School vouchers suck money out of public schools, hurt low-income kids, expert says

School vouchers have long figured into Republicans’ plans for education. Rather than fund public K-12 education, many on the right prefer to have local and state governments fund vouchers — essentially checks to pay tuition at private schools — to pay for their children’s education.

School vouchers figure heavily in Project 2025, the 922-page blueprint of right-wing policies that could be enacted if former President Donald Trump is elected president in November, which includes plans to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education and to make it harder for most people to afford college.

The document, officially called “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise,” is presented as a plan for a Republican administration in 2025. The document was put together by the right-wing Heritage Foundation think tank and 100 other right-wing groups, and at least 140 of its contributors worked in the Trump administration.

The first page of the document’s chapter on the Department of Education calls for universal school vouchers. The document argues that parents should ultimately be entitled to vouchers funded by local and state governments — but not the federal government — to pay for their childrens’ education.

Josh Cowen, a professor of education policy at Michigan State University, says vouchers don’t work. “What you’re seeing is essentially a tuition forgiveness plan for K-12 private school kids,” he said, pointing out that they’re supported by Republicans who oppose student loan forgiveness for higher education.

A July report from the Kentucky Center for Economic Policy, which comes as that state’s voters will be voting in November on an amendment that would allow the state to spend public education money on private schools, estimated that in other states with existing voucher programs, “65%-90% of voucher costs go to subsidize families already sending their children to private schools or planning to do so.”

Parents who take advantage of school vouchers to move their children from public to private schools actually see worse outcomes for their kids, Cowen said. Many of these children end up in what Cowen called “subprime” private schools.

“They’re just not very good. Most of the private schools are already full, the good ones, they’re full, and 70% of voucher users are already in private school to begin with,” Cowen said. “These are mostly for parents who are already in private school to begin with, and for the few kids who do switch from public to private, they suffer extraordinary academic loss.”

School voucher programs tend to result in new start-up institutions going after the stream of state funding. In Milwaukee, Wisconsin, home of the nation’s oldest voucher program, as many as 41% of start-up voucher schools failed between 1991 and 2015, a 2016 research paper published by two scholars of public administration showed.

Deven Carlson, a professor and education policy researcher at the University of Oklahoma, said school vouchers have gone far beyond where their proponents would have ever expected.

“I don’t think, if you asked someone in the early ’90s when this was first happening, when the idea of vouchers was first being tossed around, I don’t think anyone would have ever said we have aspirations for statewide no-income-limit school vouchers,” Carlson said.

Carlson said vouchers have evolved from “an idea to give low-income students in primarily urban areas access to schooling options in districts where they weren’t being well-served” into “almost a full-scale alternative to the public education system.” And, he said, the cost of voucher programs is often higher than projected.

Arizona is one state that has seen its voucher costs balloon. 

The state’s universal school vouchers program was implemented in 2022. Since then, it’s shot far past its $65 million cost estimate to $429 million this year, according to ProPublica.

A lot of those costs are for things that aren’t necessary for education, Cowen argued.

“Voucher advocates would call them homeschool expenses,” he said. “But we’re seeing things like dollars being spent on kayaks, on grills, on big-screen TVs, on SeaWorld tickets.”

And a key point regarding school vouchers is that students typically must be completely disenrolled from public school for their parents to receive the money, Cowen said.

The requirement encourages parents to pull their kids out of school to receive voucher money, starving public schools — which typically receive state funding based on student head counts — in the process.

Such loss of funding is something Janneken Smucker, a parent in Philadelphia, is all too familiar with. Vouchers, she said, take even more money from the historically underfunded public schools that need the funds the most.

“I would much rather see that money go into improving the schools rather than sending kids out of a public school district into a private school,” she said.

It’s an issue that’s especially pertinent in Pennsylvania, she said, where the Commonwealth Court ruled in 2023 that the state wasn’t upholding its constitutional obligation to adequately fund schools.

“Look, we all need to make our individual educational choices for our children. But if you’re choosing to go to private school, then use the resources that are available. You might be able to find grants and scholarships,” Smucker said she would tell individual parents. “If private school is the priority for you, then there are ways to pay for it. But it should not come at the expense of public school children.”