Illustration by Alex Nabaum
This article appears as part of a special issue of The American Prospect magazine on state policy divergence and aggression. Subscribe here.
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, 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, “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.
The explosion of so-called universal school vouchers is likely to have a far more profound impact than culture-war hot buttons.
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 their 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 in 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 as an “indispensable historical and cultural touchstone,” Louisiana is requiring displays of the Ten Commandments in every classroom, and Texas has inserted Bible stories into 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, 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, 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, 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 at the opportunity to send their kids to private schools using state funds. A review by The 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.
ROSS D. FRANKLIN/AP PHOTO
A 2017 protest of Arizona’s education savings accounts (ESAs). The program has led to a $1.5 billion state budget shortfall this year.
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 of 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 decreasing.
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 published 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 recently, 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 the 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. To a remarkable extent, that sentiment now animates Republican education policy. Some 18 states have 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. His boss Kevin Roberts, the architect of Project 2025, was making a similar argument, 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.
Red states are growing steadily less educated, while education levels in blue states continue to rise.
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, 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 steep 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 of “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 to 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 on 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 the 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 put 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.
CHARLIE RIEDEL/AP PHOTO
Former Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback (R) cut public school spending so heavily that the state supreme court found the underfunding unconstitutional.
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 Mike Hicks, an economist at Indiana’s Ball State University and the author of The Country Economist newsletter on Substack. Red 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 that 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 into state races in a largely successful effort 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, with the aim of getting 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 predicted 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 the 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, 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.
