"Universal" School Vouchers Cost States Billions
So who benefits, and is anyone asking for this?
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“To get universal school choice, you have to operate from the premise of universal school distrust.”
-Chris Rufo
At the end of the session, South Carolina attempted to join states like Arizona and Florida in expanding its existing school voucher program (which passed just last year) to make it “universal” within a few years. (A version of a universal voucher bill passed the House.) This might end up costing the state as much as $1.4 billion a year, despite poor-to-mixed results from school voucher programs in other states, and widespread concerns about transparency, accountability, and a lack of regulations that would protect students from discrimination.
What are vouchers, and are they popular?
In 2024, you will rarely see a piece of legislation or a “school choice” advocate using the word “voucher” to describe methods of subsidizing or refunding the cost of private educational services, although that’s what they are generally promoting.
This is smart marketing, because popular support for the programs depends largely on how they are framed. As FiveThirtyEight points out, when surveys lean into the “choice” element of vouchers, they are much more popular than when participants learn that voucher programs defund their public schools. Despite the best efforts of “school choice” promoters— many of whom are deeply motivated to undermine public services, as the presence of so many of these groups on the Project 2025 advisory board attests— defunding schools is broadly unpopular among Americans, and more than half believe one reason schools could be “headed in the wrong direction” is that they aren’t adequately funded and resourced.
For example, in Texas, where polling generally shows a majority support for “school choice,” “a RABA Research poll asked 512 adults on March 17 to 18 if they supported ‘diverting tax revenue away from neighborhood public schools to use for private school vouchers’ — 66 percent opposed while 34 percent supported.” So even in states where the idea of “school choice” is broadly popular, programs which defund schools are still broadly unpopular. (People support “choice” in theory, but don’t support paying for them the way these programs generally do. It’s possible that many of these people actually want public school choice, the practice of many school districts of allowing students to apply to attend schools outside of their residential zone to enable them to participate in magnet programs or other school-specific opportunities.)
So, instead of “vouchers,” which the public has come to associate with ineffective programs (as the most recent research has confirmed), the inflation of state budgets (more on that below) and the defunding of traditional public schools (a promise baked into many contemporary examples of voucher legislation), proponents have shifted hard into neo-voucher terms like “Education Savings Accounts” (ESAs) or “Education Tax Credits”.
Nonetheless, these programs are essentially the same as past “voucher” schemes: government subsidies spending public dollars to incentivize a small number of families to leave the public school system and a large number of families to keep paying for the same private educational services they always did, but now with public funds.
State officials are pushing vouchers, whether they’re popular or not.
Arizona, Florida, and at least eight other states have already adopted “universal school choice,” a phrase that generally means that either now or at some point in the near future, any family in the state with a school-age child will be eligible to receive state funds to pay for some kind of non-public educational service.
Other states are following suit. For example, South Carolina legislators this session passed a bill creating “universal” vouchers by 2028. During the previous session, legislators had pushed through a “pilot” year that significantly capped who was eligible for the vouchers, but in the session which just ended, they expanded to “universal” vouchers without bothering to complete the pilot.
As in other states, polling on “school choice” is complicated. In a poll commissioned by the right-leaning South Carolina Policy Council (a Heritage-associated group and a member of the ALEC-affiliated State Policy Network), 32% of participants “strongly approved” of “school choice”— in a sense.
But what respondents actually got was this question: “South Carolina is considering a new education scholarship program that would pay for some low-income K through 12 students to attend private schools of their choice, or help cover the cost of tutoring, textbooks, computers and more. The cost per student would be equal to or less than what the state is currently spending to educate these children. Do you approve or disapprove of this new school choice plan?”
Ultimately, the bill that passed in SC this session doesn’t really meet that description, because it is not targeted at “low-income K through 12 students”; if South Carolina follows the trend of other “universal” voucher states, most of the recipients of vouchers will be families that already sent students to private schools.
Opponents in the SC legislature warned that, rather than helping “low-income students,” expanding vouchers could ultimately increase private school tuition and price them out (which, for some schools, could be the goal). There is research that suggests that this is exactly what has happened in other voucher expansion states, and a recent study from Princeton showed the largest tuition increases when students were “universally eligible” for vouchers.
(Voucher proponents have cited their own study, from the radically pro-voucher Heritage Foundation, which includes among its authors Lindsay Burke. Burke, you may remember, is the author of the Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership’s chapter on federal education policy. In it, she calls for abolishing and/ or restricting the Department of Education, phasing out Title I funding, eliminating Title IX protections, and reducing eligibility for school lunches— along with federally offered “universal school choice”.)
South Carolina House Education Chair Shannon Erickson was the primary sponsor on SC’s universal voucher expansion bill, which will ultimately remove all limits on which families can qualify for state funds to pay for private education services.
During a podcast interview with Cameron Runyan, superintendent of the embattled Charter Institute at Erskine, she called parents’ increased interest in school choice due to the COVID-19 pandemic, “a silver lining”. This comment, particularly in the context of a conversation with a private college’s charter authorizer leadership, implicitly echoes the self-proclaimed instigator of the incredibly divisive “Critical Race Theory” school culture wars, Chris Rufo, who famously proclaimed during an address at the private Christian Hillsdale College called “Laying Siege to the Institutions,” “To get universal school choice, you have to operate from the premise of universal school distrust.”
Erickson is close allies with Superintendent of Education Ellen Weaver, who has frequently cited Florida and Arizona as model states for voucher expansion.
Patricia Lavesque of pro-voucher group ExcelInEducation in Action praised Erickson, SC Superintendent of Education Ellen Weaver, and others for “a focus on funding parental choice,” referencing their support for voucher bills.
Weaver, in turn, has praised Erickson for her support of vouchers, writing in 2019, “‘The Year of Education’ won’t be complete until we dramatically expand the ability of parents to choose the right education experience for their child. And that’s exactly what bold Education Scholarship Account bills like Representative Shannon Erickson’s (H.3681) and Senate Majority Leader Shane Massey’s (S.556) would do.”
According to Oran Smith (“former” neo-Confederate and current senior fellow with the Project 2025-affiliated think tank Palmetto Promise—which Weaver ran until she became superintendent), “With that legislation, [Erickson] introduced the concept of the Education Scholarship Account or the “ESA” to the lexicon of The Palmetto State”. Smith was referencing Erickson’s sponsorship of H. 4308 (“Equal Opportunity Education Scholarship Account Act”) during 2017-2018 session.
That bill, like most of South Carolina’s attempts at passing some kind of school voucher legislation over the past several year, has the American Legislative Exchange Council’s (ALEC) fingerprints all over it, and seems to be based specifically on the “Education Savings Account Act,” a model ALEC bill finalized in 2017. (ALEC warrants its own article, but the very short version is that the group is a pro-corporate, pro-privatization “bill mill” which gets legislators and representatives of major companies into rooms for secret meetings. The group is responsible for the Stand Your Ground law, the promotion of private, for-profit prisons, and has successfully pushed school voucher bills across the country.)
So, in short, while “vouchers” are unpopular with the public, and “school choice” is a mixed bag whose popularity depends on some misleading claims about helping “lower-income” students, these schemes are very popular with dark money groups and radical political “think tanks”.
What’s the impact? And what does it cost taxpayers and public schools?
Even before they become universal, the cost to South Carolina taxpayers for its “universal” voucher bill is estimated in the bill’s fiscal impact statement to be nearly $106,000,000 by 2026-2027, when the number of students is still capped. After that year, there will be no cap. As The State Gazette pointed out when the bill passed the House, “Do the math, and the cost [in South Carolina] could top $1.4 billion annually” (incidentally, the same price tag already seen in Arizona). To put it in context, that’s more than a fifth of the total SC Department of Education budget this year.
ProPublica published an investigation a few weeks ago that included this:
Yet in a lesson for these other states, Arizona’s voucher experiment has since precipitated a budget meltdown. The state this year faced a $1.4 billion budget shortfall, much of which was a result of the new voucher spending, according to the Grand Canyon Institute, a local nonpartisan fiscal and economic policy think tank. Last fiscal year alone, the price tag of universal vouchers in Arizona skyrocketed from an original official estimate of just under $65 million to roughly $332 million, the Grand Canyon analysis found; another $429 million in costs is expected this year.
According to researcher Josh Cowen— an education researcher and one-time voucher proponent who has since turned heavily against vouchers,
Studies indicate that after traditional voucher expansions, the private school market floods with new pop-up providers. That’s exactly what is happening with the ESA-style expansions in Arizona now. Many new schools are nearly or entirely funded by the ESA payments—just as the average private school in older voucher programs was. Many of these schools will quickly close. There’s also existing academic evidence predicting that traditional voucher programs incentivize existing private schools to raise tuition, using the new dollars as something of a public subsidy. And that is exactly what recent reports are showing with ESA passage, with existing private schools raising their tuition
So, in short, Arizona’s experiences suggest that not only are “universal” vouchers much more expensive than predicted, but they offer little benefit for “low-income” students. Instead, the benefits that do exist are primarily felt by families who already pay for private schools, and of course the fly-by-night “pop up” programs and strip mall academies that tend to flood the market temporarily at the beginning of voucher programs.
In Florida, universal vouchers are projected to remove as much as $4 billion from the state’s public schools.
The major mistake of “universal” voucher supporters across the country is assuming that vouchers bring a significant number of new students into the private education provider system; in fact, most voucher recipients are families who already have send students to private schools, so every penny paid to them is a loss for the state, which is paying people to do something they already did. Objectively, paying people to continue to do something they would have done anyway creates a net loss for the public.
It also means that while voucher proponents— including Weaver and Erickson— often describe a system where “the money follows the student,” what we have in reality is more like money being tossed into the wind to be picked up by whoever can find it.
Accountability and Transparency
Crucially, the South Carolina Policy Council poll that supposedly showed voters were pro- “school choice” (when it was described as favorably as possible), also showed that an even more overwhelming majority strongly agreed with this statement: “South Carolina local school boards and other government bodies should be required to broadcast their public meetings on the internet for transparency and accountability?”
It makes sense that South Carolinians want to know how public school funds are being spent. All kinds of schools and school systems are vulnerable to mistakes and corruption. But at least with public schools, communities elect boards and state officials to oversee those schools and ideally combat those mistakes and corruption.
But while voucher proponents rely heavily on slogans about the free market being more efficient, the bigger voucher programs—and other forms of alternative education services that are less regulated—become, the more vulnerable taxpayers are to their money being used incorrectly or even fraudulently. And when this happens, it can be hard— as we have seen with SC’s private charter school authorizers— to know, or to hold bad actors accountable for misspending or even stealing state funds.
For example, last year under North Carolina’s “Opportunity Scholarship Program,” according to WFAE Charlotte, some private schools were getting as many as double the number of vouchers as their total numbers of students, and some of the schools that appeared to be receiving state funds hadn’t even opened yet.
So much for the money “following the student”.
And as I’ve written before, the lack of accountability and oversight could lead to even more worrisome outcomes— for example, what happens if a network literal Nazi homeschools, like the one in Ohio, requests state funding in a place like North Carolina or South Carolina?
On the one hand, this seems extremely unlikely, given that programs do have to be approved in some kind of as-yet-undetermined process created by the state Department of Education. Yet many of the same folks supporting vouchers— including Weaver— have adopted far less plausible hypotheticals about “woke” teachers “indoctrinating” students to support their arguments for more “school choice”.
And on the other hand, it isn’t actually impossible that these kinds of programs could sneak into the voucher registration process. SC’s propose law merely requires that, “The department must require an independent school that applies to be an education service provider to be located in the State, to have an educational curriculum that includes courses set forth in the state's diploma requirements and to meet the compulsory attendance and State Board of Education approval requirements”. An amendment even waives a previous requirement that “education service providers” reapply to be eligible for funds each year, instead allowing the providers themselves to “certify” that they continue to meet requirements.
And of course the department in South Carolina that would create any requirements in addition to the very broad ones listed above is run by Weaver, herself. In the convoluted logic of school privatization, books and entire histories can be banned or restricted, always with the argument that state funds are paying for them. Weaver has made this argument frequently, only to turn around and support exactly the opposite whenever state funds might go to private entities. She has supported multiple past voucher bills that contained language explicitly prohibiting state oversight of programs receiving state voucher funds, and was running Palmetto Promise Institute when it was named in the lawsuit over Governor Henry McMaster’s unconstitutional SAFE Grants, which would have used COVID relief funds to create private school vouchers.
Call them what you want, modern vouchers/ ESAs/ Opportunity Scholarships are a scheme to thwart the intentions of state constitutions which prohibit direct funding of public schools. They are vouchers in all but name, because they still result in state funds being spent explicitly and exclusively on private educational services.
Note: this piece has been updated to clarify that South Carolina’s universal voucher bill has passed the House. At this point, the bill has not passed the Senate.