In the New York Times, David Wallace -Well finds three unfortunate truths in the Trump budget, and one of them has to do with the fascination with vouchers–and how Americans really feel about it.
You may think that school vouchers reflect the basic ideological drift of the country, but for more than half a century, every single time they are put to a democratic test, the public roundly rejects them. In 2024, such initiatives were defeated in three states — Colorado, Kentucky and Nebraska — two of which also went for Trump by huge margins. This pattern is not a new one. Since 1967 — 1967! — no single state referendum in favor of school vouchers has passed anywhere in the country. And yet, in the past few decades, 33 states and the District of Columbia have all enacted voucher programs, and just in the five years since 2019 the number of American students using vouchers has doubled.
This is not just a bad procedural look but a genuine democratic stain, made all the worse because the record of voucher programs is so abysmally bad, as Michigan State’s Josh Cowen documented last year in his cleareyed book “The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers.”
How bad? In Louisiana and Ohio, voucher programs were shown to have been worse for student performance, measured by testing, than the Covid-19 pandemic, which shuttered American schools for many months and produced such widespread outrage that those closings now represent for many Americans the largest social scar produced by the pandemic. Taking advantage of a voucher program in Louisiana, the research suggests, was much worse for your child than that. In Ohio, the effect on test scores was almost twice as bad.
This is not the kind of record that anyone should want to expand, and older programs have produced only somewhat less terrible results. So what explains the zombie persistence of the voucher movement? Almost surely, these programs could be designed better, but it is close to impossible to take in the recent track record and continue to believe that voucher initiatives are good-faith efforts by well-meaning reformers. Much more intuitive is to see them as an ideological effort to divert students out of the public school systems as part of an effort to undermine those systems and what they represent — almost no matter the educational consequences.
Exactly. Read the full op-ed here.