In 2022, the Heritage Foundation released an agenda for the next Republican president, Project 2025. One of the key policies addressing the dwindling resources allocated to public schools within Project 2025 is to enact national universal school vouchers. Under Project 2025, federal funds allocated to public school systems would be diverted to fund a national school vouchers program. School vouchers would allow for parents to use government funds to subsidize the educational costs associated with public school alternatives.
The initiative has sparked significant controversy amongst parents, school boards, and legal experts across the country. Critics argue that allowing taxpayer dollars to be spent on funding religious schools would violate the Constitution’s First Amendment, which establishes separation between church and state.
School vouchers, initially introduced by American Economist Milton Friedman in the 1960s, have long sparked debate. At their core, vouchers aim to re-allocate funds for each student into the hands of parents, allowing them to choose non-public school alternatives. The paradigm emerged as a reaction to the Civil Rights Movement, particularly following the landmark Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education, which prohibited racial segregation in U.S. public schools. Josh Cowen, Michigan State University professor and author of The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers, said, “Legislatures in the South that were affected directly by the Brown order immediately grasped onto this idea that we could create a sort of a publicly funded private system.”
In 1990, the first modern school voucher pilot program was introduced in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Through the 1990’s and early 2000’s, small school voucher programs began to pop up all across the country. In just the last couple of years, some of these small programs have ballooned into statewide initiatives known collectively as universal school voucher programs. Universal school voucher programs allow parents to take money from the government and use it to fund any public school alternative, no questions asked. These programs operate under the belief that parents have the right to choose what kind of education their child should receive regardless of financial barriers.
Critics of school vouchers argue that the existence of universal school vouchers poses a direct threat to public schools’ funding. Under these systems, voucher programs receive funding that would otherwise be part of the public school budget.
“Vouchers do threaten public school funding over the long run. You’re starting to see the biggest programs in Arizona and Florida actually move substantial amounts of money out of the state budget into the private sector,” said Cowen.
Jennifer Berkshire, a journalist and educational studies lecturer at Yale, believes that school vouchers will lead to direct cuts to public school education and major budget deficits in any state aiming to implement a universal school voucher policy.
“Because these programs are now universal, they’re open to anyone, no matter how wealthy you are. This is new state spending. That’s an enormous expense that the state didn’t have before,” said Berkshire. She claims that educational policies like this would lead to a collapse in public education systems that have already been dramatically underfunded.
“This is something that impacts everybody, not just a few people, that public education should be great for every student,” Marisol Garcia, who serves as President of the Arizona Education Association, told The Politic. “Doesn’t matter where you live, if you live on the Navajo reservation or if you live in inner city Phoenix, every student deserves to have a great education.”
Garcia, like many public educators, believes that improving the general public education system is a better strategy than allowing students to choose private options. She and others who disapprove of voucher systems point out that the educational quality of public school alternatives is not always reliable.
“The first thing you need to know is that all of these programs are basically ‘black box’ programs, meaning they make it virtually impossible to tell where the money is going,” said Berkshire.
This “black box” aspect of universal school vouchers puts into question the quality of education being provided in these public school alternatives. The initial school voucher programs were designed with the goal of helping students move to private schools that could meet specific needs that a public school education would not. If students are currently receiving a sub-par education, that would indicate a distinction between initial and current school voucher programs.
“My concern with these programs is that [students] are being sold this story that they’re moving to these elite academies, like Dead Poets Society, something you see in these movies. This is just not the type of schools they’re actually getting into or that are willing to serve them,” said Cohen.
Opponents of school vouchers claim that when it comes to school vouchers, a misconception among parents is that a school voucher correlates to an automatic admission to any high profile private school in America. Private schools still reserve the right to reject any student regardless if they have a school voucher.
“It’s certainly sold as the ability for parents to take those coupons and go to whatever school they think. But that’s actually not what happens in practice. You have to be accepted to that private school. The school chooses you,” Cohen explains.
Proponents of the school vouchers program claim that parents should have the ability to choose which school their children attend. Conservative organizations such as the Heritage Foundation are at the forefront of this debate advocating for the program. When describing the importance of parental choice, Jonathan Butcher, a William Skillman senior legislative research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, said “It’s changed the way that families think about education. It’s no longer ‘My kid’s going to go to the assigned school, and I don’t have a choice in the matter.’” Butcher is one of many school-choice advocates who argue that by expanding school options, parents can make the most informed decision for their children’s education.
Pro-school voucher voices suggest public education system failures require new measures to ensure students have access to a quality education. They point to concerns over dwindling resources, overcrowded classrooms, and diminishing educational quality. While Butcher acknowledges that students continue to graduate from public schools at a high rate, he argues that a misconception is hidden within this statistic. “Graduation rates are a complicated statistic, because sometimes schools are graduating kids who wind up taking remedial classes. So, we have competing information about whether we’re actually graduating students who are prepared to go on to the next level academically. The results do not demonstrate that the assigned system is providing the right answer for every kid.” His analysis of the public education system suggests that school vouchers level the playing field for parents who are seeking a public school alternative by eliminating the income barrier.
In 2022, Arizona passed the Arizona Empowerment Scholarship Act (ESA) which marked the first ever universal school voucher program in America. The program creates an “Empowerment Scholarship Account” worth 90% of the state’s per-student funding, which parents can use towards a public school alternative. The ESA is available to all students in Arizona regardless of income level or region. As a result of this new program, Arizona has served as a battleground for both supporters and opponents of school vouchers. One of the biggest opponents of the ESA is the Arizona Education Association (AEA), responsible for representing over 22,000 educators and school workers throughout Arizona’s public schools.
AEA President Marisol Garcia has been one of the most prominent leaders in the fight against universal school voucher programs. “Our funding for schools comes from the state,” Garcia told The Politic. “We have to explain to [teachers] that the general fund is being eaten up by $800 million for this universal school voucher program.” Garcia is one of many teachers who view school vouchers as an ineffective solution to the systemic problems within public schools. Vouchers, in her opinion, provide an alternative to public schools, but don’t actually help to fix the issues that are related to public education. Instead, they divert important funds away from public education and into private schools. “By creating these different avenues, we’re essentially underfunding every system, instead of investing in one healthy, good one,” said Garcia. The AEA’s advocacy work has been focused on increasing public education funding in order to provide teachers and faculty with the necessary resources to provide the best education for students.
With public school educators and faculty searching for a way to combat the universal school vouchers program, the AEA has found a champion for their cause in Arizona Democratic governor Katie Hobbs. Elected in 2023, Hobbs has been a staunch advocate for the teacher’s union and opposes the universal school voucher programs.
However, the Republican Party’s control over the Arizona legislature has made it difficult for the governor to effectively push back against legislation in favor of school vouchers. Garcia pointed out that this Republican majority means that in many cases, Hobbs’s hands are tied. “She can’t author a bill, she can’t pass a bill. She can sign the bill, but it has to get to her desk. So she came up with, like seventeen things she wanted to try to do. And I think across the finish line, we got two of them.” But that could all change given the fact that groups such as the AEA have been backing candidates for the Arizona legislature that back their agenda. The AEA is hoping that by electing officials that are in support of public schools, they can help roll back legislation such as the ESA.
Currently, twenty three states have implemented school voucher or education saving account programs that allow parents to use taxpayer money to pay for an alternative education to public school. The growth of school voucher policies throughout the United States has turned what was initially a state matter into a topic of national debate. Project 2025’s endorsement of a national universal voucher program only increased tensions between the two sides of this debate.
While Project 2025 is a publication of the Heritage Foundation and not endorsed by the Trump campaign, it is undeniable that the two sides of the 2024 presidential election have taken completely opposite stances on this issue. Former President Donald Trump has shown support for an education savings account program in which parents could spend up to $10,000 of taxpayer money on alternative school options. Vice President Kamala Harris falls on the opposing side, standing in firm opposition to school vouchers. Harris’s education policy instead focuses on increasing funding for public education.
Although it seems that groups such as the Heritage Foundation and the AEA are miles apart from each other, both groups are looking to answer one simple question: How can we improve education for all Americans? Where the groups differ is their approaches to answering this question. The implementation of a national school voucher program could prove devastating for public schools, yet expanding parental choice would allow for parents to be fully in the driver seat for their children’s educations. These two fundamentally contrasting approaches set the stage for a 2024 election cycle with education as a central issue. The controversy over school vouchers programs is only indicative of a larger battle that could prove consequential for the future of education in America.