Jan Resseger talks about how the culture wars have become part of the push for school vouchers. Reposted wiith permission.
While every morning, 90 percent of U.S. children—our children, our grandchildren, and our neighbors’ children—go off to a public school which we expect will welcome them all, our legislators and Congress have been diverting more and more of our tax dollar to vouchers for unregulated private schools, which can exclude the children they don’t want as well as ignoring civil rights laws. Most of us don’t very often remember to appreciate the strength of universal public education, invented over the past two centuries in the United States to serve our democracy by bringing together all the children in every community to learn together in an institution that protects their rights and serves serve their particular needs. Of course, it has taken Brown v. Board of Education, the Civil Rights Movement and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act to put us on a path to make our public schools more inclusive, but our society has persisted.
Right now MAGA politicians at the federal level and far right legislatures across the states are voraciously promoting the alternative: retrenchment on civil rights protections for school children and the political promotion of private school vouchers paid for with tax dollars.
Who is responsible for the enormous voucher movement? In his book, The Privateers, Josh Cowen provides at least a partial list of ideological, so-called, think tanks. They and their affiliated billionaires are underwriting the campaign for school privatization, and they are now framing their campaign with a bigoted attack on civil rights and inclusion of all students: Alliance Defending Freedom, American Federation for Children, American Legislative Exchange Council, The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, The Council for National Policy, EdChoice, The Heritage Foundation, the Institute for Justice, and Moms for Liberty. (The Privateers, pp. vii-viii) That list leaves out state-by-state organizations like Ohio’s Buckeye Institute and Ohio’s Center for Christian Virtue. The State Policy Network coordinates a number these state-by-state agencies. When Cowen’s book was published in 2024, Linda McMahon was chairing the board of the America First Policy Institute; today Cowen would have to add that organization to his list, because that agency’s agenda is central to the Trump administration’s policies.
School privatization at public expense is a growing trend. For Education Week, Matthew Stone and Caitlynn Peetz Stephens estimate that 19 states now “have programs on the books that make virtually all their students eligible for state funding to use on private school tuition or home-school expenses.” And last summer a new, federal tuition tax credit program was created as part of the “One Big Beautiful Bill.” The Washington Post‘s Laura Meckler reports that governors continue to make decisions about whether their states will participate in the federal program: “Twenty-eight governors have said they will opt in, including all but one Republican (who remains undecided)… Two Democratic governors have said their states will participate, and four have said they won’t, but most have ducked the question, as pressure rises from all sides.”
Meckler explains how the program works: “These tax credits, including the new federal version, incentivize taxpayers to donate money to scholarship granting organizations, or SGOs, which then give money to students. Starting in 2027, donations up to $1,700 to SGOs will qualify for a dollar-for-dollar tax credit. That means that as long as donors owe at least $1,700 in federal taxes, they will see their tax bill reduced by the amount of their donation. In essence, taxpayers are directing money they owe in taxes to these SGOs rather than to the government. The Joint Committee on Taxation estimated that the program will cost the federal government $25.9 billion over 10 years.”
I hope you will take the time to read Kayla Patrick and Loredana Valtierra’s excellent report for the Century Foundation, A Backdoor School Voucher Scheme That Sidesteps Civil Rights and Undermines Public Oversight, which demonstrates the damage already inflicted on our children and their public schools by school privatization schemes across the states as well as the further damage the federal tuition tax credit scheme will likely impose. They begin: “(I)n practice, vouchers operate quite differently than advertised. It’s the private schools not families, who ultimately decide who enrolls, and they do so outside the accountability systems that govern public education and public dollars and ensure every student has equal opportunity to learn.”
Here are three of Patrick and Valtierra’s key observations about what the new federal tuition tax credit vouchers will mean.
In the first place, the federal tax credit scheme is constructed to help wealthy families: “(T)he tax credit is not targeted to families facing affordability pressures. It allows households earning up to 300 percent of area median income to qualify, a threshold that would make roughly 90 percent of U.S. households eligible.” Qualification to receive the benefit of the tax credit is tied to each region’s median income. “In high-income regions, families earning as much as $500,000 per year could receive publicly subsidized support for private education… (T)his program directs public dollars toward a limited use—private education subsidies for households that largely do not need the financial help….”
Second, the federal tax credit program, like almost all state-operated school voucher schemes lacks government oversight: “There are no academic performance standards, no transparency obligations, and no requirement to evaluate outcomes… Once a state opts in, its role is largely administrative and unfunded. States receive no resources to carry out oversight, cannot impose safeguards, and must submit eligible organizations to the U.S Treasury without authority to shape the program design or accountability.” The program was created to be administrated by the Department of the Treasury: “As a result, a major national education policy will be implemented through the tax code, with limited attention to accountability, equity, or educational impact.”
Third, the One Big Beautiful Bill does not include civil rights protection for participating students: “Public schools that receive federal funding are required to comply with federal civil rights laws, including Title VI and Title IX of the Civil Rights Act, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act… These laws require schools to take corrective action to prevent and respond to discrimination, provide accommodations and services to students, investigate complaints, and offer families meaningful avenues for recourse… By contrast, the One Big Beautiful Bill does not require scholarship-granting organizations or the private schools and programs they fund to comply with these federal civil rights protections.”
In today’s MAGA era, there is also something new about the way vouchers are being promoted. In The Privateers, Josh Cowen explains: “Trump’s election… recentered… the notion of ‘parents’ rights’ around its original conception of the right to avoid integrating students from different family backgrounds in one public school community… (H)is presidency refueled culture wars around issues of race and gender.” (The Privateers, p. 100) “This then, is the education freedom agenda in its entirety: increasing overt conflict on issues of race, gender, and sexuality with the express intent of devaluing public schools as a civic institution and reorienting the notion of education from a public good to a private enterprise.” (The Privateers, p. 131)
While vouchers were once promoted as a marketplace innovation, the Trump administration and groups like Moms for Liberty and the Heritage Foundation now frame the issue based on appealing to parents’ cultural biases. The new frame promotes private school vouchers as the way states and the federal government can help parents protect their children from “the dangerous other.” Parents are told they can move their children to private schools to insulate them from exposure to “woke” public schools and “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” The President, the Heritage Foundation, the America First Policy Institute and their allies never mention what has historically been understood as the primary role of public schooling: bringing children from across our society together to learn from each other and prepare for democratic citizenship.
Although MAGA has been radically reframing the promotion of vouchers from the point of view of the bigotry implicit in today’s culture wars, the danger of privatizing schools at public expense has not changed at all. Here are two traditional critiques of vouchers. The first analyzes the damage of vouchers academically according to the evidence without any reference to MAGA’s culture war framing. The second critiques vouchers as they were originally sold by appealing to marketplace framing. The two critiques use more old-fashioned frames to reach precisely the same conclusions explained of the new report from the Century Foundation.
In 2023, the editors of a Teachers College Press analysis of school privatization, The School Voucher Illusion: Exposing the Pretense of Equty, concluded: “As currently structured, voucher policies in the United States are unlikely to help the students they claim to support. Instead, these policies have often served as a facade for the far less popular reality of funding relatively advantaged (and largely White) families, many of whom already attended—or would attend—private schools without subsidies. Although vouchers are presented as helping parents choose schools, often the arrangements permit the private schools to do the choosing… Advocacy that began with a focus on equity must not become a justification for increasing inequity. Today’s voucher policies have, by design, created growing financial commitments of taxpayer money to serve a constituency of the relatively advantaged that is redefining their subsidies as rights—often in jurisdictions where neighborhood public schools do not have the resources they need.” (The School Voucher Illusion: Exposing the Pretense of Equity, p. 290)
And back in 2007, political philosopher, Benjamin Barber critiqued the same injustices, but from the point of view of a different frame: the danger of elevating the values of marketplace individualism over the common good:
“Privatization is a kind of reverse social contract: it dissolves the bonds that tie us together into free communities and democratic republics. It puts us back in the state of nature where we possess a natural right to get whatever we can on our own, but at the same time lose any real ability to secure that to which we have a right. Private choices rest on individual power… personal skills… and personal luck. Public choices rest on civic rights and common responsibilities, and presume equal rights for all. Public liberty is what the power of common endeavor establishes, and hence presupposes that we have constituted ourselves as public citizens by opting into the social contract. With privatization, we are seduced back into the state of nature by the lure of private liberty and particular interest; but what we experience in the end is an environment in which the strong dominate the weak… the very dilemma which the original social contract was intended to address.” (Consumed, pp. 143-144)