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.”
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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.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
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.
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).
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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