Steve Nuzum: “Universal” School Vouchers Cost States Billions
Steve Nuzum explains the sleight-of-hands used to promote vouchers as demonstrated in South Carolina and elsewhere. This is a great explainer for folks who have not been following the school voucher movement.
At the end of the session, South Carolina joined states like Arizona and Florida in expanding its existing school voucher program (which passed just last year) to make it “universal” within a few years. This might end up costing the state as much as $1.4 billion a year, despite poor-to-mixed results from school voucher programs in other states, and widespread concerns about transparency, accountability, and a lack of regulations that would protect students from discrimination.
What are vouchers, and are they popular?
In 2024, you will rarely see a piece of legislation or a “school choice” advocate using the word “voucher” to describe methods of subsidizing or refunding the cost of private educational services, although that’s what they are generally promoting.
This is smart marketing, because popular support for the programs depends largely on how they are framed. As FiveThirtyEight points out, when surveys lean into the “choice” element of vouchers, they are much more popular than when participants learn that voucher programs defund their public schools. Despite the best efforts of “school choice” promoters— many of whom are deeply motivated to undermine public services, as the presence of so many of these groups on the Project 2025 advisory board attests— defunding schools is broadly unpopular among Americans, and more than half believe one reason schools could be “headed in the wrong direction” is that they aren’t adequately funded and resourced.
For example, in Texas, where polling generally shows a majority support for “school choice,” “a RABA Research poll asked 512 adults on March 17 to 18 if they supported ‘diverting tax revenue away from neighborhood public schools to use for private school vouchers’ — 66 percent opposed while 34 percent supported.” So even in states where the idea of “school choice” is broadly popular, programs which defund schools are still broadly unpopular. (People support “choice” in theory, but don’t support paying for them the way these programs generally do. It’s possible that many of these people actually want public school choice, the practice of many school districts of allowing students to apply to attend schools outside of their residential zone to enable them to participate in magnet programs or other school-specific opportunities.)
So, instead of “vouchers,” which the public has come to associate with ineffective programs (as the most recent research has confirmed), the inflation of state budgets (more on that below) and the defunding of traditional public schools (a promise baked into many contemporary examples of voucher legislation), proponents have shifted hard into neo-voucher terms like “Education Savings Accounts” (ESAs) or “Education Tax Credits”.
Nonetheless, these programs are essentially the same as past “voucher” schemes: government subsidies spending public dollars to incentivize a small number of families to leave the public school system and a large number of families to keep paying for the same private educational services they always did, but now with public funds.
State officials are pushing vouchers, whether they’re popular or not.
Arizona, Florida, and at least eight other states have already adopted “universal school choice,” a phrase that generally means that either now or at some point in the near future, any family in the state with a school-age child will be eligible to receive state funds to pay for some kind of non-public educational service.
Other states are following suit. For example, South Carolina legislators this session passed a bill creating “universal” vouchers by 2028. During the previous session, legislators had pushed through a “pilot” year that significantly capped who was eligible for the vouchers, but in the session which just ended, they expanded to “universal” vouchers without bothering to complete the pilot.
As in other states, polling on “school choice” is complicated. In a poll commissioned by the right-leaning South Carolina Policy Council (a Heritage-associated group and a member of the ALEC-affiliated State Policy Network), 32% of participants “strongly approved” of “school choice”— in a sense.
But what respondents actually got was this question: “South Carolina is considering a new education scholarship program that would pay for some low-income K through 12 students to attend private schools of their choice, or help cover the cost of tutoring, textbooks, computers and more. The cost per student would be equal to or less than what the state is currently spending to educate these children. Do you approve or disapprove of this new school choice plan?”