Stories describe how voucher programs have hurt people and communities.

School choice has had troubling consequences for the Indiana K-12 public school system. Indiana’s Choice brings forward the voices of teachers, students, administrators, and parents to examine how school choice enables segregation of students and discrimination against students, families, and school employees.

The National Rural Education Association (NREA) advocates for equitable educational opportunities for the nearly 9 million students attending rural public schools across America. Tennessee has over 600,000 students in rural districts that are the backbone of our communities. But now our rural schools face an existential threat from school vouchers.

Legislative Bill 753 will be on the ballot in November 2024, and it's up to Nebraska voters now to decide if the state should go forward with a program to divert tax dollars to fund private school tuition.

A voucher program is a policy of diverting state and taxpayer resources marked for public education to private entities. Proponents of this system try to claim that children are “trapped in the public education system they were raised in.” This is, quite frankly, not true.

Right now, a lot of people claim to have the answer to solving the problem of equity in our education system. It seems that equity in education is a value many of us share, regardless of political leaning. There are a number of roads that people think will take us there, but not all roads are clear on the reality that education is a public good and a key ingredient in a healthy democracy.

Every Child NC's "Opportunity for Every Child" rally was held in response to the Republican-led legislative efforts to expand private school vouchers this long session. Speakers spoke about the importance of funding quality and equitable public education.

CBS 17 covers a a CREED and HEAL NC rally against school vouchers.

As a school board member in Arizona, I hear the concerns, hopes and frustrations that parents and citizens have about our public schools. The things that families worry about? School safety, shrinking budgets, student achievement and the accessibility of programs.

These are the issues that unite our students and families in our public schools and the kinds of problems that they want addressed. And these are the issues that I really want to work on with other policymakers who, regardless of political affiliation, care about similar things.

President Donald Trump didn’t coin the phrase “government schools.” But he gave it a big stage and a broader public audience during Tuesday’s State of the Union address, when he used it to urge Congress to back a bill that would provide $5 billion in tax credits to support scholarships for private school admission, tutoring, and other educational services.

Ohio public school districts that support a lawsuit against the state over private school vouchers say Republican leaders are bullying and intimidating them.

According to A.J. Calderone, superintendent of LaBrae Local Schools in Trumbull County and a member of the coalition Vouchers Hurt Ohio , Senate President Matt Huffman (R-Lima) and Auditor Keith Faber (R-Ohio) wrote to all of Ohio’s public school districts earlier this summer asking for information about individual school districts that were involved in the lawsuit against the state. Calderone said the letter was unnecessary because the requested information would have been available through the state's Legislative Service Commission.

A growing number of school districts are joining a lawsuit against the state, pushing back against private school vouchers. The lawsuit was filed last year and is awaiting trial.

“Vouchers are going on trial,” Dayton Public Schools board member Jocelyn Rhynard said. “And we will make our case in the court of law, where the law matters, and the constitution cannot be ignored.”

An Ohio program that already directs more than $100 million of public money to private schools will undergo a massive expansion this school year.

What seems like an outbreak of local skirmishes is part of a decades-long push to privatize the education system.

Public school teachers are under assault from every angle. Arizona's universal voucher program is just one (very harmful) example.

Inside a double-wide trailer on the Warm Springs reservation in central Oregon, nearly two dozen American Indian high-school students sit facing computers, teaching themselves math and history. Rain slaps the roof. Ear buds dangle from one girl’s left ear. Two more students whisper, sharing a joke. Still another student, his face set in a serious expression, stares at the screen before him. The one teacher in the room previously taught third grade; he’s certified to teach high-school continuing education and agricultural science. Nearly all of the young people who study in this trailer—officially called the Bridges Career and Technical High School at Warm Springs—are Native Americans.

Today advocates of “school choice” routinely use the language of civil rights to argue that federal and state governments should finance largely unregulated private schools through the use of vouchers. These are the same type of vouchers that were the essential tools of Southern segregationists who fought and obstructed public school desegregation after the U. S. Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. How has the nation arrived at this point?

Illinois Families for Public Schools, the Illinois Education Association, the Illinois Federation of Teachers and the League of Women Voters of Illinois held a virtual forum on Tuesday April 25, 2023, "What You Need to Know about Invest in Kids: Illinois’ Tax Credit Voucher Program."

Public schools in Illinois can't discriminate on the basis of disability status, gender identity, sexual orientation, language, pregnancy or parenting status, marital status, or religion. But under the Invest in Kids voucher program, public dollars are now going to private schools in Illinois, many of which do discriminate against students in all these protected categories.

Voucher programs around the country—whether in the form of traditional vouchers, education savings accounts (ESAs),or tax credit scholarships—are supported by well funded and organized groups. These include: Americans for Prosperity (the Koch brothers’ 501c4), the American Legislative Education Council (ALEC), the American Federation for Children (Betsy DeVos’ 501c4), Moms for Liberty and the Heritage Foundation, among others.

What do these organizations have in common? They work openly to discredit public schools and push a privatization agenda, using the slogans of school choice, education freedom and parent rights. Many of them were on the ground working on the April 2023 school board elections in Illinois.

The push to dismantle public education via voucher schemes that start small and then metastasize to drain public coffers isn’t just a battle happening in Illinois. It’s nationwide, and it’s accelerating.

This web page from Illinois Families for Public Schools includes blog posts covering school voucher programs in Illinois.

In 2017, as a result of a backroom deal between then Governor Rauner, legislative leaders and the Archbishop of the Archdiocese of Chicago, the IL General Assembly created a K-12 voucher program for Illinois in the form of a tax credit scholarship scheme. Known as the Invest in Kids Act, the law allows up to $75 million in tax revenue to be diverted to private schools each year. More than $250 million state dollars have now been siphoned off to private schools in our state.

This program was intended to last for five years and to sunset after the 2022-2023 school year. It was extended for one additional school year already. Voucher supporters and school privatizers want it to be made permanent and expand!

Our Voucher School Scam$ page, which we began in September of 2023 in response to the recent flood of irresponsible universal voucher programs includes a sorting feature that allows you to search charter scandals by state and by 12 categories. You can also search by keyword. Just use the ‘X’ to clear search terms and return to the full list of scandals.

A looming education bill in Raleigh will harm public schools in the Scotland County area if it becomes law. Senate Bill 406/House Bill 823 would triple the size of the state’s Opportunity Scholarship private school voucher program by opening the program to wealthy families whose kids are already enrolled in private schools and increasing the maximum voucher size. The bill would negatively impact public schools across the state but will have a particularly negative impact on rural schools.

Policies that base funding on community wealth and ignore the real costs of educating all students hurt everyone, especially students of color, students from families with limited incomes, and students who require additional programs, supports and services.

Vouchers are state-funded certificates that are used to pay tuition to private schools. Mississippians have been so opposed to using taxpayer dollars to fund private schools that our constitution bans these voucher payments. Savvy folks who have long sought to privatize our public schools now are attempting to circumvent the constitution – and the will of the people – by using tax credits and education savings accounts to funnel state tax dollars to private schools.

The most recent research on the academic impact of private school vouchers finds that voucher students experience significant losses in achievement. Prior research showed that gains in achievement were about the same for low income students receiving vouchers as they are for comparable public school students.

Regardless of race, neighborhood, or how much money is in their parents’ bank account, every child should be able to attend an excellent school that has everything they need to learn and grow. Every dollar spent on vouchers makes this vision less achievable. Vouchers take public money and give it to private schools, with real consequences for the 90% of our kids who attend Ohio's public schools.

Public Funds Public Schools lists their series of webinars on school voucher programs with descriptions and links.

This web page from Save Our Schools Arizona is includes blogs on Arizona’s voucher program.

Robert Lominack, Executive Director of Richland County Public Education Partners (RCPEP), and Debbie Billings, a parent and public school advocate in South Carolina affiliated with RCPEP, spoke with Nicole Ciullo, Research & Policy Associate at Education Law Center. Founded in 2018, RCPEP works to improve Richland County public schools by supporting and developing innovative initiatives that assist teachers, students, and families. The interview, which was conducted earlier in the legislative session, has been edited for length and clarity.