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Category Archives: Education / Youth

Those “Superior” Private Schools

Americans’ deep-seated anti-government biases explain a lot of defective policy positions. (I’ve previously written about the resistance to a national health system, despite the fact that we have the world’s most expensive and least comprehensive health care, and despite the fact that government already pays over 70% of those inflated costs.) Anti-government prejudice and a belief that the private sector is always more efficient also explains efforts to privatize various government functions –including schools.

I’ve done a fair amount of research on privatization, the results of which haven’t been pretty, but as regular readers of this blog are aware, evidence–even probative, credible evidence– rarely sways public opinion. Stories and anecdotes are more likely to make an impression than data amassed with academic rigor, a reality that drives us academic types up the wall.

A regular reader recently shared such a story–one that will probably have a greater impact than the copious research debunking defenses of America’s proliferating voucher systems.

Reporters for Pro Publica tested the processes for establishing private schools in three states. As they explained, their prior reporting had uncovered how easy it was for people —even people with questionable backgrounds — to found private schools (and to locate them in barns, strip malls and similar places.) That reporting led them to an experiment: could they open a school? After all, as they wrote,

We have no business running a private school.

We’re reporters, not teachers. That doesn’t matter. Inexperience has hardly been a barrier for those who want to start their own schools, as we have reported this year. And it didn’t stop us, either.

Over the last few months, to test the process, reporters from ProPublica partnered with local journalists in three states to establish private schools. None required much effort.

In Arkansas, all it took was a few clicks on the Arkansas secretary of state website, $45 and an American flag to form a bona fide private school with the Arkansas Times.

They established a school in West Virginia by filing the new school’s “name and location with authorities on a piece of notebook paper, then exchanging a few emails.” In North Carolina, they filed an online notice of intent to open a private school in a brewery in Durham.

We used our names and news organization email addresses, following each state’s rules for starting private or microschools, a type of private school intended for just a few students. Experience running a school wasn’t needed. No one from any of the states asked us about our backgrounds or qualifications, though West Virginia did ask for proof of a high school diploma. No one questioned what we plan to teach or how we would measure whether students are learning.

Despite those arguably significant omissions, they were immediately able to enroll students in two of those states,  and Arkansas sent information about how their school could accept public money through the state’s voucher system. As the reporters discovered, Arkansas’ Department of Education doesn’t bother to regulate private schools once they’ve been opened, and didn’t inspect the Arkansas Times newsroom, the location they’d identified for the school. Insofar as they were able to determine, no one checked their backgrounds.

When Arkansas adopted its voucher plan in 2023 the state had fewer than 100 private schools. By the fourth year of its “Education Freedom Accounts” voucher program, the state had more than 220.  Arkansas also had 143 microschools, a different category, also approved to accept tax dollars.

The story was much the same in West Virginia, where dozens of new private and microschools have been established in recent years to take advantage of the roughly $5,400 the state’s “Hope Scholarship” offers each student. In West Virginia, while brick and mortar schools must pass a safety test,  there is absolutely no state oversight of the microschools.

North Carolina was somewhat better: in order to join the 169+ other new private schools that have opened in North Carolina since the expansions of the state’s publicly funded voucher program, they would have to undergo criminal background checks.

There’s much more, and it’s all illuminating. I encourage you to click through and read the full descriptions of the “processes” involved. I also encourage you to consider the physical and educational dangers to students enrolled in these private “academies,” and the millions of tax dollars being siphoned from the nation’s “government” schools to pay for their attendance.

Maybe they’ll learn to spell “scam.”

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Subsidizing Religion

As I noted yesterday, I recently participated in an event sponsored by the Fort Wayne chapter of Hoosiers United for Separation of Church and State. (Hoosiers is part of the umbrella organization Americans United for Separation of Church and State). One of the concerns voiced both by Randall Balmer, the keynote speaker, and several of the panelists whose discussion concluded the event was the growth of educational vouchers, which have proven to be less about education and more about subsidizing religious institutions.

Those of us who have followed the “privatization” movement and the establishment and growth of educational voucher programs will recall that these programs were initially sold as a way to allow poor children to escape “failing” public schools. Unlike wealthier families, these children lacked the wherewithal to escape to the private schools that (we were assured) were doing a better job.

Several years later, the belief that private schools would improve educational outcomes has been pretty thoroughly debunked. But we are only now coming to realize that the real purpose of these programs was to send more of the nation’s children to religiously (and often racially) segregated schools, and to subsidize the already well-to-do.

Permit me to quote from a recent article from Chalkbeat.

Enrollment in Indiana’s Choice Scholarship school voucher program slowed in overall growth for the second year in a row last school year, new data from the state shows, but the number of higher income families using the program increased.

For the first time, more vouchers went to families making more than $100,000 than less than $100,000 this year.

It also turns out that, far from helping children escape “failing” public schools, “the majority of students in the program have never attended a public school.”

In Indiana, as in several other states engaged in siphoning off taxpayer money from public education, in 2025, the legislature authorized vouchers for all Indiana families regardless of income. While that added incentive won’t be in effect until next year, we can already see the effect of the program’s already generous preceding limits.

Approximately 7,000 students from families making more than $200,000 received a voucher in 2025-26, compared to around 5,400 in 2024-25 and 3,700 in 2023-24. More vouchers were also awarded to families in the $100,000-$150,000 and $150,000-$200,000 income brackets than in past years.

The number of vouchers given to students from families making less than $50,000 dropped from 16,000 in 2024-25 to around 12,000 in 2025-26.

And how much money are taxpayers transferring from our public school systems to these predominantly religious schools?

The state awarded $548 million for Choice Scholarships in 2025-26, according to the report, up from $497 million in 2024-225. The 2024-25 amounts were adjusted slightly because some students transferred out of their choice schools before the end of the year. The actual payments were around $491 million, according to this year’s report.

So we Hoosiers paid $491 million dollars to send students to “private” schools, 90% plus of which are religious (and a substantial portion of which are fundamentalist or close). Years of research confirm that those schools are not producing superior academic results; indeed, they are often are producing inferior results. Research also confirms that a number of these religious academies teach creationism rather than science, and use books that distort American history to accord with White Christian nationalist propaganda.

Now, we learn that We The People aren’t just subsidizing religion in contravention of the clear intent of the Establishment Clause, we are also subsidizing the already well-to-do. Let me repeat the central finding of that Chalkbeat report: more vouchers went to families making more than $100,000 than less than $100,000 this year, and 7,000 students from families making more than $200,000 received a voucher in 2025-26.

The underpaid teachers in our underfunded public schools are scrounging for supplies while We the Taxpayers are sending tuition dollars to families that can well afford to send their children to these religious academies. (Indeed, several studies have found that many families receiving vouchers previously had enrolled their children in these schools and had been paying the tuition.)

The Free Exercise clause of the First Amendment absolutely protects the right of parents to send their children to a religious school of their choice. The Establishment Clause–properly read–should prohibit the use of our tax dollars to subsidize that choice.

Public schools are constitutive of a public. In addition to teaching subject-matter, they should be laboratories of democracy–not underfunded and struggling while public dollars subsidize the wealthy and further erode what Randall Balmer accurately calls “America’s Best Idea: Separation of Church and State.”

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What Vouchers Really Do

Can you stand one more diatribe about school vouchers?

I have posted dozens of blogs addressing the multiple negative consequences of starving the nation’s public schools in order to funnel tax dollars into the pockets of people who mostly don’t need those dollars. But the incredibly negative fiscal consequences of voucher programs aren’t even what makes these programs most damaging.

There are several reasons that the authors of Project 2025 promoted school vouchers so heavily.

As I have pointed out, most of the “private” schools accepting vouchers are religious schools–and a significant percentage are fundamentalist. Not only do several of them teach religious dogma rather than science or accurate history (in Louisiana, a study found several substituting creationism for evolution), the segregation of children by religion reinforces social polarization. In public schools, children from various backgrounds mingle in the same classrooms, an often-overlooked element of efforts to achieve e pluribus unum, or “from many, one.” (I’ve also previously reported on my own co-authored study of voucher schools in Indiana, which found few of them bothering to teach civics.)

A number of those schools also actively discriminate on the basis of religious dogma–refusing to accept gay children or the children of gay couples. And despite initial efforts to describe vouchers as a measure to help minority children “stuck” in substandard public schools, some studies have found that voucher students are overwhelmingly White.

Several scholars have pointed out that these programs operate almost entirely in urban regions. Rural areas simply don’t have enough children to support additional schools, so the net effect in many states is to siphon funds from rural public schools to support voucher options in the more densely populated urban areas.

Other studies have confirmed that the bulk of the dollars being taken from public education are going to wealthier families, many of whom were paying private school tuition before We the Taxpayers thoughtfully took that burden from them.

By far the most telling consequence of this movement to destroy public education has been the utter failure of these private religious schools to produce the educational outcomes promised. Children in voucher schools do not perform better--and often perform signifiantly worse–on standardized tests of reading and math.

Recently, Heather Cox Richardson visited the voucher debate, and put it into historical context. She began by revisiting the Nat Turner uprising and the reaction to that event by the slaveholding South–a reaction that was twofold: justifying slavery and withholding education from enslaved Blacks.

Denying enslaved Black Americans access to education exiled them from a place in the nation. The Framers had quite explicitly organized the United States not on the principles of religion or tradition, but rather on the principles of the Enlightenment: the idea that, by applying knowledge and reasoning to the natural world, men could figure out the best way to order society. Someone excluded from access to education could not participate in that national project. Instead, that person was read out of society, doomed to be controlled by leaders who marshaled religion and propaganda to defend their dominance.

Richardson then traced the efforts of the then-Republican Party to rebut this anti-education effort, from Lincoln to Brown v. Board of Education. Brown, as we know, was met with the South’s “massive resistance” to integration. Some areas closed their public schools, while others took funds from the newly integrated public schools and redistributed them to segregated private schools.

Richardson notes that this massive resistance has never died–that “The drive to push tax dollars from public schools to private academies through a voucher system remained a top priority for those on the right.” She documents the massive amounts being siphoned from public schools in Arizona and in Texas, where a study by the state comptroller showed that “of the more than 100,000 families participating in the new private school voucher program, most are white and from urban areas… About 70% were already attending private schools or being homeschooled.”

I encourage readers to click through and read Richardson’s lengthy post in its entirety. Her report amply supports her concluding paragraph:

In 1831, southern lawmakers tried to create a white nation by making it a crime to educate Black Americans. In 2026 the intent to exclude certain Americans from participation in the Enlightenment principles that undergird the nation remains the same, only less explicit.

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Vouchers And Accountability

Last week’s primaries generated lots of food for thought and discussion, not to mention argument. That said, I found  one race–in the Red state of Iowa–especially intriguing, because Rob Sand, the Democrat running for governor, has focused on the issue of vouchers.

Chalkbeat has the story.

A Democrat in an increasingly red state, Sand is aggressively campaigning against the state’s education savings account, or ESA, program, which passed in 2023. The state now provides publicly funded vouchers for families to pay for private-school tuition and expenses.

Sand–who styles himself a fiscal hawk– points out that the voucher program is siphoning off hundreds of millions of dollars from Iowa’s public schools. He is emphasizing the importance of oversight and the absence of such oversight from Iowa’s program. He also criticises the lack of income limits to the program–a feature of Indiana’s equally wasteful voucher program. Sand says that “when you allow private schools to take public money but reject students, then you actually haven’t promoted school choice because the school is the one that gets to make the choice.” He reiterates that he wants public oversight over public money, and his arguments appear to be resonating with Iowa voters.

Iowa isn’t the only state with deeply unsatisfactory public control over a voucher program. Last December, The Washington Post published a report on Florida’s voucher program–a report headlined as a “cautionary tale.”  Florida, like Indiana and Iowa, allows any family in the state to get a taxpayer-funded school voucher regardless of income. Enrollment in Florida’s voucher program is nearly half a million children.

Florida’s auditor general has found “a myriad of accountability challenges.”

By the end of the 2024-25 school year, the program cost $398 million more than expected, according to a recently released report from Florida’s auditor general. And when students switched between public schools and voucher-funded programs, tax dollars did not move with them as lawmakers had promised.

On any given day, Florida’s education department did not know where 30,000 students were going to school and could not account for the $270 million in taxpayer funds it took to support them, according to the state Senate Appropriations Committee on Pre-K-12 Education…
“This money was money the school districts should have received and never did until this all came to light,” said Norín Dollard, senior policy analyst and Kids Count director at the Florida Policy Institute, a think tank that has been critical of vouchers. “Maybe that could have been some more teachers, it could have been enhanced curriculum. It couldn’t happen because the funds were not there to do it.”
The issue of accountability is important, but as I have frequently reported on this blog, it is hardly the only problem with these programs. One issue of concern is the fact that the private schools accepting these tax dollars are overwhelmingly religious, and a significant portion of them teach versions of fundamentalist Christianity.
In 2021, an investigation by Huffpost found that textbooks used in a majority of Christian schools delivered what you might call a “curated”(i.e. skewed) history, and taught that contemporary America is experiencing “an urgent moral decline that can only be fixed by conservative Christian policies.” The analysis found that language used in the books “overlaps with the rhetoric of Christian nationalism, often with overtones of nativism, militarism and racism as well.”
Research also fails to support claims that voucher schools improve student outcomes. Despite lots of rhetoric, most academic studies of school voucher programs find that the only area of improvement is in parental satisfaction. Even in well-run programs, student performance remains where one would expect based upon a variety of sociological factors. Reports about rising test scores tend, upon further inquiry, to be based on the ability of private schools to eject students who aren’t making the grade.
The data debunking the educational performance of voucher schools has been available for years. Back in 2012, Mother Jones listed some of the “lessons” being taught by Louisiana’s voucher schools, including that dinosaurs and people hung out together; and that gays have no more claims to ‘special rights’ than child molesters and rapists.
We Americans have a love affair with easy answers. We also tend to believe that–whatever the task–private enterprises will outperform governmental ones. We also have a tendency to think that change equals improvement. Unfortunately, solving real-world problems requires analysis. Sometimes, there actually is an easy answer; sometimes, a private entity is better suited to solve a certain problem. Sometimes, change is warranted–and positive.

Sometimes, not so much.

I’m rooting for Rob Sand.

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Grading Schools

In a recent commentary, economist Michael Hicks reported the results of a research project–a study which both confirmed other studies of public school performance and distinguished the effects of socio-economic status from instructional effectiveness in the production of standardized test scores.

We have long known that student achievement is heavily dependent upon parental income, and that students from impoverished backgrounds face barriers their wealthier classmates do not. What is less recognized is the fact that the results of standardized testing often reflect the reality that students in some school districts are more prosperous than students in other districts, and that higher average test scores reflect that economic reality rather than the quality of the education provided.

Hicks and his research team set out to measure the extent to which superior test scores were a result of higher prosperity, and the extent to which those scores could be attributed to superior teaching–what he dubbed the “value added” dimension. They found that “some Indiana districts are dramatically outperforming what their demographics would predict, while others are leaving potential on the table.”

Hicks reminded readers that differences in standardized test scores have been shown to account for as much as one-third of the differences in home values between neighborhoods and communities. Given that economic importance, you would think that measuring school quality accurately would be important, yet Hicks notes that Indiana continues to use methods better suited to 1926 than 2026.

An accurate understanding of how well a school performs begins by accounting for the kinds of families that school serves, because–unlike the private schools participating in the state’s bloated voucher program–public schools don’t get to choose their students.

Fortunately, there’s abundant data on each school corporation. We know the size, race and ethnicity of students in every Indiana school. We know how many are labeled as English language learners because they speak another language at home. These data provide us with a way to isolate schools’ contributions to outcomes from families’ contributions.

We can also add measures of poverty, such as the share of students eligible for the free and reduced-price lunch program and per-student spending, which is adjusted upward based on three measures of poverty or family hardship.

In this model of Indiana’s 290 public school corporations, there were only two issues that correlated with test scores: our poverty measures and the share of Asian students in the school (but only tests at 8th grade and above). This held across the 3rd- and 8th-grade ILEARN and 10th-grade SAT share who met the college-ready benchmark.

School size didn’t matter. The share of White or Black students didn’t matter. And the English language learner share didn’t matter — which is sure to disappoint anti-immigrant folks in the state.

The study found that what affected school performance was poverty, confirming what Hicks acknowledged is “among the most studied and clear findings of the last half-century of social science research.” The study was intended to identify how much  student learning could be attributed to things the school is able to control — staff, standards and curriculum. As Hicks noted, “as a parent, that’s what I am interested in knowing, not just how well-heeled my neighbors are.”

Crawford County, Speedway, Brownsburg, Avon and North Spencer racked up stunning value-added measures. The students at these schools passed their standardized tests at levels ranging from 24.2% to 31.5% higher than they were predicted to do, given their community demographics.

We tested these measures over several years, and there was a lot of consistency from year to year. But there were some outliers as well. The five schools that saw the biggest year-to-year change were South Central, Blackford, DeKalb, Crawford and Caston. Those schools saw their value-added increase from 20.8% to 32.8%.

Hicks suggests that identifying schools performing well should encourage schools not currently adding equivalent value to contact and learn from these high-ranking institutions.

In a state with better lawmakers, a study of this sort might also lead to a revision of state education policy. This, however, is Indiana, where we elect culture warriors who focus on preventing one or two transgender women from playing school sports, and facilitate the ability of well-heeled “religious” parents to use our tax dollars to send their offspring to parochial schools that copious research shows don’t perform as well academically as the public schools they are leaving.

Our legislative motto might as well be: “We don’t need no stinking evidence…”

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