The voucher mirage: fake popularity, fake results
Vouchers have long been a mainstay topic in educational policy discussions, and this year is no exception.
Likely as not, next year will not be an exception, either. Moreover, this is not a partisan issue. St. Paul’s DFLendorsed city council members placed a ballot measure before voters this fall that provided public funding for private sector childcare and preschool. In Kentucky, the largely Republican legislature put to voters the question of whether the state constitution should be amended to provide financial support for students opting out of public schools.
In both jurisdictions, these ballot measures went down in a resounding, unambiguous defeat. On the other hand, legislators in Texas appear to be poised to adopt legislation that will permit the diversion of educational funding to private school voucher programs. This follows an ugly intra-party primary process in Texas in which a number Republican legislators who had previously voted against voucher programs were unseated by challengers further to their right. What we are seeing is that support for vouchers is high amongst doctrinaire opponents of public education. They are not particularly popular with the public. There are many reasons for this.
For one thing, vouchers are typically expensive, and they invariably siphon funds from free public schools. In July, ProPublica found that Arizona’s voucher program had “precipitated a budget meltdown.” This was in part because Arizona grossly underestimated the cost of the program at its inception, and in part because there is no limit on how wealthy a family can be in order to use vouchers. Worse yet, because most families receiving vouchers were already enrolling students in private school, the voucher amounts were a new net expenditure.
In addition, vouchers pay for schools that are largely unregulated. In Minnesota, private schools don’t have to offer students the protections of the Pupil Fair Dismissal Act. Private schools are also not required to follow statutory requirements common to schools regarding staff, curriculum or minimum hours of instruction. More importantly, private schools may also seek exemptions from the Minnesota Human Rights Act, which could enable them to discriminate against students and families.
Predictably, the risk of this strategy has been borne out in other jurisdictions. In Louisiana, education researchers found in two separate studies that voucher programs reduced student achievement in the areas of both language arts and math. Researchers attributed this to poor quality private schools. In Indiana, researchers found losses in math, and no improvement in language arts.
These programs are often sold by legislators to their constituents as improving parent “choice.” When voucher programs do receive more public support in polling, it is because the language of polling options framed the program as offering greater freedom to parents.
However, this is misleading. In rural communities where there are no private schools, vouchers do not provide additional choice for parents; and because vouchers rarely cover the full cost of private school tuition or the additional costs of attending a private school, they also offer little choice to low-income parents. This is one of the reasons that Arizona’s voucher program has been found to disproportionately benefit wealthy and upper middle-class families.
Given all of this, it is by no means surprising that, when given the opportunity to vote on a voucher proposal, even Tennessee voters rejected the policy by a nearly 2-1 margin. Most taxpayers do not want policies that weaken their public schools. In a Reuters/Ipsos poll from 2023, only 36% of respondents indicated their support for diverting public funds to religious schools.
If pollsters asked families whether they want to divert public school funding to unregulated schools that will worsen students’ educational outcomes, that number would very likely be even lower.
Privatization of education is neither advisable nor necessary. The most well-meaning advocates are responding to a circumstance in which public infrastructure is either not yet universally available (preschool options) or chronically underfunded. When our elected leaders build consensus to create universal opportunities for students to learn together in public schools, every stakeholder wins.
Less well-meaning advocates are simply looking for new and creative ways to try to wind down public schools. This is how states end up with a voucher program that craters a state budget merely to finance a choice wealthy parents were already making—as we saw happen in Arizona. However, subsidizing the fracture of one of the United States’ most democratizing institutions, the public schools, is in no one’s interest.
Doing so in a way that offers no quality control for instruction or inclusive practices is particularly pernicious for students and their families. Given this, Minnesotans should continue to urge elected officials to reject vouchers, regardless of the age of the student, and instead to fully fund public schools that can be effective and welcoming to all students.
