The editorial board of Indiana’s Journal Gazette argued against universal school vouchers.
It’s not that we’re prognosticators, but more than 20 years ago, this board predicted that if Indiana adopted a voucher program, it would eventually become universal.
After years of pretending the voucher program was primarily about giving poor students a boost, followed by repeated expansions of income eligibility, the Indiana General Assembly finally adopted a universal system last spring. And last week, as the school year began for most students, Gov. Mike Braun touted the resulting cascade of state cash as a Hoosier virtue.
“We told you so” is irrelevant. Our concern remains the state’s systematic dismantling of public education and, more pointedly, the way poor and disenfranchised families and students have been used to sell the farce.
As the Indiana Capital Chronicle reported Friday, Braun visited Cardinal Ritter Catholic High School in Indianapolis to celebrate the start of universal vouchers. The setting was fitting: Cardinal Ritter is one of 427 private and parochial schools accepting the publicly funded scholarships.
“I embrace competition,” Braun said. “I love choice.”
We love competition, too. Except this isn’t really a competition.
Indiana taxpayers spent $497.2 million on private-school vouchers during the 2024-25 school year, money committed to private education while public schools from South Side to Homestead to Adams Central compete for teachers, programs and resources.
Regardless of geography, public school corporations are governed by elected boards, hold open meetings and are required to serve children whose educational needs can be expensive and complex. Private schools participating in the voucher program must meet state testing and accountability requirements, but they retain considerably more latitude over admissions, operations and governance, even as they receive increasing amounts of public money.
A narrowly tailored program giving poor students access to alternatives might be defensible, though decades of research leave plenty of room to debate whether vouchers deliver the academic benefits their proponents promise.
But giving public money to affluent families to finance a private-school education they were already willing and able to purchase is something else entirely. In almost any other context, we’d expect the governor to call it socialism.