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BREAKING THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS  
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Jennifer C. Berkshire
October 11, 2024
The American Prospect
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_ Red states are enacting universal education vouchers, threatening
budget calamity and potentially degrading student achievement. _

, Illustration by Alex Nabaum

 

Education spending in North Carolina is about to go way up, thanks to
lawmakers’ largesse. But the extra funds—close to half a billion
dollars—won’t go to the public schools attended by the vast
majority of children in the state, or to hike teacher pay, despite a
worsening shortage. Instead, the huge influx of cash will go to pick
up the tab for private school tuition, including for well-off
families, a priority for North Carolina’s Republican supermajority.
In fact, according to recent state analysis
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funding for the state’s _public_ schools will drop by nearly $100
million as a result of voucher expansion. While Gov. Roy Cooper, a
Democrat, vetoed the bill, legislators are expected to override him.

As one school district leader stated
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“It feels like to me that there’s a desire to suffocate
traditional public schools to justify their demise.”

North Carolina’s tilt toward school privatization is all the more
remarkable given that the state was, until relatively recently, a
model for the kind of education-as-human-capital vision that united
both political parties. Starting in the 1980s, governors of both
parties plowed money into public schools, teacher salaries, and
community colleges, with the aim of supercharging the state’s
economic development.

Today, the story couldn’t be more different. The GOP candidate for
governor, current Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, is a vocal proponent of
school vouchers and has encouraged North Carolina parents to remove
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children from public schools, citing alleged agendas in the classroom.
“Do not turn your children over to these wicked people,” Robinson
told attendees at a church service.

A growing number of parents seem to be listening. North Carolina,
which once had the highest percentage of students enrolled in public
schools in the nation, has seen private school enrollment soar
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recent years.

In recent years, education policies in states red and blue have
diverged dramatically. Red-state lawmakers have donned the mantle of
culture warriors, imposing limits on what teachers can talk about and
what kids can learn, mandating so-called patriotic education, and
injecting religion into public school curricula. Conservatives have
banned “critical race theory” in schools and intimated that
teaching students about LGBT history is a pretext for “grooming”
children. Oklahoma is now requiring that public schools teach the
Bible
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an “indispensable historical and cultural touchstone,” Louisiana
is requiring displays of the Ten Commandments
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every classroom, and Texas has inserted Bible stories
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its elementary school curriculum.

But the explosion of so-called universal school vouchers is likely to
have a far more profound impact on the lives of young people in red
states than these culture-war hot buttons. As states race to pay for
families to send their kids to private schools, blowing up state
budgets in the process, the schools attended by the vast majority of
kids will be left with far fewer resources, blunting their prospects.
By design, funds are being shifted away from students in poor and
rural areas and into the pockets of affluent parents, entrenching
inequality in the process.

A RADICAL SHIFT

“Anyone know of a flat earth curriculum?” The query
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posed in a discussion group for recipients of school vouchers in
Arizona, which are known there as education savings accounts, or ESAs,
was not a joke. Arizona is home to the nation’s most ambitious
experiment in free-marketizing education. Parents here are allowed to
direct education funds, not just to the school of their choice, but to
anything they might call “education.”

As Arizona’s superintendent of public instruction Tom Horne, a loud
proponent of vouchers, admitted in an interview
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the state’s emphatically hands-off approach means that there’s
nothing to prevent parents from using public dollars to teach their
kids that the Earth is flat. Indeed, state law prohibits any kind of
public oversight over the burgeoning nonpublic sector of private
schools, homeschooling, and microschools, which are for-profit
ventures in which small groups of students learn online while being
monitored by a guide.

While Arizona’s ESA experiment would seem to be a cautionary tale, a
growing list of red states view it as a model. Fourteen states have
now enacted so-called universal voucher programs, providing taxpayer
funds to any family that wants them. As economist Doug Harris
has argued
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these “super vouchers” represent a radical break with what he
calls the foundational traditions of public education across the
country: “separation of church and state, anti-discrimination, and
public accountability for educational processes and outcomes funded by
taxes.”

Voucher advocates have long couched their support for abandoning
public education in the language of mobility and uplift. In North
Carolina, vouchers have been rebranded as Opportunity Scholarships; in
Louisiana, they are GATOR scholarships, or “Louisiana Giving All
True Opportunity to Rise.” But a radical exacerbation of existing
inequities is the far more likely outcome. Among states that have
adopted universal vouchers, wealthy parents have leapt
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the opportunity to send their kids to private schools using state
funds. A review
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Wall Street Journal_ last year found that the biggest beneficiaries
of the new voucher programs have been students already enrolled in
private schools, meaning that their parents were wealthy enough to pay
for tuition themselves.

Expand

[OCT24 SPECIAL Berkshire 2.jpg]

A 2017 protest of Arizona’s education savings accounts (ESAs). The
program has led to a $1.5 billion state budget shortfall this
year.  ROSS D. FRANKLIN/AP PHOTO

States that have opened existing voucher programs to wealthy residents
have seen a similar trend. In Indiana, for example, which has had a
voucher program for low-income students since 2011, lawmakers have
steadily expanded eligibility to more affluent Hoosiers. According to
recent analyses
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the program, which is projected to cost the state $600 million this
year, vouchers in Indiana now subsidize predominantly wealthy, white
suburban families whose kids never attended public schools. Meanwhile,
the percentage of low-income students receiving vouchers has
been steadily
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The ability of private schools to hike tuition as a result of state
support is also likely to deepen the divide between rich and poor
students. A study
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by researchers at Brown and Princeton Universities found that after
Iowa adopted a voucher program, tuition at private schools rose by
nearly 25 percent. Across the border in Nebraska, where lawmakers have
tried but so far failed to enact a similar program, no such tuition
hikes occurred. Vouchers, conclude the researchers, act as tuition
subsidies for families who can afford private schools, incentivizing
such schools to charge more while pricing out families who can’t
afford it.

One of the arguments voucher proponents have long made is that funding
parents directly will end up saving taxpayers money, since the amount
of the voucher is typically less and sometimes far less than what
states spend to educate a child. Yet that logic only holds if students
are leaving the public schools. Because these programs have ended up
subsidizing parents whose kids already attend private school, they
represent enormous new budget items.

As ProPublica documented
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Arizona’s voucher program has precipitated a “budget meltdown”
to the tune of nearly $1.5 billion this year. While the rising tide of
red ink will inevitably lead to slashed spending on the state’s
public schools, the cost of paying for private school tuition is now
crowding out spending on all sorts of state services and projects,
including investment in vital water infrastructure. Arizona’s budget
woes are exacerbated by the fact that there’s less money coming in
thanks to a flat tax that delivers huge benefits to the wealthy.

“States that have passed significant tax cuts, dramatically expanded
private school vouchers, or done both should be alarmed by how quickly
Arizona found itself in a deep fiscal hole,” warned
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Center on Budget and Policy Priorities recently. On that list of
states: Iowa, West Virginia, Ohio, North Carolina, and Arkansas. Faced
with shrinking revenues and costly new voucher programs, these states
will soon be forced to enact major spending cuts, setting off a battle
for increasingly scarce resources.

Voucher proponents appear to have gamed that out as well. The looming
budget showdowns will pit affluent parents, who will be loath to give
up their new entitlement, against the majority of families whose
children still attend public schools. It isn’t hard to predict the
outcome.

CULTURE WAR AS SMOKE SCREEN

“To get universal school choice, you really need to operate from a
premise of universal public school distrust,” proclaimed
conservative provocateur Christopher Rufo in a 2022 speech
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extent, that sentiment now animates Republican education policy. Some
18 states
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banned the discussion of so-called divisive concepts, threatening
teachers with punishment and schools and districts with fines, while
giving parents the right to sue if their kids encounter banned topics
in the classroom. But the anti-CRT furor signaled just the start of
the GOP’s embrace of the school culture wars. Over the past two
years, red states have cycled through a fixation on pornography in
libraries, social and emotional learning—a Trojan horse for Marxism,
claim its critics—and anything having to do with gender.

What is increasingly apparent, though, is that these successive panics
have merely been smoke screens for enacting school vouchers. “It is
time for the school choice movement to embrace the culture war,”
wrote Heritage Foundation research scholar Jay Greene in an
influential 2022 paper
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His boss Kevin Roberts, the architect of Project 2025, was making a
similar argument
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albeit in more apocalyptic terms, by urging red states to go to war
against “a movement willing to cover up sexual assaults, mutilate
vulnerable children, and celebrate racism.” Such arguments would
provide the playbook for voucher expansion in one state after another,
as right-wing groups fanned the flames of the culture wars while
holding up vouchers as an alternative for “anti-woke” parents.

Incendiary rhetoric about indoctrination also plays another key role
in the school privatization campaign. In his new book _The
Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School
Vouchers
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education scholar Josh Cowen argues that voucher advocates have
embraced the role of culture warriors in part to obscure the
disastrous academic results of previous voucher experiments. In
Louisiana, for example, where Gov. Jeff Landry is leading a crusade to
fuse church and state, research found
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academic declines for students who participated in the state’s
voucher program, largely because they ended up attending low-quality
religious schools.

In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott has spent the better part of two years
making ever more outlandish claims about the state’s schools as he
seeks to enact a controversial voucher scheme. By the spring of 2023,
he was warning
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“an extraordinary movement to expand transgenderism in schools in
the state of Texas.” Public school teachers, Abbott insisted, were
“using their positions to try to cultivate and groom these young
kids” into being transgender.

That was precisely the sort of rhetoric that convinced Courtney Gore
to run for school board in deep-red Granbury, Texas. Elected as a
Republican in what had previously been a nonpartisan contest,
Gore pledged
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root out indoctrination in the local schools. Today, Gore views
herself as having been a pawn in a larger scheme to sow distrust and
chaos in order to “degrade trust in our public education system.”
Says Gore: “The ultimate goal is to try to get vouchers passed.”

A DEEPENING DIVIDE

At a rally this summer, Donald Trump touched
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the topic of school spending. “We spend more per pupil than any
other country in the world, and we’re at the bottom of every
list,” he told a crowd in Philadelphia. Cut spending in half, Trump
insisted, and the result will be “much better education.”

Unsurprisingly, Trump’s claim is wildly at odds with research on the
connection between school spending and student achievement. That more
spending, particularly on schools attended by the poorest students,
leads to improved academic performance and graduate rates is now so
well established that even former naysayers have conceded
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point. The evidence regarding the damage done by slashing school
spending is also considerable. Deep spending cuts result not in a
system that looks like Norway, as Trump opined to the faithful, but in
stunted academic and life outcomes for kids.

Twelve years ago, Kansas attempted a radical experiment in tax
cutting. Under then-Gov. Sam Brownback, lawmakers slashed taxes on the
state’s top earners and reduced the tax rate on some business
profits to zero. As one think tank
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it, “Kansas Tax Cuts Among Deepest State Tax Cuts Ever Enacted.”
The cuts did not bring the promised “trickle-down” economic
renaissance. As revenues plunged, lawmakers were forced to make deep
cuts to spending, particularly for public schools. By 2016, Kansas had
tumbled to near the bottom of state spending on public elementary and
high schools.

The drop in educational attainment among students was just as
dramatic. As school funds dried up, resulting in teacher layoffs and
program cuts, the number of students who dropped out before earning a
high school diploma rose dramatically, while the percentage of high
schoolers going to college plunged. Jonathan Metzl, a scholar and
medical doctor, who chronicled the impact of Kansas’s tax-cutting
experiment in _Dying of Whiteness_, argues that young people in the
state “became cannon fodder in the fight to redistribute wealth
upward.” Just four years of school budget cuts was enough to narrow
the possibilities for a generation of young Kansans. It got so extreme
that the state supreme court found the underfunding of schools
unconstitutional
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[OCT24 SPECIAL Berkshire 3.jpg]

Former Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback (R) cut public school spending so
heavily that the state supreme court found the underfunding
unconstitutional.  CHARLIE RIEDEL/AP PHOTO

Today, a growing list of states seems poised to replicate the Kansas
disaster, as the combination of shrinking state coffers and enormous
new voucher programs forces deep cuts to spending on public education.
The result will be a deepening, and seemingly intentional, decline in
educational attainment in red states.

“We are in the first extended period of diverging educational
attainment in U.S. history,” warns
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Hicks, an economist at Indiana’s Ball State University and the
author of The Country Economist
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states are growing steadily less educated, the result of disinvestment
from public education, while education levels in blue states continue
to rise. That divide is also, of course, partisan. Notes Hicks: “The
15 states that have seen the biggest relative drop in educational
attainment are all solidly Republican states—and poor. Indiana ranks
10th on this list. The top 15 states are all solidly Democratic—and
affluent.”

Now, as red states race to enact sweeping school privatization
schemes, that divide is likely to become a chasm. The same states that
dominate the “least educated” rankings, a list
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includes West Virginia, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma, have also
adopted universal school voucher programs. Texas, which comes in at
number 41, is poised to join them in the coming months after big-money
school choice donors, including hedge fund billionaire Jeff
Yass, poured money
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state races in a largely successful
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to eliminate voucher opponents within the GOP.

For their part, red-state policy elites seemed determined to hasten
the process of driving educational attainment levels down. In addition
to vouchers and tax cuts, these same states have also rolled back
restrictions on child labor, allowing teens to work longer hours and
in more dangerous occupations. Pitched as a way to help teens
“develop their skills in the workforce,” as the governor of Iowa
put it, such laws will also have the effect of nudging more kids out
of school and into work.

WHAT HAPPENS IN RED STATES WON’T STAY IN RED STATES

So far, the explosion of voucher programs has been largely confined to
the states that, as one education pundit observed, make up the “old
Confederacy.” That’s unlikely to remain the case for long. The
American Legislative Exchange Council recently unveiled a
new Education Freedom Alliance
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universal vouchers enacted in 25 states by 2025. Led by two right-wing
business organizations, the Job Creators Network and the Committee to
Unleash Prosperity, the ALEC effort seeks to expand vouchers in red
states where they’ve previously encountered resistance—Texas,
Tennessee, and Nebraska—as well as in purple states like
Pennsylvania and New Hampshire.

Project 2025 goes much further. The education section of the
conservative blueprint for a second Trump administration, created by
the Heritage Foundation, lays out a plan for restructuring federal
education funding so that it flows directly to parents to use outside
of public schools, essentially replicating the Arizona model. Among
its proposals: turning Title I, which supports high-poverty and rural
schools, into a “no strings attached” block grant to states, while
encouraging states to distribute funds to parents in the form of
education savings accounts.

Should its architects prove successful, Project 2025 would have dire
implications for the nation’s public schools. A recent Center for
American Progress analysis
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that eliminating Title I funding would result in the loss of 180,000
teacher positions and negatively affect the academic outcomes of some
2.8 million students.

But cutting funding to schools and steering taxpayer dollars to
institutions that are allowed to discriminate remain deeply unpopular
positions. That’s why Americans have consistently rejected private
school vouchers when they’ve been placed on the ballot, a result
that is likely to be repeated when voters have a chance to weigh in on
voucher measures in Nebraska and Kentucky this November.

The imposition of the red-state vision for school privatization and
more entrenched inequality is likely to come not through Congress or
via voters, but through the courts. Last year, encouraged by a string
of Supreme Court rulings that have opened the door to public funding
of religious schools, Oklahoma attempted to open what would have been
the nation’s first taxpayer-supported religious charter school. The
virtual school was to be operated by the state’s Catholic
Archdiocese, which would teach Catholic doctrine and require students
and staff to attend mass; its employees were to be classified as
“ministers,” exempting them from labor law protections.

This summer, Oklahoma’s highest court prevented
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school from opening, arguing that the state could not fund the school
without violating the prohibition against government-established
religion in both the state and federal constitutions. The case is now
headed to the U.S. Supreme Court. According to a recent
Politico investigation
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conservative legal activists are determined to use the Oklahoma school
as a means of undermining the entire separation of church and state.

Blue states, which ban both discrimination and the use of public
monies for religious education, may soon find themselves with no
choice but to fund both.

_Jennifer C. Berkshire is the host of the education podcast Have You
Heard and the author, with Jack Schneider, of ‘The Education Wars: A
Citizen’s Guide and Defense Manual.’_

_Used with the permission © The American Prospect, Prospect.org
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