Why did it break through after decades of effort — and what comes next?
Updated Sep 11, 2023, 12:35 PM UTC
Andrew Prokop is a senior politics correspondent at Vox, covering the White House, elections, and political scandals and investigations. He’s worked at Vox since the site’s launch in 2014, and before that, he worked as a research assistant at the New Yorker’s Washington, DC, bureau.
With little national attention, the conservative movement has racked up a remarkable series of victories on one of their long-held policy dreams.
For decades, activists on the right have pushed to steer state money toward alternatives to the public school system. Typically, they proposed vouchers, in which the state would pay part or all of a child’s private school tuition.
But despite all this effort, conservatives could only get limited and targeted voucher programs into place — vouchers for low-income families, or those in low-performing school districts, or for students with disabilities.
Even in the reddest states, they fell short of their true Holy Grail: public money funding private school tuition, for all who want it, including middle-class and wealthy families.
Very suddenly, that has changed. It started with West Virginia in 2021 and Arizona in 2022, and then continued with a flood this year — Iowa, Utah, Arkansas, Florida, Oklahoma, Ohio, and Indiana. More may follow. “It’s happening!” Corey DeAngelis, a conservative activist who describes himself as a “school choice evangelist,” regularly tweets, joyfully chronicling each new victory.
The reform sweeping red America is slightly different from a voucher — it’s called an education savings account, or an ESA. In a voucher system, public funds go directly to schools. With ESAs, parents who opt out of the public school system get several thousand dollars in an account that they can use for private school tuition, homeschooling, or other education-related expenses.
But the biggest change is in who can use them: everyone. “It’s really hard to overstate how different from any kind of previous legislation these programs are,” said Liz Cohen, policy director for 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.”
The aftereffects of the Covid-19 pandemic and an unfolding culture war shook up the status quo enough that a longstanding, well-financed conservative advocacy effort could finally defeat longstanding resistance. Now, in many red states and the occasional purple state, we’re seeing what could prove the most sweeping change in K-12 education policy in decades.
“We’re ending up with, really, two different systems for arranging our schools,” said Morgan Polikoff, an associate professor at USC Rossier School of Education. Blue states are sticking with the traditional state-funded public education system, while red states are increasingly creating an option for government-subsidized private school tuition — the full consequences of which won’t be clear for some time.
Critics of these changes argue they amount to a wealth transfer to families with kids in private schools, and they fear it will result in the weakening or even the eventual privatization of public school systems. They also voice concern over the separation of church and state, since many ESA funds will go toward sending children to religious education.
For many supporters, those are features, not bugs. They characterize the new ESA laws as letting parents take “their money” — the dollars that would have been used to educate their kids — out of public schools they have no interest in using. They call this “funding students instead of systems.” Their critics say it’s the destruction of the common good.
Public schools have long been treated as a public resource. They are typically administered by local governments, free to all, and funded by taxpayers generally, including those who don’t have children.
But in a 1955 paper, economist Milton Friedman proposed a different model. The government should stop running schools, and instead merely give parents vouchers worth a certain amount that could be redeemed at “approved” educational institutions. This, he asserted, would create free market competition, expand the choices available to parents, and produce better outcomes than the current government-funded monopolies.
In the ensuing decades, various groups dissatisfied with the public school system would come to embrace vouchers as an alternative, as journalist Cara Fitzpatrick writes in her new book The Death of Public School. The coalition included free market enthusiasts like Friedman, but also devout families preferring religious schooling for their children. And as school desegregation was taking place, some Southern white parents hoped voucher-like policies could help fund their kids’ exit to mostly white private schools. These policies were eventually blocked by courts, meaning “white flight” had to occur without government help.
The most effective converts to the voucher cause were several deep-pocketed conservative donors — members of the DeVos, Koch, and Walton families, and leaders of the Bradley Foundation, among others. Some appeared to be motivated by free market ideology and others by religious belief, but the common thread was a disdain for government.
These donors’ largesse and consistency ensured that, whichever way the political winds were blowing, there would always be a well-funded network of voucher supporters refining policy arguments, shaping advocacy strategy, and conducting research that would produce results showing vouchers “work.” Over the past few decades, these donors spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the cause — promoting vouchers as well as other policies, like charter schools, under the banner of “school choice.”
When the quality of American schools became a nationwide concern in the 1980s and onward, conservatives pitched vouchers as a solution, framing them now as a civil rights cause. Too many poor or minority children, they said, were trapped in dysfunctional public schools. Vouchers could give some of them other options — and perhaps they could even create competitive pressures to make the public schools better. This argument prevailed in Wisconsin in 1990, when Republicans joined with a few Democrats to create the nation’s first modern voucher program, for low-income kids in Milwaukee (an idea promoted by the Wisconsin-based Bradley Foundation).
But most Democrats were anti-voucher. They argued that voucher programs would harm the public school system, draining funds and students from it. Teachers unions, a powerful Democratic-aligned interest group, were staunch opponents because private schools were non-unionized.
So at the peak of the education reform movement in the 2000s, most of the bipartisan action was on other issues. President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act focused instead on testing and accountability for schools deemed to be “failing” — Bush supported vouchers, but Democrats largely didn’t, and he needed them to pass the bill. President Barack Obama notably backed charter schools, which are public schools administered by independent operators, but he was hostile to vouchers.
When a few Republican-controlled states, such as Ohio, Florida, Arizona, Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Indiana, did pass statewide voucher programs, they came with sharply restricted eligibility. These were specialized programs for low-income people, those in districts with poor-performing schools, foster children, or children with special needs.
For vouchers’ biggest backers, this was never just about helping the disadvantaged. They wanted vouchers for all. And yet, despite all that conservative money and activism, not a single state had managed to create such a program by 2020.
The simplest reason is that proposals to radically disrupt public schools were unpopular. The opposition was typically led by Democrats and teachers unions, but even many Republican voters were deeply skeptical about anything that could be framed as weakening their own public schools.
Often, suburban parents had moved to an area specifically for high-quality public schools. Meanwhile, in rural areas, there could be few private options, the public schools were often significant employers, and a loss of students could mean a painful loss of funding. “The main opposition to these programs in Republican-dominated states has come from rural superintendents,” a recent Heritage Foundation paper stated. So typically, proposals for statewide vouchers ended up watered down or blocked even in Republican-controlled legislatures.
When voucher proponents took their case to the public, it went even more disastrously.
In 2000, Betsy DeVos (who would later go on to become President Donald Trump’s education secretary) and her family spent about $5 million on a Michigan voucher ballot initiative, but it failed by a 69 percent to 31 percent margin. A similar measure in California that same year failed 70-30. Out of about two dozen voucher ballot initiatives, none were approved.
Meanwhile, the few programs that passed the legislature faced court challenges, nationally and on the state level, often over government funding of religious schools. Some were struck down — including Florida Gov. Jeb Bush’s prized voucher program and a fledgling Arizona voucher program for special needs students. An alternative policy scheme involving tax credits for families who donated to nonprofits that would provide private school scholarship money gained steam in some states.
The obstacles for vouchers seemed so daunting that, in 2005, Dan Lips, an education policy expert at the Arizona-based Goldwater Institute, proposed a new spin on the policy: education savings accounts (ESAs). Now, instead of a voucher coupon that would be given directly to a private school, parents would get an account in which actual money would be deposited, and the money could also be spent on tutoring, homeschooling, or other education-related expenses.
Advocates hoped this would address the Arizona Supreme Court’s concern over funding religious schools, which had undone the state’s voucher program. Now the state money would be given to parents, not to schools directly.
ESAs were also a helpful rebranding. “Part of my job was to actively call reporters and try to get them to take the word ‘voucher’ out of their stories,” said Charles Siler, a former lobbyist for the Goldwater Institute who has since become a critic of his onetime allies.
In 2011, Arizona Republicans passed the nation’s first ESA program, limited to special needs students. They immediately went to work expanding eligibility to other groups — just one year later, nearly 20 percent of the public school population was eligible (though far fewer actually chose to participate).
But a 2018 attempt to make every Arizona student eligible ran into the Red for Ed movement of teacher activism and walkouts in conservative states. Opponents of the new law gathered enough signatures to put it up for a statewide referendum before it could go into effect. The result was similar to the other referendums: a lopsided defeat, 65 to 35 percent.
Even in red states, it seemed, you still couldn’t mess with the public schools.
It’s a cliché to say the pandemic changed everything, but for the politics of K-12 education that happens to be true.
Universal voucher bills had long failed because most parents didn’t want radical disruption of the public school status quo. The pandemic brought this radical disruption. Polarizing battles unfolded over school closures, mask and vaccine requirements, and (after reopening) how long kids should be kept home if classmates tested positive.
Then the culture war that erupted over race, gender, and sexuality teaching in schools in 2020 and beyond ensured that things never entirely returned to “normal.” Activists like Christopher Rufo argued that “critical race theory” concepts were pervading teaching about race, Twitter accounts like Libs of TikTok spread videos of educators discussing gender identity, and such matters became omnipresent on Fox News and in conservative media.
In the right’s narrative, parents reasonably recoiled against the incompetence or ideological extremism of educators. In the left’s narrative, conservatives targeted the public school system with a strategic and unrelenting campaign of vilification, laden with exaggeration and moral panic. “The overriding message has been to drive a wedge between parents and public schools,” Polikoff said.
Conservative activists saw opportunity. “It is time for the school choice movement to embrace the culture war,” the Heritage Foundation’s Jay Greene and James Paul wrote in 2022.
In a 2019 survey, 31 percent of Republican respondents said they had very little or no confidence in public schools; in a 2022 survey, that number had risen to 50 percent. Democratic and independent voters, in contrast, remained roughly as confident in the public school system as before the pandemic.
But the drop in Republican support shifted the previous political status quo, especially in red states, making rank-and-file GOP voters less hostile about proposals to shake up the system.
In June 2021, Joel John was a few months into his first term in the Arizona House of Representatives, when the state’s governor, Doug Ducey, took another shot at greatly expanding ESAs. Though a Republican, John wasn’t on board. He was concerned that public schools had to compete with unregulated private schools that lacked accountability measures. Two other Republicans, citing similar objections, joined him and blocked the proposal.
“It was my first term; it takes time to get your bearings and to understand how things work,” John told me in an interview. He would soon learn. Afterward, John and the other two holdouts were attacked in YouTube ads funded by an outside group: the American Federation for Children (AFC).
The American Federation for Children has long been the leading advocacy group trying to get vouchers passed into law. It was initially funded, founded, and chaired by Betsy DeVos, who was for many years the main financial force behind the voucher movement. (The group’s name is a dig at the American Federation of Teachers — meant to imply that the union represents teachers’ interests, while the group represents children’s.)
Investor Bill Oberndorf, who took over as board chair when DeVos became education secretary, outlined AFC’s strategy on a 2021 podcast. Statewide referendums were hopeless, he said: “There has never been a ballot initiative that’s passed.” Instead, AFC would identify “states where we feel that, over a three- to five-year period, we can change the legislative composition to be favorable to choice and where we can help elect a governor who is receptive to signing such legislation.” That legislation, it became increasingly clear, was ESAs for all who wanted them.
In Arizona, a sympathetic governor was already in place: Ducey. Ambitious Republican governors seeking to cultivate the conservative base have long been drawn to the school choice issue — it’s important to both big donors and the religious right, two key factions in GOP power politics, and it earns positive press in conservative media outlets. John’s impression, he told me, was that Ducey was “hoping to build a national platform” off the issue.
In 2021, West Virginia Republicans had created an ESA for which 90 percent of students would be eligible (students currently attending private schools were excluded). Implementation there was delayed due to a lawsuit. So in 2022, his final year in office, Ducey took another shot at getting the nation’s first truly universal ESA program — in which even families already sending their kids to private school could get money — off the ground in Arizona.
Ducey faced the same three GOP holdouts in the state House. But he and his party’s legislative leaders deployed carrots and sticks. The carrot was a historic boost in funding to the public education system, made possible due to a large budget surplus. The stick was pressure from party leaders and outside groups before the primaries. In the end, all three of the holdouts flipped, voting for the bill. “To be frank, I have regretted it ever since,” John told me.
All three went on to lose their primaries that year anyway. Meanwhile, liberal activists tried to gather signatures to force the new law onto the ballot, as they did during the Red for Ed days, but they fell short. So the nation’s first universal ESA program went into effect in Arizona in the fall of 2022.
It would not be the last. AFC intervened in state legislative primaries across the country that year, hoping some attention-getting defeats of incumbents could scare others into going along. In Iowa, after Gov. Kim Reynolds’s ESA bill failed in the state House, she backed primary challenges against several holdout Republicans. Assisted by campaign ads funded by AFC and other conservative groups like the Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity, they defeated four of them.
One, Jim Thorup, was a solid conservative but feared the bill would harm rural school districts. “I think if I agree with the governor on nine out of ten issues, that tenth issue, if we disagree on it, that should be okay,” Thorup had told the Iowa Capital Dispatch before the election.
AFC’s goal was to make sure that wasn’t okay — they wanted to make “universal school choice” a litmus test issue for Republicans, as previous generations of anti-abortion, pro-gun rights, and anti-tax activists had successfully done for their own causes. Yet the groups could only succeed in this if enough Republican voters felt the same way, and largely, they now did.
The midterms didn’t end up producing a GOP wave, but as 2023 began, a wave of ESA bills rippled through red states. Corey DeAngelis, a senior fellow at AFC, became the public face of the effort, traveling from state to state, holding rallies, making media appearances, and tweeting constantly. After getting his PhD at the University of Arkansas’s (Walton-funded) education reform program, DeAngelis concluded that he could “make more of an impact” in an advocacy role. “You can write a thousand white papers and politicians won’t even read it,” he told me.
Iowa was the first domino to fall this year, with Gov. Reynolds finally getting her ESA bill through the now-more-pliable legislature in January. Republicans in Utah, Arkansas, Florida, Oklahoma, Ohio, and Indiana soon followed with their own universal or near-universal ESA laws (though some will phase in eligibility gradually over a few years).
Other GOP-controlled states didn’t go quite so far, but took steps in that direction — South Carolina created its first ESA program, New Hampshire expanded eligibility for the program it created in 2021. In other states like Georgia and Texas, advocates have fallen short for now, but they will try again.
Arizona’s universal ESA program, which went into effect in fall 2022, is the furthest along so far. Arizona families who already sent their children to private schools or homeschools were immediately eligible for the $7,000-per-student benefit, if they signed up. Many have.
After John left office, he told me, he spoke with a local banker about the bill: “I told him it was such bad policy, I was embarrassed I supported it,” John said. “He said he was happy about it: it saved him seven grand per kid on tuition.”
“In the short term, mostly it’s just going to be a funding giveaway to families that were already sending their kids to private schools,” said Douglas Harris, an economist at Tulane University who studies education policy. “In the long run, there’s potentially a much bigger story here.”
By mid-May 2023, about 61,000 Arizona students were enrolled in an ESA, and the state department of education estimated that number would rise to 100,000, about 8 percent of school-aged children in the state, over the next year.
Shortly after the universal program was opened, the state superintendent (then a Democrat) said that 75 percent of applicants had never attended public schools in the state. More recently, the current superintendent (a Republican) said 49 percent of enrollees had been in public schools. All we know for sure is that some families who weren’t using the public school system are now getting money to do what they were already doing, and some families who had been attending public schools are now getting money to go elsewhere.
What is the money producing? Again, the answer is unclear. The Goldwater Institute bragged in 2022 that Arizona’s ESA bill “does not have any testing requirements.” (Iowa legislators, in contrast, did include some.)
Critics fear state money will go to low-quality private schools that don’t actually educate children well — and that, without transparent testing requirements, we’ll never find that out for sure. “These policies being passed now are almost being evidence-proofed,” said Polikoff. “You won’t be able to say, ‘This isn’t working, we need to do something different,’ because there won’t be the data. The data will just be, ‘Look at all these people who’ve enrolled their kids.’”
Public school enrollment will likely decline somewhat now that funds are available to go elsewhere, with the question being exactly how much. In the short term, an overwhelming exodus from public to private schools likely won’t materialize simply because the existing private school infrastructure can only support so much. (Tuition will surely increase, as is already happening in Iowa.)
But already, Arizona’s superintendent Tom Horne has said he would push to close some public schools if enrollment dropped, which is just what rural school voucher skeptics long feared.
As time passes, there could be greater change. For-profit K-12 schools will likely expand, eager to get their hands on newly available state funding (Arizona’s program is now estimated to cost $900 million). “In some places where similar things have been tried for low-income kids, there were not enough private schools, so new low-quality private schools opened,” said Cohen of FutureEd.
Many controversies surely lie ahead as well. Private schools have wide latitude to discriminate in admissions (though it’s illegal to do so based on race) — can it truly be called “universal school choice” if children can’t get into the school they want?
The politicized curriculum controversies that have dogged public schools could also soon hit private schools, with more scrutiny from the left about what certain private schools are teaching. And there will be questions about the appropriateness of some spending (one article names “chicken coops, trampolines and tickets to SeaWorld” as among homeschooling parents’ claimed education-related expenses).
There’s also the budget question. In many of these states, universal ESAs were passed at a time when state budgets were flush with Covid aid. States could create what was essentially a new benefit for families who weren’t previously utilizing government money to educate their children, while often increasing funding and teacher pay at public schools, in “have your cake and eat it too” fashion.
But the Covid aid is ending, which will eventually present a math problem for states if revenues slow down. Either taxes will have to go up, or something — ESAs, public schools, or other state spending — will have to be cut. “The federal money drying up is going to be a big deal, and the whole tenor of the conversation is going to change,” said Andrew Rotherham of Bellwether Education Partners.
Democratic opposition to ESAs remains high, but in states where they’ve been implemented, Republicans have staunchly defended them (Katie Hobbs, Arizona’s new Democratic governor, couldn’t get her effort to roll back ESAs past the GOP-controlled legislature). The wind could change in purple states, but in red states, the GOP is highly likely to hold onto legislative majorities, so ESAs are likely here to stay.
“I’d like to see the legislature roll it back and reconsider the soundness of this policy, for sure,” said John, the former Arizona legislator. “But while Republicans have a majority, don’t count on that. No one’s gonna break ranks on this where a lot of people have an interest in it and there’s so much money behind it.”
Robert Enlow, president and CEO of the group EdChoice and a supporter of the new laws, put it a different way: “Once you give choice to families, it’s going to be very hard to take it away.”
Even in states that have passed “universal school choice,” advocates may keep pushing for more. Milton Friedman, in his original voucher article from 1955, mused about getting government out of the business of administering public schools altogether.
Once the market of educational options was up and running, Friedman wrote, the role of the government could be something more like a restaurant inspector ensuring “certain minimum standards” are met. We’re a long way from that happening. But perhaps not as far off from it as we once were.
For now, DeAngelis still has more battles to fight. His home state, Texas — Republican-controlled, and home to 5.4 million students — is currently embroiled in controversy over Gov. Greg Abbott’s ESA proposal. There’s a similar story of rural reluctance among legislators, and Abbott has said he will call for a special session to try to force action. Advocates may well fail — but if there’s one thing the past few decades have proved, it’s that they’ll keep at it until they succeed.
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