hand, a few of these studies have shown improvements on outcomes such as high school graduation or enrollment in college (e.g., in Milwaukee and Washington, DC).

This leaves us with a bit of a puzzle. How can we reconcile findings that voucher programs lead students to perform worse academically with research suggesting they might also lead students to persist longer in school?

As a researcher on vouchers since 2005, I’ll offer a few possible explanations.

First, I believe the positive effects on attainment are often overstated. Apart from the genuinely large effects of the small program in Washington, DC, the positive effects on attainment in the literature are very modest in size (especially compared to the shockingly significant negative effects on test scores). This includes our initial findings from Milwaukee. Notably, too, our slightly positive findings on college enrollment in Milwaukee are partly a story of students from Catholic high schools entering Catholic colleges, which raises questions of whether these gains might come more from networking than increased educational productivity. In fact, the studies that track students for the longest periods of time—from New York City and Milwaukee—find that any attainment effects fade away as students work their way through college. There’s little evidence of voucher impacts on rates of college persistence or graduation.

Second, for the most part, the seemingly inconsistent effects on attainment and achievement come from different students, schools, and/or places. That is to say this literature generally does not come from a single group of students who experienced both negative effects on their test scores and a boost to their persistence in school. In some cases, this is because the attainment and achievement studies come from altogether different cities or states. In other cases, it’s because they come from different students attending different schools within the same site. For example, in Milwaukee, we studied achievement effects primarily in grades 3-8 and attainment with a separate cohort of 9th graders (with limited follow-up for students in earlier grades). This leaves us to speculate whether the positive attainment results are driven by some private high schools that are succeeding in ways that their private primary school counterparts are not.

Third, it’s worth noting that private schools—especially if not subject to rigorous state guidelines or oversight (as most are not)—might be able to improve graduate rates by simply lowering their standards and making it easier to graduate (in ways not available to public schools). Some writers have argued that public secondary schools prefer graduation as an accountability measure because those rates are easier to manipulate than test scores. If that is true, the same logic applies at least equally, and probably more so, to private schools that are marketing themselves to would-be consumers. This story would also help explain why voucher students are generally no more likely to persist in college.

This potential tradeoff between attainment and achievement, if it even exists, isn’t just an academic argument. Parents have to make decisions about which schools their children attend—maybe more than ever if private school choice programs continue to expand. And we have some data on what parents actually value. We know from voucher application data in Washington, DC and New Orleans (that is, based on the characteristics of the schools they actually choose, not what they say in a survey) that academic quality is the dominant determinant of private school choice. Other factors like distance from home to school, safety, religious education, or after school programs matter too, but private school parents still appear to overwhelmingly prioritize the academic success of their child.

All of this leads me to suggest that it’s time to reframe the question that has been guiding the debate on voucher effects. That question has been, “Which outcome matters more, achievement or attainment?,” with some voucher advocates arguing forcefully against paying much attention to test scores. Instead, maybe we should be asking, “What would it take to offset the dismal learning loss induced by vouchers?”

Joshua Cowen is a Professor of Education Policy in the College of Education at Michigan State University. He also currently serves as a research advisor to the new federally mandated evaluation of the DC Opportunity Scholarship (voucher) Program.