The Empty and Expensive Promise of School Voucher Programs
This is my latest piece for The Progressive’s ongoing Public Schools Advocate project.
When New Hampshire’s Republican lawmakers inserted a school voucher bill into the state budget, proponents claimed that the new program would be no big deal, that it would only cost the state about $130,000. That was in May 2021. Less than two years later, the program’s cost now stands at $14.7 million—and the legislature is poised to spend more on it.
That pattern—school voucher programs swiftly ballooning to take a huge chunk of public dollars to fund private schools—has been repeated across the country.
In a new report from Public Funds Public Schools (PFPS), researchers look at seven states that have been running a school voucher program long enough to develop a track record. The results of the study show that program costs mushroom quickly into major state expenditures, directing mountains of taxpayer money at private schools even as public schools find themselves working with less funding.
In each of the seven states that the study examined, researchers found that public school funding—as a percentage of the state’s gross domestic product—declined, even though enrollment increased over the same time.
And those programs cost taxpayers.
Voucher defenders claim that they save money for taxpayers. But research shows that voucher programs cost more per pupil than public schools. Certainly, it seems counter-intuitive to claim that students can be educated more cheaply if they are spread out among many schools instead of located in one. And indeed, the PFPS study reports that “the claim that it costs less to educate students with private school vouchers than in public schools ignores numerous realities.”
Families often absorb those extra costs, as do public school taxpayers who either pay more to plug the gaps or see programs cut from their local schools.
The funding issues are exacerbated by programs that switch to “universal” vouchers—vouchers extended to students who never were in the public school system to begin with, meaning that the public system loses funding, but loses $0.00 in costs. While a traditional voucher system posits that we can use the same amount of money to educate 100 students whether they are in one school or five different schools, the universal voucher posits that districts can use the same amount of funding to educate 100 students that it does to educate 130. In other words, universal vouchers are a funding cut for public schools. The research, moreover, has yet to find any significant academic benefits to voucher programs.