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LESSONS FROM WISCONSIN: THE SLOW, STEALTHY, AND STRATEGIC THREAT OF
SCHOOL VOUCHERS  
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Bob Peterson
March 1, 2025
Rethinking Schools
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_ The message from Wisconsin to other states considering so-called
voucher or private school “choice” programs: Beware. Well-funded
right-wing forces have their eyes on dismantling our public schools. _


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From the decimation of welfare programs, to attacks on public sector
unions, extreme gerrymandering and the mass incarceration of people of
color, Wisconsin has been a petri dish for right-wing causes for more
than three decades. This is perhaps most clear in the state
legislature’s growing use of tax dollars to pay tuition at private,
religious schools while straightjacketing funds for public schools.

Public funding of private school tuition in Wisconsin — known as
“voucher” programs and sometimes disingenuously referred to as
“school choice” — was originally sold to the state legislature
in 1990 as a small program to help a few non-religious community-based
schools serving low-income kids in Milwaukee. Step by step, the right
wing has marched toward their strategic goal of taxpayer-funded
vouchers for all students at all private schools. 

Today, there are almost 400 private, mostly religious schools
throughout Wisconsin, annually receiving roughly half a billion
dollars in taxpayer money. 

We live in a world where, in so many ways, the once-unthinkable is
becoming reality. The message from Wisconsin to other states
considering so-called voucher or private school “choice” programs:
Beware. Well-funded right-wing forces have their eyes on dismantling
our public schools.

As Ann Bastian, co-author of _Choosing Equality: The Case for
Democratic Schooling_, foresaw a quarter century ago, “Privatizing
public education is the centerpiece, the grand prize, of the right
wing’s overall agenda to dismantle social entitlements and
government responsibility for social needs.” 

In the 1990s, Wisconsin (along with Ohio and Indiana) was in the
forefront of a handful of states finding ways to use public dollars to
support private schools. By 2023, 30 states and Puerto Rico and
Washington, D.C., had 42 private school voucher programs, and more
states are considering similar legislation, according to EdChoice, a
pro-voucher foundation in Indiana. The programs go by various
innocuous, democratic-sounding names  — “Educational Savings
Accounts,” “Education Freedom Accounts,” “Invest in Kids,”
“Opportunity Scholarships,” “Empowerment Scholarships.” Some
programs include homeschooling. They all transfer public tax dollars
to private schools, often religious schools, with little or no
accountability. 

The people of Wisconsin never voted in favor of public tax dollars
going to private religious schools — instead, the state’s
Republican-dominated legislature has done the work. In fact,
throughout the country, any time vouchers have been put to a popular
vote (such as statewide referendums in Michigan, Utah, and
California), they have been soundly defeated. 

Undermining the right to a free and public education — enshrined in
every state constitution — attacks democracy. As Indian
novelist/activist Arundhati Roy has so eloquently noted:
“Privatization of essential infrastructure is essentially
undemocratic.”

Public Dollars for Private Schools

Looking over the more than three decades of Wisconsin’s voucher
program, the right wing’s strategy has been clear: gain a foothold
and advance whenever possible toward the goal of universal vouchers
— i.e., public tax dollars paying students’ tuition at private
schools, with few if any strings attached. The initial legislation was
sold to reluctant lawmakers as a pilot program with a five-year sunset
provision, targeted at families at or below 175 percent of the poverty
level. Equally important, only 49 percent of a school’s students
could receive vouchers, to try to ensure the schools were good enough
to attract families privately paying tuition and therefore could be
deemed “private.”

One by one, the legislature eliminated or significantly reduced those
restrictions. Today, for instance, 33 of the state’s voucher schools
do not have a single student privately paying tuition. Another 38 have
fewer than 10 percent of the students privately paying tuition.

The right wing labels these private voucher schools as just another
type of public school. Don’t be fooled. To argue that a private
school is “public” merely because it receives public tax dollars
is like arguing that your local Walmart is a public store because it
accepts food stamps. 

Even when a voucher school does not have a single student paying
private tuition, the state legally defines the school as private. This
legal designation allows these private voucher schools to evade
regulations that public schools must adhere to. Here are just a few of
the important legal differences between public and private schools in
Wisconsin:

* Public schools are prohibited from discriminating against students
on the basis of sex, pregnancy, marital or parental status, or sexual
orientation. Private voucher schools are allowed to circumvent these
anti-discrimination measures. (The only restrictions are that voucher
schools must adhere to federal anti-discrimination guidelines based on
race, color, or national origin.)
* Public schools must honor constitutional rights of free speech and
association, and due process when a student is suspended or expelled.
Private voucher schools do not
* Public schools must follow Wisconsin’s open meetings and record
laws. Private voucher schools do not. 
* Public schools are controlled by publicly elected school boards.
Private voucher schools are not. 
* Wisconsin school board meetings are open to the public. Private
school board meetings are not.

Publicly Funded Homophobia

The problems are particularly acute when tax dollars subsidize
religious education at voucher schools — and 95 percent of voucher
schools in Wisconsin are religious. Take what happened to two female
students in 2022 at Fox Valley Lutheran High School. 

The two students were called into the dean’s office a few months
before graduation, according to an investigative report last May in
Wisconsin Watch, a nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative news service.
One student was the cheerleading captain, the other a basketball
player, homecoming queen, and student council member. In separate
meetings, the two were told they faced expulsion because it was
suspected that the two young women were dating each other. The
school’s handbook prohibits any “homosexual behavior,” on or off
campus. 

The cheerleading captain told Wisconsin Watch that the dean said they
could graduate — on the condition they break up and speak to a
pastor. The dean, meanwhile, “outed” the students to their
parents.

In 2019, Sheboygan Lutheran High School canceled the valedictorian
speech of Nat Werth after he came out as gay. According to Werth, the
school’s handbook was subsequently expanded to include
anti-transgender policies.  

Wisconsin has long been in the forefront of protecting LGBTQ+ students
and employees, and in 1982 it became the first state to ban
discrimination in public and private sector employment on the basis of
sexual orientation. Yet today, because of public funding of private
religious schools, Wisconsin taxpayers fund discrimination.

Gus Ramirez, whose family foundation runs the St. Augustine Prep
voucher school in Milwaukee and plans to open another school, is clear
that the school serves a select student body and promotes conservative
religious beliefs.

“We hold firm to the biblical description of family at this
school,” he told the _Milwaukee Journal Sentinel_ in August.
“That doesn’t mean all teachers and all staff are part of a
nuclear family, but we strongly believe that nuclear family generates
a lot better student outcomes. . . . Some will say that we’re too
conservative, but for the most part our teachings are just aligned
with Scripture.”

Skirting Special Education Law

Special education is another area with disturbing differences between
public schools and private voucher schools. Public schools must adhere
to all federal special education laws and regulations. Not so for
private voucher schools. 

An official from Wisconsin’s Department of Public Instruction (DPI),
which oversees the voucher programs, told Wisconsin Watch that the DPI
was “fully committed” to ensuring nondiscrimination of students
with disabilities, but did not believe it had the authority to require
the private schools to adhere to these federal requirements. 

“DPI has significant concerns about the DPI’s authority to ensure
that Choice schools do not discriminate against students with
disabilities,” the agency’s chief legal counsel wrote in a letter
to Wisconsin Watch.

Nicholas Kelly, president of the voucher organization School Choice
Wisconsin, disputed the allegations of discrimination and sent a
letter to Wisconsin Watch that read, in part: “Fundamentally,
parental choice and educational freedom provide accountability. If
parents or students are not satisfied with the education they receive
they can choose another school.”

Discrimination Regardless of the State

As voucher programs have expanded across the country, pro-public
school activists have documented various forms of discrimination.

In December 2023 the Education Voters of Pennsylvania issued
“Pennsylvania Voucher Schools Use Tax Dollars to Advance
Discrimination.” The report focuses on two of the four
“scholarship programs” put in place in 2001 with annual funding of
$340 million. The study highlights exclusionary and discriminatory
policies and practices, found on the websites of private and religious
voucher schools that participate in the Opportunity Schools Tax Credit
program.

For example, the Dayspring Christian Academy “retains the right to
refuse enrollment to or to expel any student who engages in sexual
immorality, including any student who professes to be
homosexual/bisexual/transgender or is practicing
homosexual/bisexual/transgender, as well as any student who condones,
supports, or otherwise promotes such practices.”

A similar study was influential in December 2003, when the Illinois
legislature refused to renew the “Invest in Kids” voucher program,
and to allow individuals and businesses to redirect the state taxes
they owed to support private schools. (The policy was also criticized
for potentially creating a $75 million hole in the state budget.) 

The nonprofit organization Illinois Families for Public Schools found
that nearly 20 percent of the schools that would have benefited from
the renewed Invest in Kids Program had anti-LGBTQ+ policies. It also
found that only 13 percent of the private schools in the Invest in
Kids program served any special education students in 2022. 

Improve, Don’t Destroy, Public Education

For every dollar that goes to a private voucher school, that money is
unavailable for funding public schools. Those of us who work in public
education are acutely aware of its shortcomings and challenges; too
often our public schools reinforce social, racial, and gender
inequality, especially in areas already segregated by class and race.
But they are also battlegrounds to defend and promote progressive
social policies, and are obligated to serve the needs of all
children. 

Establishing two school systems — one public and one private, yet
both supported with tax dollars — only expands the ability of
private schools to pick and choose their students, reinforce
inequality, and teach a biased curriculum. The public should not be
forced to subsidize educational programs that promote religious
beliefs that might be antagonistic to one’s own religious views. 

Milwaukee Congresswoman Gwen Moore (D) was a state representative when
vouchers first passed the Wisconsin legislature, and voted for the
program because it was small, secular, and experimental. “Of course,
this is a vote I deeply regret,” she later said. “I never was the
kind of voucher person who wanted to destroy public education.” 

Public schools are the only educational institutions in our
communities that have the capacity, commitment, and the legal
obligation to serve all students. We must fight to improve our public
schools and defeat the threat of private school vouchers. 

_Bob Peterson ([email protected]__) is a founding editor of
Rethinking Schools and was a member of the Milwaukee School Board from
2019 to 2023, and board president for the final two years. He was a
classroom teacher in public schools for more than 25 years, and
president of the Milwaukee teachers’ union from 2011 to 2015. He
would like to thank Barbara Miner for help with this article._

* school vouchers
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* School Choice
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* Public Education
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* inside threats
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