Marble Falls       A headline in the news said that the great state of Texas was moving to allocate $1-billion to a voucher program there.  One red state after another has tried to skim dollars away from public education support to support private education, largely through church-based schools or pick-up places, based on a lot of claims, most of which are unproven, and attacks on public school education.

Is this voucher push really about education and choice, or is this just a major piece of the conservative culture war?  Reading a review by the esteemed education expert and advocate, Diane Ravitch of a new book on this mess, answers the question pretty definitively, and the answer is no on learning and choice and yes on cultural and billionaire manipulation.

I was struck by the private manipulation and the lack of public support for vouchers.  As Ravitch writes in the New York Review of Books,

…most voters today do not favor vouchers.  In fact, since 1967 no state referendum on vouchers has ever passed.  In 2024 three states had referenda on the ballot, and vouchers were again defeated.  Voters in two of those three states, Kentucky and Nebraska, cast ballots overwhelmingly for Trump – and in both states public funding for private schools was decisively rejected.

The people are speaking, but the politicians and their billionaire enablers are not listening and are uninterested.

            Of course, that’s not all, because race and running from integration is the terrible legacy of this drive to push for private education.  The Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education started a rush by largely Southern governors to find an exit ramp from integrated public education for white segregationists.  Milton Friedman, the prominent conservative University of Chicago libertarian economist, helped their cause by enabling rationalizations around choice to mask white supremacy in favor of privatized education.  Now, “…since the 1990s [vouchers] have been enacted in various forms in thirty-three states and the District of Columbia.”

Despite the racist roots, do voucher private and religious schools deliver better education?  Researchers who have evaluated these programs find the opposite.

…a study of Milwaukee’s vouchers from 2005 to 2010..concluded that ‘there was very little difference on test scores’ between students in public schools and carefully matched students in voucher schools.  Furthermore, when low-income and Black students left voucher schools and returned to public schools, their academic performance in reading and math improved.  At the same time that the Milwaukee study ended, a new report showed ‘shockingly bad early test score results for students in the years following Hurricane Katrina.’  Those poor results persisted and were replicated by studies in Ohio and Indiana.

Louisiana, Ohio, Washington, and Indiana are very different states, but the “bigger and more recent the voucher program, the worse the results have been.”

So, given the terrible roots and poor results of these voucher initiatives, why do we continue to find politicians defunding public schools to support them?  One factor maybe that there are usually no income bars for receiving a voucher making this a middle-class benefit to offset the cost of private suburban schools, while masking behind a claim to offer alternatives to lower-income families.  As powerful as they argue that case, it is the billionaires from the Koch and Devos clans and others who see this as key ingredient in their elite and racially tainted efforts to move people to the right with public education as acceptable collateral damage.

The simple solution is to stop this diversion of resources and increase funding for public schools sufficiently to put them on par with private offerings that include “certified teachers, small classes, a well-supplied library, and a curriculum that includes arts and sciences as well as physical education and a time for play.”  If politicians were willing to listen to the public and stop discriminating against public schools and their populations, then this other, more equitable world, would be possible.