WASHINGTON—Top congressional Democrats who deal with education legislation challenge the effectiveness of statewide taxpayer-paid school vouchers for all parents of private school kids. And the vouchers foster discrimination, too, they contend.
Sens. Bernie Sanders, Ind-Vt., Christopher Murphy, D-Conn., Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., and Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Va., say vouchers don’t improve educational outcomes for the kids whose parents use them to pay private school tuition. Vouchers also promote school segregation, strain state budgets, don’t hold schools—or parents of home-schoolers—accountable, and shut out rural students and schools, they add.
The four lawmakers want the non-partisan Government Accountability Office to discover whether they’re right or not, through an in-depth investigation of state-wide school voucher programs in at least three states.
Vouchers and homeschooling have been the main social issues that the far right and congressional Republicans have promoted for years. So have their corporate backers, including for-profit private school corporations.
Voucher backers say parents can use vouchers to have complete control—either by themselves or at a private school that caters to their interests—over their children. As explained by the Center for American Progress, private school vouchers have an origin tied to racism. One could argue this particularly appeals to white conservatives, who know private schools can admit or turn away whichever kids they like.
As a result, private schools funded by vouchers are overwhelmingly white, the lawmakers told GAO.
The right also views vouchers as a way to divert money from public schools, which educate 90% of the nation’s 50 million K-12 students, that they need. That, in turn, harms public school teachers, who are overwhelmingly unionized. Few private school teachers are unionized.
“Attempts to direct public funding to private school voucher schemes undermine the core purpose of public education to ensure that all students—regardless of their background—have an equitable opportunity to learn,” the lawmakers wrote to GAO head Gene Dodaro, the Comptroller General.
“Instead of expanding access to high-quality learning opportunities, school vouchers redirect public funding to unaccountable private schools that can decide which children to enroll,” the four say.
The lawmakers are blunt about the GOP donors behind the pro-voucher movement, singling out “unelected right-wing billionaires,” such as former Trump Education Secretary Elizabeth “Betsy” DeVos—an heir to the Amway fortune—and the Koch brothers.
They’ve “pushed exclusionary, unaccountable, opaque, and budget-busting school voucher schemes. This is despite the fact that, since 1967, every ballot initiative to create or expand school vouchers has failed when put to the voters,” the lawmakers noted.
That included voters last November in trending blue Colorado, but also deep-red Kentucky and
Nebraska. During last year’s campaign, AFT/Teachers President Randi Weingarten, while on her cross-country bus tour promoting the AFT-endorsed Democratic presidential ticket, took time out to campaign in Kentucky against that state’s pro-voucher initiative.
So did Gov. Andy Beshear, the only statewide Democratic elected official. He made the point that vouchers would really hurt rural schools in the Bluegrass State. Those schools were already scraping along and skimping on spending, he said. Vouchers lost in Kentucky 35%-65%.
“School vouchers have a sordid origin in our country as a tool to resist school integration and today, have the potential to exacerbate already high levels of racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic school segregation,” the lawmakers warn. After the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v Board of Education ruling outlawing legal segregation aka “separate but equal…some white parents formed private schools to avoid integration,” they explained.
“These efforts to avoid integration were often supported by policies that allowed public funding to be used for vouchers to attend all-white private schools. Today, the role of school vouchers in de facto segregation is deeply concerning, as research shows our nation’s public schools are currently highly segregated along racial, ethnic, and economic lines.
“Arizona and Florida have some of the largest universal voucher programs in the country, and in 2023, North Carolina expanded its voucher program to allow all families, regardless of income, to use public funding to send their children to private schools. These vouchers come at a hefty cost.”
In Arizona alone, state-paid vouchers to parents of private school kids cost $708.5 million in the 2023-24 school year, 11 times the original estimate. And 91% of the kids whose Arizonan parents received those vouchers had previously enrolled their children in private schools.
In other words, the lawmakers said, Arizona shows the entire state, including poor parents, is subsidizing already well-off parents who could afford to send their kids to private schools.
The lawmakers want GAO to pick three states with statewide voucher and/or tax credit programs, and report on their costs, the demographics of the kids in the voucher programs, compared to overall school demographics and what state and federal education standards the states require voucher-funded schools —or parents home-schooling their kids—to meet.
Another question they’d like answered is, “To what extent do universal voucher programs impact segregation and isolation related to students’ racial, ethnic, socioeconomic, and/or disability status in public schools?”
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