The surge in authorization of school voucher programs over the past 15 years across the United States has been striking, as NCSPE research associate Steven J. Koutsavlis and I documented in a recent report entitled “The Fiscal Consequences of Private School Vouchers,” published by Public Funds Public Schools in collaboration with the Southern Poverty Law Center and Education Law Center. Yet this surge appears to be a mild prologue to a tempest, as we’ll share in a webinar sponsored by PFPS on Thursday, April 20th, at 2:00 p.m. Those interested in attending the webinar may register at this link.
Among the salient findings of this report is an unmistakable pattern in several states of substantial growth in funding for school vouchers at the same time funding for public schooling declined. From fiscal 2008 through 2019, Arizona and Florida, for example, increased spending on school vouchers in inflation-adjusted dollars by 270 and 313 percent, respectively, while decreasing spending on public schools in inflation-adjusted dollars by 5.7 and 12 percent, respectively.
Koutsavlis and I moreover revealed in this report an unmistakable pattern of states gradually lifting eligibility for schools as well as students to participate in voucher programs. In Milwaukee, for example, vouchers were introduced in 1990 in a pilot allowing at most 1 percent of the students in the district to participate, with the stipulations that such students come from families whose income did not exceed 175 percent of the federal poverty threshold and that they be allowed to attend only non-sectarian private schools so not to violate the principle of church-state separation. In 1995, the program allowed up to 15 percent of the district’s students to participate and lifted the ceiling on family income to 220 percent of the federal poverty threshold. In 1998, the program permitted families to use vouchers for enrolling their children in religious schools. In 2011, the program nullified the cap on the number of students permitted to participate in the program and elevated the ceiling on family income to 300 percent of the federal poverty threshold. By 2018, nearly 28 percent of the district’s 104,000 students used vouchers to attend private schools. With another 23 percent of the district’s students attending charter schools, under half of the district’s students attend conventional public schools today.
While advocates of vouchers as well as charter schools contend that the money follows the students and accordingly does not affect per-pupil spending in public schools, such advocates ignore the difference between fixed and variable costs. The sizeable presence of fixed costs necessary to run a school district means significant cuts to variable costs when enrollment declines. Such variable costs come in the form of teachers, nurses, librarians, and social workers as well as microscopes, band instruments, art supplies, and computers. Helen Ladd and John Singleton documented precisely this problem in studying the impact of the growth in charter schools in North Carolina, as did Robert Bifulco and Randall Reback in addressing this issue in Albany and Buffalo while Gordan Lafer did the same in studying this phenomenon in Oakland, San Diego, and Santa Clara County.
The confluence of conditions behind this dramatic change in education policy is another matter Koutsavlis and I will address in this webinar. The Supreme Court has certainly played a major role, first in allowing families in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris in 2002 to use vouchers to send their children to religious schools (so long as the vouchers went to the parents before going to the schools and so long as parents could use such vouchers at non-sectarian private schools as well as religious schools) and then in mandating in Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue in 2020 that states with tuition tax-credit scholarship programs to fund enrollment in private schools could not exclude religious schools from participation.
Another major factor we will discuss is the outsize role played by think tanks and advocacy organizations. This development may be traced back to the legendary memorandum in defense of free enterprise authored by Lewis Powell a year before he joined the Supreme Court as an associate justice in 1972. Powell contended in that memorandum that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and likeminded organizations must join forces in a coordinated, well-financed effort to counter criticism of free-market principles. In 1973, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and the Heritage Foundation were founded as allies to this end. In 1977, the Cato Institute emerged as another ally. In 1996 came the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, which changed its name to EdChoice two decades later. These organizations have together beat the drum for vouchers. EdChoice alone spends nearly $7 million a year publishing reports promoting the fiscal as well as pedagogical virtues of vouchers.
What Koutsavlis and I documented goes only so far as 2019. West Virginia since authorized a universal voucher program in 2021, allowing all families regardless of income to participate. Arizona followed suit in 2022. Already in 2023, Iowa, Utah, Florida, and Arkansas have authorized similar universal voucher programs.
What’s at stake is far more than lost funding for public schools. While countries such as the Netherlands, Belgium, France, and Sweden are all home to significant voucher programs, all schools in these countries must comport with considerable regulations. Not so in the United States. Creationism may be taught in biology classes. Members of the LGBTQ+ community may be barred from enrollment and employment. Little if any accommodations may be mandated for students with special needs. With this steady growth in vouchers, the United States thus stands to forfeit the common ground long afforded by public schools.
Jessica Levin, litigation director of ELC and director of PFPS, will open the webinar, and Danielle Farrie, research director of ELC, will moderate it. Joining the webinar to discuss their related 2022 report, entitled “Florida’s Hidden Voucher Expansion,” will be Mary McKillip, senior researcher at ELC, and Norín Dollar, senior policy analyst and director of KIDS COUNT at Florida Policy Institute.
Samuel E. Abrams
Director, NCSPE
April 19, 2023