“It started with West Virginia in 2021 and Arizona in 2022, and then continued with a flood this year — Iowa, Utah, Arkansas, Florida, Oklahoma, Ohio, and Indiana. More may follow.”
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“The reform sweeping red America is slightly different from a voucher — it’s called an education savings account, or an ESA. In a voucher system, public funds go directly to schools. With ESAs, parents who opt out of the public school system get several thousand dollars in an account that they can use for private school tuition, homeschooling, or other education-related expenses.”
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“Critics of these changes argue they amount to a wealth transfer to families with kids in private schools, and they fear it will result in the weakening or even the eventual privatization of public school systems. They also voice concern over the separation of church and state, since many ESA funds will go toward sending children to religious education.
For many supporters, those are features, not bugs. They characterize the new ESA laws as letting parents take “their money” — the dollars that would have been used to educate their kids — out of public schools they have no interest in using. They call this “funding students instead of systems.” Their critics say it’s the destruction of the common good.”
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““In the short term, mostly it’s just going to be a funding giveaway to families that were already sending their kids to private schools,” said Douglas Harris, an economist at Tulane University who studies education policy. “In the long run, there’s potentially a much bigger story here.””
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“What is the money producing? Again, the answer is unclear. The Goldwater Institute bragged in 2022 that Arizona’s ESA bill “does not have any testing requirements.” (Iowa legislators, in contrast, did include some.)
Critics fear state money will go to low-quality private schools that don’t actually educate children well — and that, without transparent testing requirements, we’ll never find that out for sure. “These policies being passed now are almost being evidence-proofed,” said Polikoff. “You won’t be able to say, ‘This isn’t working, we need to do something different,’ because there won’t be the data. The data will just be, ‘Look at all these people who’ve enrolled their kids.’””
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“Arizona’s superintendent Tom Horne has said he would push to close some public schools if enrollment dropped, which is just what rural school voucher skeptics long feared.”
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“Private schools have wide latitude to discriminate in admissions (though it’s illegal to do so based on race) — can it truly be called “universal school choice” if children can’t get into the school they want?”