Vouchers are a state-funded program that pays tuition, fees, and other expenses for students to attend private schools or to be homeschooled, rather than attending a free public school.
Of course, state funds are taxpayer money. Now, in Oklahoma, taxpayers are footing the bill for students from wealthy families who were already attending private and religious schools.
Arizona is touted as the nation’s leader in funding private schools. Indeed, universal voucher programs are going into effect in eleven states (https://www.nea. org/nea-today/all-news-articles/ no-accountability-vouchers-wreakhavoc- state).
Now Oklahoma has joined the movement, even though state-wide problems with existing charter and private schools are becoming painfully clear. Arizona’s universal voucher program, now in its second year, provides a cautionary tale.
In 1998, the Arizona legislature began awarding scholarships to private schools. By 2022, Arizona’s program had grown into a universal voucher system where any student is eligible to switch to private schools at taxpayer expense. An estimated 50,000 students who were already enrolled in private Arizona schools now receive taxpayer money.
Republicans in Arizona, as in the nation, have been scheming for decades to privatize public schools. Republicans call our public schools “government” schools where children are supposedly indoctrinated into being “woke.” They make these claims based on very sketchy examples (https://azeconcenter. org/arizona-school-vouchers-explained).
The Arizona voucher program, estimated to cost taxpayers $65 million, exploded to $900 million in the most recent school year. The result is a $1.6 billion deficit in the state budget for 2024/2025 (https:// azeconcenter.org/1101-2). On a smaller scale, this is where Oklahoma is headed (Oklahoma has about 4 million people; Arizona has about 7.4 million.)
As usual, the biggest negative effect of diverting public funds to private schools will be on our desperately underfunded public schools.
In Oklahoma, vouchers are estimated to cost taxpayers $116 million to $162 million. This guess is based on about 20 thousand students using state vouchers, or 2.6% of the state’s student population (https://freepressokc.com › what-we-know-so-far-aboutoklahomas- school-voucherbill).
The once grand old Republican party has devolved into a hateful party of and for the rich. Rich people were already sending their children to private or religious schools. Now they attend at taxpayer expense.
In Oklahoma, public schools are the mainstay of rural communities. There is no school choice in many areas unless families want to move to larger towns or send their children to boarding schools. Rural schools are already underserved and underfunded, and vouchers could very well kill them.
Private schools are not accountable to taxpayers. Under current Oklahoma law, the state is not allowed to collect student achievement data from private schools! Private schools that accept vouchers have no limit on administrators’ pay, no requirement to account for how voucher money is spent, no public reporting of student benchmarks, no curriculum requirements, and NO taxpayer oversight (www.ossba.org/advocacy/ vouchers). As was the case for Oklahoma’s Epic Charter Schools, lack of oversight almost guarantees corruption.
The push to privatize schools originated with farright- wing billionaires including the Koch brothers and Betsy DeVos, Trump’s Secretary of Education. The stiffest resistance has come from rural communities. In Texas, the House recently voted to take vouchers out of an education bill. Gov. Greg Abbott responded with a purge of anti-voucher Republicans, using a fund of millions from Jeff Yass, a finance billionaire (https://www.publicnotice. co/p/school-vouchers-texasexplained).
Republican plans are outlined in their 900-page Project 2025 playbook for another Trump term. The plan for education is to use more taxpayer money to fund private and religious schools, teach Old Testament “Christianity” in remaining public schools, cut any Title1 program that supports low-income students, diminish academic freedom, abolish teacher tenure, eliminate the Department of Education, and discontinue free lunches for children, summer feeding programs, food stamps and Head Start.
Whew! Trump and Vance have no idea what life is like for working families with school children. To top things off, Project 2025 plans stipulate that there will be no government support for daycare (https://www.rollingstone. com/politics/politics-news/ project-2025-proposes-defunding- daycare).
In contrast, the Democratic principle for education is all children, no matter who they are, how much their families earn, or where they live, should have access to a quality public K-12 education (https://democrats.org/ where-we-stand/the-issues/ education).
Democrats have plans to make college affordable for more Americans, teach civics, include job training skills, pay teachers a living wage, provide lunch for schoolchildren, hire nurses and counselors for schools, and streamline existing federal programs that help students.
Americans, including the childless, have long supported public schools. Democracy depends on citizens who can evaluate information, think, and make up their own minds. To thrive as one nation, we need to support the great American innovation of public school for everyone.
The coming election is no longer a contest between two parties. In November we can choose Harris and Walz, who favor fairness and democracy, or Trump and Vance, who favor control and dictatorship.