7 February 2025
Over the last few years, pressure and intensity have mounted in the battle over school choice. The conservative push to funnel state money towards private schools has become massively successful since the COVID pandemic shook up public education in 2020. Since 2021, nine states have expanded school choice policies in a domino effect of sweeping changes [1]. As the movement gains momentum, vouchers— government-funded coupons for private school tuition— have sparked conflict in state legislatures’ funding negotiations. For example, they were at the center of Pennsylvania’s budget fight two summers ago that dragged an impasse up to nearly six months; the $100 million voucher proposal also failed during budget negotiations this past summer [2].
The record of vouchers’ impact on educational achievement, school performance, and racial and income sorting remains mixed—far from the wealth of evidence arguably necessary to justify their implementation in more and more states. Once conceptualized as a policy narrowly targeted towards disadvantaged families to give their children a better education, the voucher programs proliferating across the country today are universal, which enables even wealthy families to have their choices subsidized by the government. The school choice movement is driven by religious families, who are now the primary benefactors of vouchers, and religious schools, many of which are funded by government vouchers while discriminating against LGBTQ students and those with disabilities. Voucher programs may, when narrowly tailored, expand opportunity for low-income students dissatisfied with their public education options. But today’s school choice movement has gained its momentum by sowing skepticism in public education, funneling resources away from an already-underfunded foundational civic institution.
School vouchers are government-funded coupons that cover private school tuition for families who don’t want to send their children to their local public school. The average voucher amount is $4,600, though amounts vary from state to state [3]. This is much lower than the average nationwide cost of private school tuition, $12,350 [4]. Like most education policies in the U.S., including public school funding formulas, school curricula, teacher certifications, and standardized tests, vouchers are a state-level policy— their implementation is entirely dependent on the political composition of each state’s legislature.
Voucher programs vary heavily in who is eligible to receive vouchers and the criteria for private school participation. Some voucher programs are state-funded, while others draw from donations to private foundations. For example, Pennsylvania currently has the Opportunity Scholarship Tax Credit Program (OSTCP), which funnels money through private scholarship organizations that administer vouchers [5]. Education Savings Accounts (ESAs) —the direct deposit of public funds into government-authorized savings accounts for educational expenses, including private school tuition fees or learning materials for homeschooling —are another iteration of a school choice policy [6]. ESAs have massively grown in conservative-run states within the last four years. Some programs allow private schools to charge tuition beyond the amount covered by the vouchers (“top-ups”), while others cap tuition at participating private schools at the voucher value. While certain states’ initiatives require private schools to accept all applicants and utilize a lottery system when applications exceed available slots, others allow private schools to be more particular about who they accept [7].
Proponents of vouchers argue that they would expand the choices available to families by enabling them to move their children to a new school without having to change their residence, which determines which public school they attend. This “choice” factor drives the movement today. Pro-voucher advocates also argue that competition in between public and private schools would boost educational quality and diversity while lowering costs, drawing from economist Milton Friedman’s influential free market defense of vouchers in 1955 [8]. Opponents of vouchers claim that they siphon public money away from already struggling public schools to subsidize private schools, which can maintain worse educational standards and discriminate against certain students. Teacher unions—most notably the National Education Association, the largest labor union in the country—heavily oppose vouchers on the grounds that they siphon money away from public education [9]. Opponents also worry about increased segregation along the lines of income, race, or ability. High-achieving or high-income voucher students leaving schools could make their old public schools even more poor-performing due to a loss of positive peer effects [10]. Others argue that voucher programs funnel state funding into religious institutions, some of which discriminate against LGBTQ students and those with disabilities [11].
Critics also cite a troubling historical context that reveals how vouchers have often perpetuated segregation and inequality. Vouchers began in the U.S. as a tool for white families to keep their children from going to school with Black children during federal desegregation efforts in the mid 20th century [12]. As part of the “massive resistance” against desegregation, many governments in Southern states established voucher systems limited only to white students while simultaneously establishing whites-only private schools. Rather than pursue integration, Prince Edward County in Virginia closed its entire public school system in 1959 and opened Prince Edward Academy, a “segregation academy” that explicitly barred Black students. Other copycat segregation academies sprung up throughout the South; by 1969, over 200 were operational. Seven states at this time had voucher programs to incentivize white students to leave recently desegregated public schools [13].
By the ’80s and ’90s, the conversation around vouchers took a drastic turn. The fundamental idea of this new era of vouchers was one of equity: the government provides a financial boost so that low-income families have the same choices as wealthier families who can afford to move to more affluent areas in pursuit of good schools. Vouchers were intended as an opportunity-leveler, enabling some children to escape “failing” public schools [14]. The Milwaukee Parental Choice Program in Wisconsin was the first large-scale voucher system in the country. It restricted participation to families with an annual income of less than 175 percent of the federal poverty level [15]. Other states that followed suit, including Ohio, Florida, Arizona, and Indiana, also implemented voucher programs with highly restricted eligibility targeted towards low-income families, students in poorly performing schools, or children with disabilities [16]. These programs were highly targeted, granting eligibility to only a small percentage of families in each state.
By the early aughts, conservatives were ramping up a push to expand these programs. In 2000, Betsy DeVos (who would later go on to be President Trump’s Secretary of Education) and her family dumped $5.6 million into a Michigan ballot initiative that would amend the state constitution to allow school vouchers [17]. This initiative, and two dozen others scattered across states, failed—and they continued to fail, all the way up until the pandemic. The concentration of culture wars in K-12 public schools about mask mandates, online instruction, and education of LGBTQ and racial issues offered a radical disruption of public education that was needed for school choice advocates to push through their own disruptive policies. “It is time for the school choice movement to embrace the culture war,” wrote the Heritage Foundation’s Jay Greene and James Paul in 2022 [18]. This shift corresponded with increasing interest in vouchers among wealthier suburban families, a much more powerful constituency than the low-income families vouchers were once intended to serve [19].
In 2020, zero states had universal voucher programs in place [20]. But the major shake-ups in K-12 education gave conservatives a window to push through drastic changes. As of November of last year, nine states had enacted universal school vouchers, including Arizona, Iowa, Utah, and Florida [21]. In Arizona, this represents an expansion of an existing highly targeted school choice program. Just a year after its inception in 2011, when it was limited to special needs students, Arizona’s program grew to include children in poorly performing schools, active-duty military families, and adopted children [22]. In 2022, it was made universal [23].
“It’s really hard to overstate how different from any kind of previous legislation these programs are,” said Liz Cohen, policy director at Georgetown University’s FutureEd think tank. “It’s not income-tested; it’s not about getting the lowest-income kids in the worst schools. Prior to three years ago, I would have bet a lot of money you would have never seen this happen” [24].
These new programs overwhelmingly utilize Education Saving Accounts, or ESAs. These government-allocated funds that go towards education costs for families provide even more freedom than traditional vouchers because they include homeschooling and virtual schooling. One investigation into Arizona’s voucher program found that ESAs’ increased freedom has led to state funding of questionable expenses in the form of parent write-offs, including ski resort passes and trampolines passed off as educational expenses [25].
This drastic expansion of voucher programs has also brought a new factor to the forefront of the school choice conversation: religion. Religious families and institutions are now a major part of the coalition pushing for more school choice; parents who regularly attend religious services are 15 percent more likely to use vouchers [26]. And this movement’s policy victories greatly benefit religious schools. Religious schools make up an overwhelming share of voucher-eligible private schools (89 percent in Pennsylvania’s OSTC Program), voucher students (82 percent in Florida), and voucher funding (87 percent in Arizona) [27].
Opponents of vouchers point out that vouchers blur the constitutional lines between church and state, with government money directly funding religious schools. However, in a recent Supreme Court decision, the conservative majority ruled that a small voucher program in Maine that excluded religious private schools amounted to discrimination against religion [28]. In Pennsylvania, the voucher programs are run through the private scholarship organizations precisely because the state constitution explicitly prohibits using tax dollars to fund religious schools [29]. The freedom of families to choose religious schools could be correlated with a decline in educational quality in some regards—hundreds of private schools in voucher programs, for instance, explicitly teach creationism, the fundamentalist Christian belief that life originated from divine creation rather than natural processes, in science classes [30].
Opponents are also concerned about religious schools’ discrimination against LGBTQ students and those with disabilities. These schools enjoy the legal protection to discriminate because federal anti-discrimination laws (both Title IX of the Civil Rights Act and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act) explicitly carve out an exception for religious private schools [31]. This means that religious private schools, funded by public money, are allowed to turn away and expel students who would otherwise face protections in public schools. An analysis in Wisconsin found that nearly half of voucher schools had policies or statements that discriminated against LGBTQ students or those with disabilities, the latter most commonly because of a lack of capacity to make special accommodations [32].
“Let’s just stop calling it a ‘choice program,’” said Jeffrey Spitzer-Resnick, a civil rights attorney and disability education advocate, about Wisconsin’s voucher program. “And let’s call it a private discriminatory education program funded with your tax dollars” [33].
And despite the potential to help students with disabilities, vouchers may instead be underserving them. A Department of Education evaluation of the DC voucher program found that the second most common reason parents didn’t use a voucher was because of a lack of special needs services at private institutions [34]. Parents may have trouble finding private schools that will accept students with disabilities, as the private schools being subsidized by vouchers are legally allowed to discriminate against them [35]. Private schools often deny admission based on disciplinary history, which disproportionately affects students with disabilities. When children with disabilities go to private schools, they relinquish federal rights they have in public schools. They are no longer under the protection of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which ensures that students are provided the services required by their Individualized Education Programs (IEPs) [36]. Money being diverted to vouchers could also worsen public schools’ special education programs and support for students with disabilities. For example, understaffing, especially a shortage of aides could be devastating for students who need individualized attention [37].
The voucher programs of the past have been transformed into the voucher programs of today. Once posed by conservatives as a free market solution to a lack of educational opportunity among disadvantaged students, vouchers are now overwhelmingly funding religious schools and often subsidizing discrimination.
The empirical evidence on vouchers is mixed—a far cry from the positive transformational effect on student outcomes advocates promised.
Multiple studies have either found no gains in test scores or gains that emerge only after the third of fourth year of private school enrollment [38]. Studies on Louisiana’s voucher program found a consistent trend of declining test scores among participating students; one group of researchers found that the attendance at a voucher-eligible private school increases the likelihood of a failing math score by 50 percent [39]. Another found effects of school vouchers only on the test scores of African American students [40].
Some studies have found improvements along another metric: graduation rates. One study found that while vouchers had no impact on test scores, they did have a large positive impact on graduation rates [41]. Another found no impact on overall college enrollments among voucher students but did find a significant increase of 24 percent among African American students [42].
These variable results could be because of the great heterogeneity among private schools in the U.S. Many parents associate private schools with a superior education, and the theoretical model of vouchers assumes that private schools are inherently higher quality, thus the government subsidizes families to abandon public schools in favor of them. In the U.S., private schools include high-quality prep schools, but they include religious schools and those with specialized curricula [43]. One group of researchers found that, once controlling for student characteristics like race and income, private schools actually do not produce better academic performance than public schools on average [44]. Another study of standardized test scores found that when controlling for demographic characteristics of students, private schools were not superior to public schools in fourth grade reading or eighth grade math; private schools performed better in eighth grade reading but public schools had higher scores on fourth grade math [45]. Rather than being unequivocally associated with an improvement in scores, private schools are associated with a greater variation in scores [46].
Early studies showing positive returns to vouchers could have been inaccurate because they included just a small number of high-quality private schools—a picture at odds with the long lists of eligible private schools in many state programs today [47]. There are not enough high-quality private schools to accommodate the number of students participating in large voucher programs today; voucher programs might also attract struggling private schools that join the programs in an attempt to boost enrollment [48]. So, rather than voucher programs granting students access to a new pool of high quality private schools, which would improve student outcomes and induce competition to improve public schools, they simply open up a large pool of private schools of widely varying quality. This expands parental choice (enabling them to send their children to religious schools, for instance), but it does not boost student performance.
Opponents of vouchers argue that they promote stratification by race and income by enabling wealthier parents to pursue certain preferred private schools, which remain out of reach [49]. This is a major concern because American schools remain highly segregated [50]. Some researchers find that white households are more likely to support vouchers when their children attend schools with more students of color [51]. Others have found that vouchers assist integration aims; in Louisiana, for example, vouchers significantly reduced racial segregation in public schools, though they had no effect on private schools. Researchers found that this effect on public schools was most prevalent in districts under active federal desegregation orders [52].
A 2017 survey of the research to date produced only the conclusion that more research was needed on the issue [53]. Ultimately, vouchers have not proven themselves a reliable way to improve educational outcomes. Despite this, some states are pouring hundreds of millions into vouchers [54]. School choice programs are overrunning funding allocations in multiple states, including a massive gap of $319 million in Arizona that made up a large part of the state’s 2024 budget shortfall [55]. While slashing funding for water infrastructure projects, highway expansion, community colleges, and improvements to conditions in state prisons, Arizona maintained its hundreds of millions of dollars in voucher funding [56].
A primary reason that vouchers have become a money drain rather than a money-maker, as promised through increases in public school efficiency, is because a majority of the funds go towards students already enrolled in private schools, rather than enabling families to seek better schools they couldn’t otherwise afford [57]. In Florida, nearly 70 percent of new applicants to the state’s newly expanded ESA program were already in private school [58]. A large contingent of families utilizing vouchers are not disadvantaged ones, but those who could already handily afford more expensive private schools and who were thus already sending their children there by the time vouchers were introduced. Voucher programs subsidize choices families were already making rather than enabling children to seek out better schools.
Voucher programs cannot be discussed as a monolith. Today’s universal voucher programs, available to everyone in a large geographical area, even the wealthy, are very different, policy-design-wise, from the programs targeted towards certain low-income families or those with children attending poorly performing schools of the late 20th century. This change could very well have major implications for the programs’ effectiveness. One study, for instance, modeled the New York City K-12 school environment and concluded that vouchers targeted towards families attending low quality public schools were much more effective than those aimed at poor individual households [59]. Another found that the quality of the private schools available could drastically impact the effectiveness of the program, with the association of declining test scores and vouchers in Louisiana potentially due to the low quality of the participating private schools at the program’s advent [60]. (As the program matured and more high-quality private schools entered, academic achievement also improved.) [61] There is also evidence that eliminating tuition “top-ups,” which benefit wealthy families, could produce more desirable results [62].
Policymakers could take a design lesson from another voucher experiment. The Moving to Opportunity experiment was conducted in the mid ’90s by the Department of Housing and Urban Development [63]. It offered randomly selected families living in high-poverty public housing vouchers to move to other neighborhoods. The vouchers were offered to different groups, including adults and families with children of various ages, but all participants were low-income. The vouchers also had different levels of restrictions—either no restrictions, i.e. families could move anywhere they wanted with the voucher, or a restriction to neighborhoods with a low poverty level as defined by a certain threshold [64].
Multiple evaluations conducted in the 2000s concluded that the program had no significant impact on the future economic outcomes of participating adults and older youth [65]. But a more recent study by Chetty et al. dug deeper into the impacts by group level and policy design [66]. They found that moving to a lower-poverty neighborhood before a child reached their teenage years had a significant positive effect on college attendance and future earnings, with the restricted vouchers accompanying a larger effect. Crucially, the authors found that the program had no effect for people who were already adults upon receiving the vouchers and had a negative effect on people in their teenage years during the move, potentially due to disruption effects. This suggests that the common practice of putting families on waitlists for housing vouchers may be ineffective insofar as it only enables families to move to better neighborhoods when children have outgrown the window of potential positive impact [67]. On the whole, this research implies that the impact of a policy and the extent to which it meets its goals could lie in the granular design details. In the case of vouchers, this could mean the dollar amount, the broadness of the scope of eligibility for families and schools, or the source and method of allocating funding.
American public schools remain underfunded and segregated [68]. Teachers are underpaid and the physical infrastructure is crumbling [69]. In Pennsylvania, where the voucher fight has raged for years, the system of funding public schools is so inequitable that it was ruled a violation of the state constitution [70]. Ultimately, the point and effect of voucher programs, from their very inception in the days of segregation to their use to promote equity to their current place subsidizing exit to private religious schools, is to instill doubt about the quality of public education and facilitate ways to remove students and funding from each state’s public K-12 schooling system. Betsy DeVos championed a more privatized education system, calling the traditional public education system a “dead end” [71]. Vouchers yield inconclusive results on educational outcomes but have a definitive track record of discrimination and funneling money out of already weak K-12 public education. It is for this reason that universal programs should be rolled back and proposals to expand programs should be blocked.
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Works Cited
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[2] Meyer, Katie. 2024. “Private School Vouchers Opposed by More than Half of Pa. Voters, Poll Shows.” Spotlight PA. October 7, 2024. https://www.spotlightpa.org/news/2024/10/pennsylvania-public-education-private-school-vouchers-support-poll/.
[3] Fischler, Jacob. 2021. “What Parents Need to Know about School Vouchers.” US News & World Report. 2021. https://www.usnews.com/education/k12/articles/what-parents-need-to-know-about-school-vouchers.
[4] Ibid.
[5] “Opportunity Scholarship Tax Credit Program.” Pennsylvania Department of Education. https://www.education.pa.gov/K-12/Opportunity%20Scholarship%20Tax%20Credit%20Program/Pages/default.aspx.
[6] Prokop. 2023. “The Conservative Push for ‘School Choice’ Has Had Its Most Successful Year Ever.”
[7] Epple, Dennis, Richard E. Romano, and Miguel Urquiola. 2017. “School Vouchers: A Survey of the Economics Literature.” Journal of Economic Literature 55 (2): 441–92. https://doi.org/10.1257/jel.20150679.
[8] Friedman, Milton. 2006. “The Role of Government in Education *.” http://la.utexas.edu/users/hcleaver/330T/350kPEEFriedmanRoleOfGovttable.pdf.
[9] Walker, Tim. 2023. “The ‘Catastrophic Failure’ of School Vouchers | NEA.” Nea.org. 2023. https://www.nea.org/nea-today/all-news-articles/school-vouchers-catastrophic-failure.
[10] Epple, Romano, and Urquiola. 2017. “School Vouchers: A Survey of the Economics Literature.”
[11] Eckes, Suzanne E., Julie Mead, and Jessica Ulm. 2016. “Dollars to Discriminate: The (Un)Intended Consequences of School Vouchers.” Peabody Journal of Education 91 (4): 537–58. https://doi.org/10.1080/0161956x.2016.1207446.
[12] Ford, Chris, Stephenie Johnson, and Lisette Partelow. 2017. The Racist Origins of Private School Vouchers. ERIC. Center for American Progress. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED586319.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Stern, Sol. 1998. “School Choice: The Last Civil Rights Battle.” City Journal. https://www.city-journal.org/article/school-choice-the-last-civil-rights-battle.
[15] Carlson, Deven E., and Joshua M. Cowen. 2015. “School Choice and Student Neighborhoods: Evidence from the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program.” Education Policy Analysis Archives, https://doi.org/10.14507/epaa.v23.1930.
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[19] Meckler, Laura, and Hannah Natanson. 2023. “More States Are Paying to Send Children to Private and Religious Schools.” Washington Post, February 8, 2023. https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2023/02/08/school-choice-vouchers-private-religious-school-huckabee-sanders/.
[20] Prokop. 2023. “The Conservative Push for ‘School Choice’ Has Had Its Most Successful Year Ever.”
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[23] Prokop. 2023. “The Conservative Push for ‘School Choice’ Has Had Its Most Successful Year Ever.”
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[27] Spicka, Susan. 2023. “Pennsylvania Voucher Schools Use Tax Dollars to Advance Discrimination.” Education Voters PA. December 6, 2023. https://edvoterspa.org/2023/12/new-report-pa-voucher-schools-use-tax-to-advance-discrimination/.
[28] Barnes, Robert. 2022. “Supreme Court Says Maine Cannot Deny Tuition Aid to Religious Schools.” Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/06/21/supreme-court-maine-religious-schools/.
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[30] Kopplin, Zack. 2013. “Hundreds of Voucher Schools Teach Creationism in Science Classes.” January 29, 2013. PBS. https://www.pbs.org/independentlens/blog/hundreds-of-voucher-schools-teach-creationism-in-science-classes/.
[31] Donheiser, Julia. 2017. “Chalkbeat Explains: When Can Private Schools Discriminate against Students?” Chalkbeat. Chalkbeat. August 10, 2017. https://www.chalkbeat.org/2017/8/10/21107283/chalkbeat-explains-when-can-private-schools-discriminate-against-students/.
[32] Petrovic, Phoebe. 2023. “Voucher Schools Discriminate against LGBTQ+, Disabilities.” Wisconsin Watch. May 5, 2023. https://wisconsinwatch.org/2023/05/wisconsin-voucher-schools-discrimination-lgbtq-disabilities/.
[33] Petrovic, Phoebe. 2023. “Voucher Schools Discriminate against LGBTQ+, Disabilities.”
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[35] Petrovic, Phoebe. 2023. “Voucher Schools Discriminate against LGBTQ+, Disabilities.”
[36] “Students with Disabilities.” n.d. National Coalition for Public Education (NCPE). https://www.ncpecoalition.org/students-with-disabilities.
[37] Hellmann, Melissa. 2023. “What’s the Effect of School Voucher Programs on Students with Disabilities?” Center for Public Integrity. October 13, 2023. https://publicintegrity.org/education/whats-the-effect-of-school-voucher-programs-on-students-with-disabilities/.
[38] Wolf, Patrick et. al. 2010. “Evaluation of the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program.”
[39] Abdulkadiroglu, Atila, Parag Pathak, and Christopher Walters. 2015. “School Vouchers and Student Achievement: Evidence from the Louisiana Scholarship Program.” https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w21839/revisions/w21839.rev1.pdf?s.
[40] Howell, William G., Patrick J. Wolf, David E. Campbell, and Paul E. Peterson. 2002. “School Vouchers and Academic Performance: Results from Three Randomized Field Trials.” Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 21 (2): 191–217. https://doi.org/10.1002/pam.10023.
[41] Wolf, Patrick et. al. 2010. “Evaluation of the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program.”
[42] Carlson, Deven, Matthew M. Chingos, and David E. Campbell. 2017. “The Effect of Private School Vouchers on Political Participation: Experimental Evidence from New York City.” Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness 10 (3): 545–69. https://doi.org/10.1080/19345747.2016.1256458.
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[44] Ibid.
[45] Braun, Henry et. al. 2006. “Comparing Private Schools and Public Schools Using Hierarchical Linear Modeling.” National Center for Education Statistics. July 2006. https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/pdf/studies/2006461.pdf.
[46] DeAngelis, Corey A., and M. Danish Shakeel. 2017. “Does Private Schooling Improve International Test Scores? An Instrumental Variables Fixed Effects Analysis of the Impact of Private Schooling on PISA Scores.” SSRN Electronic Journal. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2903523.
[47] Cowen, Josh. 2024. The Privateers.
[48] Abdulkadiroglu, Atila, Parag Pathak, and Christopher Walters. 2015. “School Vouchers and Student Achievement: Evidence from the Louisiana Scholarship Program.”
[49] Mickelson, Roslyn Arlin, Martha Bottia, and Stephanie Southworth. 2008. “School Choice and Segregation by Race, Class, and Achievement.” Nepc.colorado.edu, March. https://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/school-choice-and-segregation-race-class-and-achievement.
[50] U.S. Government Accountability Office. 2022. “K-12 Education: Student Population Has Significantly Diversified, but Many Schools Remain Divided along Racial, Ethnic, and Economic Lines.” Government Accountability Office. June 16, 2022. https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-22-104737.
[51] Brunner, Eric J., Jennifer Imazeki, and Stephen L. Ross. 2010. “Universal Vouchers and Racial and Ethnic Segregation.” Review of Economics and Statistics 92 (4): 912–27. https://doi.org/10.1162/rest_a_00037.
[52] Egalite, Anna J., Jonathan N. Mills, and Patrick J. Wolf. 2016. “The Impact of Targeted School Vouchers on Racial Stratification in Louisiana Schools.” Education and Urban Society 49 (3): 271–96. https://doi.org/10.1177/0013124516643760.
[53] Epple, Dennis, Richard E. Romano, and Miguel Urquiola. 2017. “School Vouchers: A Survey of the Economics Literature.”
[54] Bryant, Jeff. 2023. “How Right-Wing Brainchild ‘Universal School Vouchers’ Are Blowing through State Budgets.”
[55] Hager, Eli. 2024. “School Vouchers Were Supposed to Save Taxpayer Money. Instead They Blew a Massive Hole in Arizona’s Budget.” ProPublica. July 16, 2024. https://www.propublica.org/article/arizona-school-vouchers-budget-meltdown.
[56] Ibid.
[57] Fischer, Howard. 2022. “Most Applying for Arizona Vouchers Already Go to Private Schools.” Arizona Daily Star. September 8, 2022. https://tucson.com/news/local/education/most-applying-for-arizona-vouchers-already-go-to-private-schools/article_34d75b9a-2968-11ed-812b-f7dad22200b5.html.
[58] Lieberman, Mark. 2023. “Most Students Getting New School Choice Funds Aren’t Ditching Public Schools.” Education Week, October 4, 2023, sec. Policy & Politics, School Choice & Charters. https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/most-students-getting-new-school-choice-funds-arent-ditching-public-schools/2023/10.
[59] Nechyba, Thomas J. 2000. “Mobility, Targeting, and Private-School Vouchers.” American Economic Review 90 (1): 130–46. https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.90.1.130.
[60] Abdulkadiroglu, Atila, Parag Pathak, and Christopher Walters. 2015. “School Vouchers and Student Achievement: Evidence from the Louisiana Scholarship Program.”
[61] Ibid.
[62] Epple, Dennis, Richard E. Romano, and Miguel Urquiola. 2017. “School Vouchers: A Survey of the Economics Literature.”
[63] Sanbonmatsu, Lisa et. al. 2011. “Moving to Opportunity for Fair Housing Demonstration Program — Final Impacts Evaluation.” Harvard University. 2011. https://scholar.harvard.edu/lkatz/publications/moving-opportunity-fair-housing-demonstration-program-final-impacts-evaluation.
[64] Ibid.
[65] Kling, Jeffrey R., and Jeffrey B. Liebman. 2004. “Experimental Analysis of Neighborhood Effects on Youth.” SSRN Electronic Journal. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.600596.
[66] Chetty, Raj, Nathaniel Hendren, and Lawrence F. Katz. 2016. “The Effects of Exposure to Better Neighborhoods on Children: New Evidence from the Moving to Opportunity Experiment.” American Economic Review 106 (4): 855–902. https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.20150572.
[67] Ibid.
[68] Hacker, Chris, Amy Corral, Stephen Stock, and Jose Sanchez. 2023. “Majority-Black School Districts Have Far Less Money to Invest in Buildings — and Students Are Feeling the Impact – CBS News.” http://Www.cbsnews.com. September 14, 2023. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/black-school-districts-funding-state-budgets-students-impact/.
[69] Allegretto, Sylvia. 2022. “The Teacher Pay Penalty Has Hit a New High: Trends in Teacher Wages and Compensation through 2021.” Economic Policy Institute. August 16, 2022. https://www.epi.org/publication/teacher-pay-penalty-2022/.
[70] Lieberman, Mark. 2023. “Pennsylvania School Funding Is Unconstitutional, Judge Says. Here’s What Could Happen Next.” Education Week, February 8, 2023, sec. Education Funding. https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/pennsylvania-school-funding-is-unconstitutional-judge-says-heres-what-could-happen-next/2023/02.
[71] Strauss, Valerie. 2016. “To Trump’s Education Pick, the U.S. Public School System Is a ‘Dead End.’” The Washington Post. December 21, 2016. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2016/12/21/to-trumps-education-pick-the-u-s-public-school-system-is-a-dead-end/.
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