The prominence of school vouchers continues to surge across the country — but they might not benefit the families who need them the most.
Over the past few years, states like Ohio and Arkansas have expanded their school voucher programs to allow most or all parents to receive funding to send their kids to private schools. More than 20 states now have some kind of voucher program with more in consideration. Arizona was the first state to create a universal voucher program in 2022 — and experts have said it’s the state to watch when analyzing the impact of vouchers for all.
The modern school voucher movement started to grow in the 1990s under the idea that the government would give parents a certain amount of money to put toward private school tuition. The programs were means-tested, meaning recipients had to meet a certain poverty limit to receive assistance, with the idea that kids with fewer resources would be able to earn a better education at private schools.
However, gradually, more states began to raise the poverty limit, making nearly any parent eligible to receive the funding — and in some states, it led to the cash going to the wealthiest families. Arizona is “a cautionary tale” regarding the expansion of vouchers, Josh Cowen, professor of education policy at Michigan State University, told Business Insider.
Oddly, the one thing that never passes in Texas is school vouchers. The blue areas and the truly rural republicans make common cause. The sparsely populated and absolutely vast rural expanses mean that the surprisingly large rural population both feels very comfortable with their control over their local schools, and views them as the glue of their communities. That’s where you actually come into town and see people. That’s where you go vote. That’s probably the only decent-paying (and I say that fully aware how shit teacher pay is) career if you want to get your college-educated kids to come back, or barring that, someone else’s. Beyond those specific jobs, it’s likely one of few non-agriculture or mineral-extraction options for steady employment and that money goes into the local community. Generations of local leaders will have gone to the same schools, played under the “Friday Night Lights” and generally associate the school with their community in a very intimate way. They are desperate to keep those schools healthy and subsidized. You’d think that might make them re-evaluate whether their fellow republicans are looking after their best interests more broadly, but nope, it is Texas after all.
Vouchers just suck money out of the system, and no school that you could set up with just voucher money will be any better than the public schools, so the only people who will make extensive use of them will be religious nutjobs who don’t need “good” education, the absolutely exceptional outliers who will increase the prestige of any local private school, and the well-to-do who will just treat it as a tuition discount and effectively a tax break at the expense of their fellow citizens. You’ll end up with public schools with less money to serve a remaining population with more intense needs, and the whole thing will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I guarantee you the only people who game this out thoughtfully but still support vouchers are the extremely religious and people who directly stand to profit from a collapsing public education system. The rest are just short-sighted idiots. Everyone benefits from everyone’s children having access to decent schools, and I hate hate hate assholes with “I don’t have kids in those schools, why do I have to pay taxes hurr durr” attitudes.
Which is why they are experimenting with destroying the Houston ISD. Forcing parents to choose between sending their children to prison factories or supporting vouchers to try and get something like an education.
I think the key point is that people in Texas feel as though they have control over their schools. People want to leave when the schools don’t reflect their values and they are powerless to change it.