Has public education reached a tipping point?

Vouchers and Underfunding--Two Sides of the Same Coin.

Has public education in America reached a tipping point?

This was the question posed by Alice O’Brien, general counsel for the National Education Association, when she received the Demetrio Rodriguez Award at the national school funding conference last week.  The conference is sponsored by the Education Law Center. The award is named for the lead plaintiff in the San Antonio Independent Schools v. Rodriguez case in which a bare majority of the Supreme Court overturned a finding that the Texas school funding system was unconstitutional by concluding that education is not a fundamental right under the US Constitution.  Thankful that the Supreme Court did not have the final word, lawyers and advocates from across the country met to discuss litigation brought under state constitutions, most of which do consider the right to a public education as fundamental.

In both voucher schemes and inequitable school funding systems, the wealthy commandeer limited state resources often to the detriment of minority, urban and rural students. Alice pointed out that vouchers and unfair school funding schemes are opposite sides of the same coin.

Voucher schemes allow politicians to divert vast sums of public money to private schools by using parents as middlemen. NH zealots, as in other states, started introducing vouchers on a limited basis making them available to families of very modest means. NH Education Commissioner Frank Edelblut is a committed advocate for vouchers, called “Education Freedom Accounts” or EFAs. The name plays well with Edelblut’s libertarian base. Over time, the plan is to expand the income eligibility until all families qualify for their thirty pieces of silver.  

Five states have universal vouchers that do not have income limitations: Arizona, Florida, Iowa, Ohio, and Utah. Eighteen other states actively considered adoption universal vouchers in 2023.  Indiana made its voucher scheme near universal in 2024 and also did away with a requirement that the students using vouchers previously attended a public school. Families earning up to $222,000 for a family of four are eligible for full vouchers. By spring of 2024, the near universal Indiana voucher program was slated to cost $439 million.

Ohio also expanded its state voucher program in 2024 to allow for universal eligibility, but on a sliding scale in the amount of the voucher.  Families with incomes up to $135,000 are eligible for full vouchers of $6165 elementary students and $8407 for high school students. Families at the highest income levels can receive 10 percent of these amounts.  There is a separate voucher program for children who attend school in Cleveland.

Polling about the popularity of vouchers shows . . . you need to be careful about polling. How you ask the question determines the answer, perhaps showing that universal vouchers are more about politics than pedagogy. Polling analysis organization, 538--now sans Nate Silver and owned by Disney--provides examples of the malleability of polling about universal vouchers.

Ed Choice, in a February 2023 poll, framed universal vouchers as favoring parental choice and found that vouchers were approved 65 to 21 percent. Ed Choice is a pro-voucher advocacy organization.

According to 538, “A month later, a survey from Reuters/Ipsos found support for vouchers underwater by 15 points (36 percent support and 51 percent oppose).” The Reuters/Ipsos poll focused on the transfer of limited funds from public schools to private schools.  “This language emphasize[d] reduced funding to public schools, which is broadly unpopular, without mentioning potential benefits for parents and students.”

Universal vouchers don’t so much encourage families to leave public schools, they reward it.  That’s the point—to undermine public education. The majority of families using universal vouchers either had already left public schools or they never attended public schools in the first place.  Vouchers also made it harder to raise funds for public education because they divert limited resources.

There are legitimate reasons for families to choose private schools. A family may prefer religious education to secular. A private school may offer a broader curriculum or a broader array of services such as pre-k or after school care. Whether the fault of the school district or the result of intentional underfunding, a school district to which students are assigned may be failing.  Families may also leave public schools because education commissioners and state board members are so overtly political that they undermine the ability of public schools to do their job.

While these may be legitimate reasons to choose private schools, they do not justify diverting scarce public monies to benefit the lucky few.

Vouchers with income limits afford families some modicum of choice not otherwise available to them. But, even with lower income limits, voucher programs cater to families whose children are not in public schools. In NH, with income limits originally set at 300 percent of the poverty level, and then raised to 350 percent, three-quarters of the families that used vouchers were not previously in public schools when the program began in 2021.

Universal school vouchers without income limits are most commonly used by wealthy families that have already left public education or never used public schools. Vouchers aren’t about choice. They’re about compensation, as was the case of the original vouchers that compensated families who closed public schools and fled to tuition-funded private academies in an effort to fight desegregation.

According to the Arkansas Department of Education, 95% of the participants in that state’s universal voucher program had never attended public schools before receiving a voucher. When Florida made its voucher program universal, only 13 percent of the new students previously attended public schools. Forty four percent of the new students are from families who earn twice the state’s median income. The same correlation between family wealth and utilization of vouchers holds true in Arizona, the granddaddy of all voucher states. More than half of Arizona’s voucher students live in zip codes with the state’s highest wealth. In Indiana, more vouchers students came from families earning over $100,000 per year than families earning less than $50,000 per year.

Vouchers are also available to families who choose to home school their children and there is often little oversight or accountability for voucher spending. Amazon and private Christian schools were the recipients of the bulk of voucher money in NH.

Why are vouchers such a threat to public education in NH?

First, NH grossly underestimates the cost of adequacy and claims it lacks the funds to meet its constitutional responsibilities. State adequacy aid and state voucher costs can’t both go up substantially in a state with anemic revenue sources. In other words, NH can’t afford to divert limited public resources to private schools.

Second, private schools funded by vouchers and public schools do not have the same responsibility to educate children. Private schools can be selective in who they admit and generally do not provide special education services that cost NH’s public schools $850 million each year. We are truly creating two separate school systems through the use of vouchers which is probably not a good idea in as divided a nation as ours.

Third, if this plays out as I suspect some voucher advocates would prefer, public schools will only exist in places that private schools consider too isolated to service and will only teach children that private schools reject, including children with special needs. Private schools, in this scenario, will teach what they choose and religion will be top of the agenda. There will be none of the guard rails for private schools provided by the public school funding cases that rely on the education provisions found in the state’s constitution. Once the public system is irretrievably diminished beyond recognition, state leaders will then begin to step down voucher funding, too. Without constitutional protections, there will be no limit to how low the state can go.

School funding fights where the state doesn’t even try to defend their calculation of the cost of adequacy paired with efforts to greatly expand voucher programs that divert public monies to private purposes are indeed two sides of the same coin and we must directly face both challenges.