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This article appears in the February 2025 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
The push to replace existing public school systems with government-subsidized private and religious schools suffered a major blow on Election Day 2024, as voters rejected ballot measures to implement universal voucher schemes in Kentucky, Nebraska, and Colorado.
Those votes offered more data that universal voucher proposals lack popular support, even among the same populations and demographics that voted for a Republican president and for a right-wing Republican majority in both chambers of Congress.
Still, the “school choice,” or voucher, movement, which has been steered for several decades by a handful of ultraconservative billionaires, is in the midst of a watershed moment, buoyed by the aftereffects of a global pandemic and the so-called culture wars attendant to the rise of Trumpism.
“School choice” programs generally reroute public money to private and religious schools via vouchers, education savings accounts, tuition tax credits, and other mechanisms. Proponents say they compel schools to improve through free market–style competition, and offer better opportunities to underprivileged families. Opponents have generally opposed them as destabilizing to public schools.
But the issue is also clearly ideological: Leaders of the movement, like billionaire philanthropist and former Trump education secretary Betsy DeVos, have said candidly that one of their primary goals is to transform the existing public education system into a religious Christian public education system. And proponents are plainly opposed to education about nontraditional gender and sexuality, as well as historical and systemic racism.
In 2023, 18 states enacted or expanded “universal” voucher programs that allowed public money to flow to private schools, according to EdChoice. At least eight of those programs are available to nearly all students, regardless of income. The number of students who actually use a category of vouchers called “education savings accounts” nearly tripled from 2022 to 2023, rising from 33,000 students to 93,000, according to EdChoice, the leading advocacy group promoting vouchers.
Republican politicians have made it clear that they would like to exert more control over D.C.’s government.
Now, as Donald Trump re-enters the White House, private school vouchers are poised to have another banner year. That includes the distinct possibility that advocates could effectively and fully voucherize the whole public school system in the only jurisdiction with an existing, federally funded voucher program, which is also the only one subject to direct control by Congress: deep-blue Washington, D.C.
Lindsey Burke, director of the Center for Education Policy at the Heritage Foundation, told me that the “time is right” to expand D.C.’s program into a universal one that gives students federal money regardless of family income or background, and allows families to spend that money on private schools, charter schools, tutoring, and even other kinds of educational expenses. Burke is the primary author of the education section in the conservative manifesto Project 2025, which calls for Congress to enact “universal school choice” in the District, among other changes.
“The D.C. program has always been a marker of where Congress stands on the issue of school choice,” Burke said. “This is the best opportunity we’ve had probably since the beginning of the program to expand it.”
ALONG WITH ELIMINATING THE DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION, “universal school choice” is a big piece of the conservative movement’s current education policy agenda. Besides Project 2025, it was laid out in the Republican Party’s official 2024 platform, as well as in “Agenda 47,” the Trump campaign’s own set of presidential policy plans.
When Trump announced his nomination of former professional wrestling executive Linda McMahon for the secretary of education post, he touted her previous work to help “achieve Universal School Choice in 12 States,” saying she “will fight tirelessly to expand ‘Choice’ to every State in America.” McMahon herself is a longtime supporter. “One of the issues most important to me is the question of school choice,” she wrote in 2015, adding that she believes further privatization and deregulation does not “take anything away from traditional public schools … as some have feared.”
Project 2025 specifically wants Congress “to provide an example to state lawmakers” via the “K-12 districts under federal jurisdiction, including Washington, D.C., public schools. (The federal government also oversees certain military schools and has authority over public schools on reservations and tribal lands.) In other words, Project 2025 aims to make D.C.’s existing public school system a sort of “laboratory of democracy,” where conservative politicians—from other states—can experiment with education policy ideas.
Specifically, Project 2025 includes a subsection on the city’s Opportunity Scholarship Program that calls for some fairly straightforward, yet radical, reforms: expanding voucher access universally, and deregulating the program entirely.
“Congress should expand [voucher] eligibility to all students, regardless of income or background, and raise the scholarship amount closer to the funding students receive in D.C. Public Schools,” Burke and her colleagues wrote.
Josh Cowen, education policy professor at Michigan State University, wrote the 2024 book The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers, and has studied voucher programs for about two decades, including research funded by conservative organizations. He notes that the Opportunity Scholarship Program was a federal creation of a prior right-wing government. “The federal government has always tinkered with the D.C. public school system to try and create what they want,” Cowen said. “It wasn’t an accident that when they couldn’t get vouchers nationally, in No Child Left Behind [in 2002], that they then did it in D.C.”
The D.C. Public Schools (DCPS) use a combination of federal and local funding, with more than 80 percent of the budget coming from local revenue sources like property taxes, according to the DC Fiscal Policy Institute. The Opportunity Scholarship is uniquely designed to provide equal federal funding to the city’s traditional school system, charter schools, and the voucher program. Each program received roughly $17.5 million in each of the last five fiscal years, according to a 2023 report by K-12 Dive and data from the Department of Education. It funds scholarships for low-income students whose families earn less than 185 percent of the federal poverty level, which comes out to about $57,000 for a family of four. Scholarships for 2024-2025 were between $10,000 and $15,000.
“Congress should additionally deregulate the program by removing the requirement of private schools to administer the D.C. Public Schools assessment and allowing private schools” even more control and freedom in their admissions processes, according to Project 2025. The document also urges the Trump administration to implement policies in DCPS that would bar acknowledgment of or education about transgenderism, as well as teaching about contemporary or historical racial discrimination, among other policy changes.

MANUEL BALCE CENETA/AP PHOTO
Linda McMahon, Trump’s pick for education secretary, is a loud supporter of school choice.
RESEARCH BY COWEN AND OTHER EDUCATION EXPERTS over the years has shown that vouchers don’t necessarily accomplish advocates’ stated goals. Studies have shown that students participating in school choice programs in Indiana, Ohio, and Louisiana actually saw their academic achievement and performance decline relative to their peers, partly due to the dearth of participating, high-quality private schools.
In 2019, the Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences published a comprehensive comparative analysis of outcomes for D.C. students and parents between 2012 and 2014. The study found no statistically significant differences in reading or math, three years after students had applied to the program. Students who used the scholarships tested 2.1 percentile points lower in reading, and 0.2 percentile points higher in math, compared to the control group.
Studies have also shown that the programs tend to actually benefit higher-income students who are already enrolled in private schools.
The “school choice” movement’s other arguments—including the push for religious education, and to exclude LGBTQ or other nonconforming children—are obviously divisive. Indeed, since the late 1970s, voucher programs have been rejected virtually every single time that they have actually been put to a vote by state residents.
Yet proponents, who have seen some major successes through other political channels, say the programs work, and are continuing to push for national expansion. Trump himself praised and defended the D.C. voucher program during his first term, just days after another study by the National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance found that the program had a negative impact on reading and math scores.
And the latest GOP platform promises to “reassert greater Federal Control over Washington, DC”; while Trump has threatened to “take over” the city and its government during his second administration.
In short, Republican politicians have made clear that they would like to exert more control over D.C.’s government; and conservatives, more broadly, are advocating for transforming the city’s existing public schools into a universal voucher system, applicable to students and parents at all income levels, and without much effective oversight—simply because they can.
D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser’s office didn’t respond to requests for comment.
TO PUT IT SIMPLY, THERE JUST ISN’T MUCH that the D.C. government can do about this.
The Constitution gives Congress exclusive jurisdiction over Washington, D.C. An act of Congress, the D.C. Home Rule Act, allowed the District its own locally elected mayor and city council for the first time in the 1970s. By the same token, Congress could revoke local governance, or change local laws and policy, including via its control of federal purse strings.
Indeed, Congress originally imposed the existing voucher program on D.C. residents in 2003 by forcing it into an appropriations bill that had to be enacted in order to avoid a government shutdown, according to reports that November by The Washington Post, Education Week, and Baptist News Global.
The city’s voucher program could also be revamped via similar maneuvers, even if partisan Republican support cannot overcome a Senate filibuster.
Nonetheless, Republicans are nearly certain to face a number of challenges, including, most obviously, a lack of consensus on the issue. In some conservative-led states, for example, Republican representatives from low-income or rural areas that lack quality private school options have become holdouts against their colleagues’ bills to expand or implement private school vouchers. Voucher expansion legislation failed in Georgia, Texas, Idaho, Virginia, Kentucky, and South Dakota in 2023, according to a report by the Economic Policy Institute in April that year.
And, of course, average parents and other voters in red states like Kentucky and Nebraska rejected voucher expansion when it was put to a ballot this past November.
Christina Henderson, an at-large member of the D.C. City Council, told me she is “just not convinced” that Republicans will successfully achieve Project 2025’s goals for DCPS, or even make a serious attempt.
“In terms of their education agenda, at the top of which is getting rid of the Department of Education, they have a lot to worry about other than focusing on D.C.,” Henderson, a former staffer for Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), said.
Burke told me she can’t disagree on that end. “That’s not incorrect,” she said. “It’s definitely going to be a challenge to reinvigorate interest in this, and we need a concerted effort among coalition groups and other interested parties, but this is the best opportunity” we’ve had so far.
Henderson ticked off a number of other factors that might complicate an attempt to implement universal vouchers in DCPS, including that both program and private school administrators have been advocating primarily for more voucher money, rather than to expand eligibility to a broader pool of students. That’s partly a result of the relatively high cost of living in D.C., which drives up teachers’ salaries, as well as the availability of high-quality and exclusive private schools and specialized charters.
Still, those challenges that Republicans might face in trying to prioritize items within a broad legislative agenda, or garnering votes for an unpopular policy, are totally outside of the control of D.C.’s government. Republicans might indeed be very busy with other issues, or may be wary of imposing an unpopular policy on people who didn’t vote for it, or fearful that an expanded voucher program might not actually improve academic performance. But these are undoubtedly not preventative measures for the large majority of D.C. residents and elected officials who oppose the GOP’s proposals.
Henderson, for her part, told me the council is prepared “as much as we can be,” and “to the extent that we have control,” to counter impositions on D.C.’s public schools.
She added that officials were prepared “to explain to the many members of Congress who may not have worked in state or local government, and don’t understand balancing a budget, implementing programs,” or “the impact of some of the things” they have proposed.
D.C. residents can hold on to hope that the policy and facts-on-the-ground arguments will prove convincing to Republicans. At any rate, whether or not the GOP actually pulls off the broadest and most politically significant expansion of a school voucher program remains, for now, largely a matter of chance. What is certain is that many conservatives want to do so, and, in terms of politics and the law, there’s nothing truly in their way.