Privatizing Education through Vouchers
With attention focused mainly on the White House’s chaotic circus over the last few days, many other important issues have slipped to the back burner, including the ongoing push to privatize education.
The White House is pushing for privatization through a national school voucher system. ln January, the President issued an Executive Order promoting “educational choice for families and competition for residentially assigned, government-run public schools.” He justified this order by saying: “The growing body of rigorous research demonstrates that well-designed education-freedom programs improve student achievement and cause nearby public schools to improve their performance.” By “education-freedom,” he means the ability of parents to choose private schooling using public tax dollars. By “government run” rather than “government funded,” he minimizes the importance of the flow of dollars and ignores the authority of local school boards, local school principals, and teacher leaders.
Project 2025 calls for a federal voucher program. The Republican “One Big Beautiful Bill” Act passed by the House on May 22, 2025 supports such a program by using the federal tax code to offer vouchers that students would be able to use at private secular or religious schools, even in states where voters have opposed vouchers. (In November, 2024, voters soundly rejected voucher programs in Kentucky, Colorado, and Nebraska.)
As the federal government shifts its support away from public schools and toward private schools, what should we know about the potential impact of this shift? Is the White House correct in saying that research supports this policy?
In short, No.
There are different ways of constructing voucher programs but basically vouchers consist of tax-payer dollars being allocated to families to take their children out of public schools by either either homeschooling them or sending them to private schools. A voucher program is considered universal when virtually all students are eligible, regardless of need.
Like charter schools, many voucher programs began as small, localized efforts to give options to families. In some cases these efforts were directed at maintaining racial segregation. According to B. Kennedy, following school desegregation in the 1950s and 1960s, “politicians in many southern states introduced voucher proposals in an effort to evade school integration.” In other cases, vouchers aimed to challenge racial segregation by giving low-income Black and brown families options. For example, Howard Fuller in Milwaukee has championed vouchers to give families in low-income neighborhoods where the public schools are not performing well, particularly Black and brown families, a choice in where to send their kids to school.
It is possible to give families choices within public school systems; choice need not necessarily mean leaving the public schools. In many other countries such as Belgium and the Netherlands, and in some U.S. school districts, students can attend public schools that do not coincide with their residential address. In most parts of the U.S., however, students are assigned to non-charter public schools based on their residential address, so choice means either attending a charter school within the public system or a private school. (Charter schools also merit a discussion, but in a different blog post.)
Currently, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, about 87% of U.S. students attend public schools, while 13% attend private schools, a ratio that is gradually tipping toward private schooling as voucher programs expand. Between 2012 and 2021, the number of students using vouchers went from 212,000 to over 600,000. Between 2021 and 2025, the number of statewide universal voucher programs went from zero to thirteen.
Voucher programs rest on four assumptions that are not necessarily supported by the research. First, many people assume that vouchers enable low-income parents who otherwise would be unable to afford private tuition the option of sending their children to private schools. While many recipients do come from low-income families, Cohen and Di Marco found that in every state that had expanded its voucher program, many higher income families were also recipients of vouchers, in some cases outstripping the proportion of low-income recipients. For example, when Florida’s voucher program lifted income restrictions and opened up to all families in the state, “Nearly half of the state’s new ESA recipients came from families earning over 400 percent of the federal poverty level (about $125,000 for a family of four), while a third came from families eligible for free or reduced lunch.” Further, the majority of recipients of vouchers in states that had expanded their programs already attended private schools. In other words, the voucher program was using public funds to subsidize many families who could already afford to send their kids to private schools.
In addition, as voucher programs expand, so too does the proportion of white families served. Most states do not make available data on the racial and ethnic composition of voucher recipients, but Ohio and Indiana do. According to Cohen and Di Marco, in both states, as voucher programs expanded, the proportion of white participants grew and the proportion of Black and Latino participants shrank. So, while some advocates view vouchers as a tool to help Black and Latino families in low-income neighborhoods escape under-performing schools, a larger share of the beneficiaries appear to be white families, many of whom already send their children to private schools.
A second assumption is that private schools offer a higher quality education than public schools. In some cases, this is true, but the research data do not support this overall assumption. Canoblat (2025) compared instructional quality of public versus private schools, using surveys and achievement data from the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) that involved 9,632 eighth-grade students from 225 public schools and 589 students from 21 private schools. He found little difference in the nature and quality of classroom instruction, and no difference in academic achievement between public and private schools. Canoblat cites other studies that have found lower achievement for voucher students attending private schools than their peers in public schools, suggesting that public schools may serve low-income students better than private schools. For example, public schools require that their teachers be certified while private schools do not necessarily have this requirement; teachers in public schools are generally paid better; and many public schools offer tutoring at no cost while private schools are far less likely to do so.
A third assumption is that the number and capacity of private schools will expand as demand increases. But according to Cohen and Di Marco, it is too early to know whether this will happen or not, since starting a new school is a complex undertaking. Thus, applying to a private school, voucher in hand, does not guarantee admission. If, however, increased availability of vouchers leads to an expansion of private schools, what implications would that have for our schools as a whole? This question leads to the fourth assumption.
A fourth assumption, and a big one, is that voucher programs will not harm public schools since per-pupil spending will remain the same, with dollars simply following pupils to whatever school they attend. This, however, is not how it works. In her calculation of the cost of voucher programs to public school districts, Wething explained that a drop in public school enrollment leads to a drop in only a portion of the district’s expenses. School districts have fixed costs and variable costs. Fixed costs, which include things like buildings and building maintenance, principals, libraries and various instructional support services, do not shrink when a relatively small proportion of students leave. Instead, fixed costs take a bigger bite out of a school budget that is shrinking with loss of pupils, leaving less for per-pupil spending on variable costs such as teacher salaries and non-mandatory programs. Thus, class sizes rise, and programs are cut.
Wething gives the example of the Cleveland Metropolitan School District. She found that “voucher policies that reduce enrollment by 5% mean that the Cleveland Metropolitan School District must reduce services by $654 for each public school student.” Other analysis have reported similar findings that voucher programs drain funding from public schools. Abrams and Koutsavlis found that in the seven states that greatly expanded their voucher programs between 2008 and 2019, public school funding declined as funding for vouchers grew. “This results in greater and greater amounts of public funding diverted to private educational institutions and private corporations. At the same time, as noted, funding for public schools in these states has largely decreased” (p. 16).
So, if you are looking for a way to undermine rather than improve public schools, expanded voucher programs will do that.
International comparisons can help us think about the relationship between school policies and their impacts. In 2019, OECD released a report entitled Balancing School Choice and Equity: An International Perspective Based on PISA. (OECD, or the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, works with over 100 countries on issues related to public policy. It administers PISA, or the Programme for International Assessment, which measures 15-year-olds’ ability to use their reading, mathematics and science knowledge and skills to meet real-life challenges.) Drawing on data from PISA 2000, that report examines the relationship between school choice policies, student achievement, and equity issues.
The figure below, drawn from the report, shows the countries included, and changes over a fifteen-year period in the percentage of students enrolled in private schools. In the U.S., the proportion of students enrolled in private schools is considerably less than in many other countries. Also, in most (with the notable exception of the U.K.), there was not a great deal of change in enrollment patterns between 2000 and 2015.
In essence, the report’s data found that, “weakening the link between place of residence and school allocation is related to a higher level of school segregation by social status” (p. 11). In other words, the more parents can choose their children’s school, the more students end up segregated based on social class, which is due mainly to middle- and upper-class families moving their children out of public schools. The report continues:
“Some resilient disadvantaged students may have access to schools that would otherwise be inaccessible if a strict residence-based policy were applied. But that, in itself, does not offset the social-sorting effects that result when it is mostly middle- or upper-class families that take advantage of school-choice policies. At the aggregate level, this may have a negative impact on equity but also, in some cases, on the general performance of the school system if low achievers are more harmed when they attend schools that concentrate low-achieving students than high achievers benefit from being in schools that concentrate high-achieving students. Panel estimates in this report show that an increase in the isolation of high achievers from other students is associated with lower scores in PISA amongst socio-economically disadvantaged students, without any significant impact on advantaged students.” (p. 11-12)
In other words, the more choice is open to parents, the more low-income students end up clustered together in public schools as higher-income families put their children into private schools. This transfer does not necessarily benefit the students from higher-income families academically, at least according to their scores on the PISA. But it does harm the achievement of students from low-income families, with the exception of the small proportion of “resilient disadvantaged students” who attend and succeed in private schools.
Further, according to international data in the OECD report, private schools are usually more socially stratified than public schools. Although most schools have some degree of social stratification, “Diversity within schools ensures that students from different backgrounds may interact with each other. It is expected to have a positive impact on social cohesion” (p. 56). The less students have an opportunity to interact with peers of backgrounds different from their own, the less schooling contributes to overall social cohesion, and the more fragmented the society is likely to become.
Who is behind the push to expand voucher programs? According to Klam and Becker, billionaires have been the main instigators by funneling large amounts of cash into candidates who will support vouchers. The authors wrote:
“For example, American Encore, sponsored by the Koch brothers, has spent millions pushing pro-voucher state governors and ballot initiatives. The American Federation for Children, funded by the DeVos family, worked alongside other groups to remove at least 40 incumbents to pass voucher policies. After Tennessee failed to pass a voucher program due to Republican opposition, billionaire funders associated with “The School Freedom Fund,” spent at least $4.5 million on primary contests to elect voucher proponents.”
While their motives range from slashing public services, to expanding private Christian schools, to revamping schooling around technology, they share a common interest in using their billions to shape what they think schooling should look like. In this way, they are part of a long history of white philanthropists and businessmen who think they know what is best for everyone, including communities of color. As far back as the 1970s, according to Kumashiro, wealthy conservatives, who viewed education as a drain on resources, a crutch, and a socialist enterprise, “called for the entire school system to be privatized, made into a free enterprise, and the conservatives’ strategy of choice was school vouchers.” The agenda of privatizing education is getting a real boost from current White House policies.
But we get a different picture if we compare states that have engaged actively in market-based education reforms including vouchers, with those that have done so only minimally. Writing in their book Global Education Reform, Adamson and Darling-Hammond noted that, “Interestingly, the highest achieving states in the United States—Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, and Vermont—are among those that have had the least engagement with market-based reforms” (p. 159). They concluded that, “Massachusetts and these other states demonstrate how investments in public education spent wisely and in concert with a systemic approach to reform can make a stronger difference in educational outcomes” (p. 160).
Public education is often viewed as the foundation of our democracy. Strengthening that foundation means supporting public schools—supporting policies that fund them, focusing on practices that improve them, and rejecting policies such as publicly-funded universal vouchers that undermine them.