This story about school voucher programs was produced by The Hechinger Report, a non-profit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
Abbey Clegg watched the Manchester school board meetings online in the summer of 2020, slowly coming to terms with what was happening: New Hampshire schools were not going to reopen in the fall as the pandemic raged on.
Clegg, her husband, Rich, and their six children were all at home together. She and her husband were trying to work and her older kids were trying to tap into online classes. “It was a disaster for our family. They’re sending home these packets. They’re trying to do Zoom and we don’t have enough broadband,” Clegg recalled.
Clegg, who works with the New Hampshire program for foster and adoptive children, and her husband, a Baptist pastor, didn’t have strong feelings about what type of schools their kids attended. Their eldest was enrolled at a private Christian school, while their four younger school-aged kids were attending a local public school, two of them in special education.
But six kids at home for months was not going to work.
Nearly a decade earlier, New Hampshire had created a private school voucher option wherein state taxpayers and businesses get a credit that lowers their state taxes in exchange for donating money to the program. Clegg applied for the 2020-21 school year, enrolling two of her younger kids at a Catholic school that was open for in-person classes. When lawmakers created a new voucher program in the spring of 2021, joining a list of states tapping into frustration with pandemic schooling to advance school choice measures, Clegg applied again: the additional financial support meant the kids could stay in their private schools.
The system provided temporary relief for Clegg, and became increasingly popular across the country, especially during the pandemic. In June, the US supreme court also ruled that states with such programs cannot exclude religious schools, opening the door to more public funding for private, religious education.
But with the public school system already struggling, advocates worry that the growing number of private school subsidies will strip public schools of resources. For families that can’t afford to close the financial gap for a private school, this could further widen the inequality gap in the American school system and leave vulnerable children shortchanged from the beginning of their lives.
Expansion of vouchers during Covid: ‘the timing was perfect’
Over the past two years, more than 20 states have started or expanded voucher-type programs, steering taxpayer money to help families afford private schools, pay for books and other materials for homeschooling and cover the cost of services such as speech or physical therapy for kids who aren’t attending public schools.
Some states tweaked longstanding programs. Others created entirely new, expansive programs with few or no limits on who can access public dollars and minimal oversight on how the money is spent. Some of the moves were encouraged and cheered on by conservative groups aiming to upend public schools, now sometimes referred to as “government” schools.
Many states, red and blue, also acted to boost charter schools, sometimes adding millions in state dollars for charter school buildings and student funding. Often, politicians and advocacy groups backing the new programs cited parental concerns about remote schooling, along with the teaching of systemic racism and other topics ensnared in the culture wars, as reasons for pushing through school choice measures.
“The educational choice movement has done everything possible to build the best surfboard for parents. This was the right wave,” said Robert Enlow, president and CEO of the advocacy group EdChoice, referring to the pandemic. “The timing was perfect – unfortunately perfect.”
Despite parental anger that has continued to simmer and evolve since the start of the pandemic, polling about parents’ interest in private school vouchers provides a mixed picture. Support for vouchers for all students, and even for vouchers limited to kids from low-income families, actually declined over the last few years, to about 45%, according to a 2021 poll by the journal Education Next, though polling conducted this year for some choice lobbying groups found strong support for private school subsidies.
Libertarian thinktanks and DC-based advocacy groups, which offer model legislation for lawmakers, are among those lobbying for these measures, and some aggressively attack legislators who don’t sign on. School choice advocates are trying to motivate parents to vote, especially given parents’ role in helping to elect a conservative Republican who campaigned against school closures in last year’s Virginia gubernatorial race.
In some states, pandemic restrictions at statehouses may have also offered legislators the opportunity to pass measures without the large-scale in-person protests led by teachers and others in the past.
Last year, a manufactured conflict over instruction about so-called critical race theory fueled parents’ anger, adding to frustration about pandemic schooling. One of the underlying goals of those trying to rile parents is the privatization of public education.
“Too many parents today have no escape mechanism from substandard schools controlled by leftist ideologues,” conservative activist Christopher Rufo wrote earlier this year. “Universal school choice – meaning that public education funding goes directly to parents rather than schools – would fix that.”
Most of the nation’s kids – about 50 million of them – have stuck with conventional public schools. School choice advocates note that many of the vouchers offered around the country do not cover the full cost of tuition at a private school and regulations can be restrictive about who can open charters and how much money they get.
Currently, about 5 million school-aged kids are enrolled in private schools, though that number includes students from families who don’t use a subsidy for tuition. Another 3.5 million attend charter schools, a number that has ticked up during the pandemic, and the rate of homeschooling has increased too, though it still includes only a few million children.
That potential tantalizes choice advocates – and scares public school proponents.
“Let’s pretend, we have 55,000 students for the district I’m in,” said Kelly Berg, a calculus teacher who is president of the Mesa Education Association in Arizona. “Now 5,000 students take vouchers and go elsewhere, not in our district. That’s over 100 teachers we have to cut. That could potentially mean a school closure somewhere.”
Those students might return to the public school system within a few months if things don’t work out, but the money wouldn’t follow them back until the following school year, Berg said, and teachers already would have been shifted around or laid off.
“That’s the real rub for me,” she said.
School boards used pandemic restrictions to pave the way for vouchers
Some of the new programs were created specifically for parents objecting to pandemic restrictions. At the start of the 2021 school year, for example, Florida’s state board of education expanded a small voucher program for students who had been bullied to include students who didn’t want to wear a mask to school or face regular Covid-19 testing – its own form of harassment, the board argued. Only about 100 students in districts that required masks took up the state on the offer.
The New Hampshire program the Clegg family is using gives children from families with incomes of up to 300% of the federal poverty limit – or roughly $80,000 for a family of four – as much as $5,200 for private school tuition, homeschooling or educational services, or transportation to an out-of-district public school, among other uses. There’s no requirement that a child attend public schools before applying for a grant.
That kind of provision infuriates choice critics, because it means parents can choose private schools without knowing whether a public school might be a good fit for their children. Supporters, however, say that these clauses honor a parent’s choice without requiring them to jump through hoops.
Governor Chris Sununu, a Republican, signed the New Hampshire legislation as part of the state budget in June 2021. By the end of the following school year, about 2,000 students had signed up. He also expanded a separate tuition program for families in rural areas with limited public options, allowing them to use taxpayer dollars to attend religious and secular private schools.
West Virginia and Arizona went the furthest on school choice, creating options that would provide so-called education or empowerment scholarships to most or all of their respective state’s public school students. Both efforts face hurdles: a court challenge has blocked the West Virginia program, at least for now, and a campaign is under way to force the Arizona measure to face voters, which could put the program on hold until at least 2024.
‘Lots still failed’: the programs that never took off
For as many school choice programs that emerged since the pandemic, “lots still failed”, said Sharon Krengel, policy and outreach director at the Education Law Center, which has joined with other public school advocacy groups to form Public Funds Public Schools. The organization works on litigation that challenges vouchers and related programs.
In Louisiana, the Democratic governor recently vetoed a bill that would have created education savings accounts allowing parents to use tax dollars for private school tuition, homeschooling and other expenses. In Georgia, Republican lawmakers earlier this year pulled back a bill that would have provided state dollars for parents who wanted to send their children to private school. In Oklahoma, a bill to create a voucher program failed in the senate in March, despite a pressure campaign from a DC-based lobbying group. Opposition to the bill came from Democrats as well as Republicans from rural areas that don’t have private schools.
But more choice programs, and battles, are still to come.
Some of the options created by lawmakers in 2021, like voucher programs in Missouri and two cities in Tennessee, are just getting off the ground, while others, like an expansive voucher program in Ohio, face new pushback.
Back in New Hampshire, Abbey Clegg is waiting to see whether her youngest, Emilia Jo, will fit in at the Catholic school some of her siblings attend when she starts kindergarten soon, or whether another school will make more sense. “It might not be a good fit for her. She’s a fiery little kid,” Clegg said.
But “being able to keep the kids where they are was such a blessing”, she said, especially after the trauma her family experienced last year, when her son Kaden died from complications related to some long-term conditions. The teachers are loving and warm, Clegg said. Several came to Kaden’s funeral and “loved our kids so much during that time period”.
“We are huge advocates of finding schools that fit our kids,” Clegg said. “We want them to go to a school that helps them academically – and to be a good human, really.”
