Here's what to say about vouchers

They are a subsidy for private and religious schools that don't produce results and aren't supported by the public.

When we speak about vouchers, we should start with their origin story. In 1954, the Supreme Court finally condemned segregation in public schools in the Brown v. Board of Education case recognizing that separate school systems for black and white children were inherently unequal. The Court delivered a powerful message that education is “a principal instrument in awakening the child to cultural values, in preparing him for later professional training, and in helping him to adjust normally to his environment.”

Vouchers began in the deeply segregated South

The order to desegregate schools sparked fierce opposition. No place was fiercer than Prince Edward County in rural Virginia, southwest of Richmond, where public schools were closed for five years rather than have white children attend school with black children. Instead, all-white private academies were formed and parents were reimbursed their children’s tuitions to these academies by the state of Virginia. The tuition reimbursements were the first practical application of school vouchers which are tax-funded subsidies for families who mostly have already chosen to avoid public schools.

University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman argued that public education would benefit by being subjected to free market forces. Friedman, an advisor to President Reagan and Prime Minister Thatcher, didn’t appear to care that his free market theory was used to promote segregation by race. The free market choice favored by Friedman, however, isn’t really wielded by parents. The tax-funded voucher schools wield the power of choice. Like the 1950s white academies that excluded children based on race, current tax-funded voucher schools exclude children through opaque admissions processes based on religion, gender or sexual orientation, perceived academic ability, or disability (we just don’t have the needed facilities to provide Johnny with a good education).

Racism should be roundly condemned. (This is not a statement I’d thought I’d ever have to write but even today some Republicans openly challenge desegregation.) So should the other forms of discrimination practiced by tax-funded voucher schools. Parents have a choice where to send their children to school but I should have a choice in deciding how my tax dollars are spent.

Vouchers Don’t Improve School Performance

But what about Friedman’s free market school choice as a way to improve k-12 education overall? Are educational outcomes better in states that lean heavily into tax-funded vouchers for private school attendance and that broadly support charter schools, the first cousins of private school vouchers?

The answer is there is no improvement in outcomes in tax-funded voucher schools and lots of indications that kids do worse. The story with charter schools is only slightly better. The related question is whether to trust the research. Asking who funded the research is a good place to start the effort to discern if you as a parent, public school advocate or legislator can trust what information is put in front of you.

Outside of the segregation academies, Milwaukee was one of the first cities to rely deeply on charters and tax-funded voucher schools. Wisconsin legislators created the first tax-funded voucher program in 1990. (The Virginia academies were funded by the edict of the state’s board of education.) Three decades later, only 55 percent of students attend traditional public schools in Milwaukee. The principal source of funding to create the charters and tax-funded voucher schools in Milwaukee came from the Bradley Foundation, which currently has assets approaching one billion dollars.

Bradley has been very active in “school reform.” It is also well known for its anti-democratic work to undermine voting rights. Jane Mayer, the author of Dark Money, wrote that Bradley worked to persuade mainstream Republicans to support radical challenges to election laws. Attorney Cleta Mitchell, who joined Donald Trump on his phone call to pressure Georgia officials to find 11,780 votes was on the Bradley Foundation board of directors.

Not only did Bradley fund the formation of alternatives to public schools in Milwaukee, but the foundation also funded much of the initial research into the functioning of schools in Milwaukee which concluded that everything was “peachy-keen.” Later, more independent and fulsome research concluded that Milwaukee schools failed to show improvement with the influx of charters and tax-funded voucher schools. I’d highly recommend Josh Cowen’s book, The Privateers, for more on the topic of foundation-funded studies of foundation-funded school reform programs.

A 2017 study by the Stanford Graduate School of Education found that “The evidence is very weak that vouchers produce significant gains in learning. . . They also carry hidden costs, and they’re distracting us from other solutions that could yield much higher returns.” The professor who ran the study, which examined tax-funded voucher schools in Milwaukee, New York City, the District of Columbia, Indiana, and Louisiana, found that the modest gains found in some prior studies were likely the result of more public accountability than of the use of vouchers.

The Undisclosed Burdens of Vouchers

Two topics related to vouchers often not mentioned are the double burdens of paying fees and tuition costs not covered by tax-funded vouchers and the difficulty some families experience when navigating the choices in a voucher-charter-public school trilogy. A 2025 study finds that economically stronger and educationally more advantaged families better navigate what can be a very complex system of applications and admission to tax-funded voucher schools while maintaining the ability to move to catchment areas serviced by higher achieving public schools as a fall back.

The Voucher Two-Step Scam

Tax-funded voucher adoption strategies are of a piece. The strategy starts with a claim that public schools are failing and that lower income families should be saved from failing public schools by giving them the choice to attend private or religious schools with tax-funded voucher subsidies. (Consider this choice of justifications in the context of the white segregation academies. The ironies abound.) No one in this strategy recognizes that schools that are under-resourced often cannot achieve desired results. Rather than provide additional resources, the alternatives of charter and tax-funded vouchers are proposed. The costs of vouchers are often grossly under-estimated. Initially, the incomes of applicant families are capped at a low level in line with three or four times the poverty level. The cap is then raised over time until it is waived and all families, regardless of income, are made eligible for tax-funded vouchers. The cost of the tax-funded vouchers then blow through whatever projections the tax-funded voucher proponents had put forth.

The other phenomenon that happens (perhaps as a result of Friedman’s free market forces) is that private school markets flood with new pop-up providers or existing providers raise their tuition rates to take advantage of the new state tax-funded subsidies. As Josh Cowen explains, in some states, the new not-for-profit private schools fail and close but the private for-profit organizations that manage the private schools or charters strip the assets and put them to use in new ventures. Vulture capitalists use techniques perfected in other industries to drive down costs while quality suffers and when private schools fail, the state never gets its tax-funded voucher money back. Brookings also writes on this topic.

This all also happens through intermediaries who wash state tax money before it is paid to private schools through processes that make the accounting difficult to follow. It’s even worse when the parents home-school children and receive partial vouchers. In NH, Education Commissioner Frank Edelblut claims voucher monies can’t be audited.

Arizona, Indiana, Ohio, Florida, and Wisconsin are all states that introduced tax-funded private school vouchers with low income caps and that have gone on to waive all income limits and make tax-funded vouchers universally available regardless of a family’s income. A bill making its way through the NH legislature during this 2025 session seeks to follow the same course making tax-funded vouchers available to all families regardless of income beginning in 2026.

The Scam in NH

NH’s tax-funded vouchers are called Education Freedom Accounts. Introduced for the 2021-22 school year, Education Commissioner Frank Edelblut testified about anticipated use before the legislature. He swore the first year cost would be about $130,000 and $3.3 million in the second year. In fact, costs grew from $8.1 million in the first year to $14.7 million in the second year. Enrollment went from 1,635 students to 4,211 students in 2023. Utilization of vouchers skyrocketed in part from a coordinated effort of Christian schools and the Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity (and likely aided by Edelblut). Because the amount of the tax-funded vouchers is tied to the adequacy grants received by school districts to pay for the state’s share of the cost of a constitutionally adequate education, every increase in adequacy results in an increase in voucher payments.

This term, Governor Kelly Ayotte asked (really begged) the House to limit voucher applicants to families who then had children attending public schools when the vouchers were sought. She did this in an effort to protect her budget because she knew (and we know) about 75 percent of the families who take the tax-funded vouchers don’t have their children attend public schools. The House, and now the Senate, have responded by rejecting her modest request and putting the voucher bill in the budget. In 2026, there will be no income caps on tax-funded vouchers. You and I will pay for children from families of all income levels to attend the tawniest or most religious of schools in the state. Reaching Higher NH pegs the cost of these universally available tax-funded vouchers at $102 million a year.

The public doesn’t support vouchers and rejects voucher expansion that diverts public monies to support private and religious schools. Polling bears this out. The issue for Independents and Democrats to run on in 2026 will be to link property tax relief to the two-sided coin of fair funding for public schools and stopping the diversion of public funds to tax-funded vouchers. We’ll see who gets and understands this critically important messaging.