Has the Tide Turned Against Vouchers?

Complete report

Late last year in Montana, the State Supreme Court struck down the state’s three-year-old neovoucher program, ruling against the constitutionality of tax-credit-funded voucher law because it funded private, religious education. 

In November in Arizona,voters rejected the proposed expansion of Empowerment Scholarship Accounts, state tax dollars that parents can use for home schooling, private schooling and other educational expenses. An audit by the state’s attorney general subsequently found that parents had misspent or attempted to misspend the funds on such expenses as cosmetics, non-educational music albums, and entry into a seasonal haunted house.

A couple years before that, the Supreme Court in Nevada concluded that the state’s “Education Savings Account” voucher plan violated the Nevada constitution because of a funding mechanism that drew money away from public schools.

In Colorado, in 2017, a slate of school board candidates funded by the American Federation of Teachers ousted a set of Koch-backed opponents who introduced a pilot school voucher program in a conservative Denver suburb.

Meanwhile, recent studies from Louisiana,Ohio,Washington DC, and Indiana have shown that receiving a voucher is associated with a decrease in mathematics test scores (for language arts scores, one study showed a decrease while three studies found no difference). While some proponents have shifted the goalposts, arguing that test scores are no longer the right way to evaluate such programs, others have tempered their support out of fear that taxpayers might want to attach regulations or transparency to private schools that receive public dollars.