From Vouchers to ESAs – the Dismantling of Public Schools
- lynn3661
- Jan 31
- 4 min read
Lynn Gerlach, Education Committee member
When our committee chair, Denise Gaumer Hutchison, called to my attention a recent press release from Wisconsin Public Education Network, a faint memory crept into my consciousness. WPEN was warning about a new plan to “nationalize” school vouchers that would draw public property taxes away from public schools to support private – often religious – schools. I remembered reading about such a proposal in the past, but where...?
And then I recalled the summer of 2024, when I had devoted an entire summer to studying the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 and writing a series of articles on it. I remembered that the chapter on the Department of Education (which actually recommended closure of the department!) had mentioned such a “scholarship” program, so I looked back on my blog and refreshed my memory. Right! Lindsey Burke, Director of Education Policy for the Heritage Foundation, had relied on the 1955 vision of Milton Friedman, who was responding to the mandate for school desegregation. Friedman had called for a system “wherein education is publicly funded but education decisions are made by families.”
Ah, yes! ESAs in Project 2025!
And so, Burke had proposed, in her section of Project 2025, ESAs: Education Savings Accounts, “funded overwhelmingly by taxpayers... managed by charitable foundations...” to be used for “any lawful education purpose under state law.” She went on to write that the role of the federal government is to protect “faith-based educational institutions, programs and activities.” I remember being appalled at what I read, only to witness such ideas actually being implemented when Linda McMahon took over the Department of Education.
Then I had presented for the LWVGGB Education Committee a detailed summary of Josh Cowen’s The Privateers, offering “6 facts about school vouchers.” Cowen made it clear that school vouchers began as a way to maintain racial segregation of schools and then, within just a few years, turned to religious education: a Catholic parent group in St. Louis, called “Citizens for Educational Freedom,” insisted they had “a God-given and inalienable right ... to direct and control their children’s education.” These parents demanded their “fair share” of tax dollars for parochial school use, equating such diversion of tax dollars with “individual liberty.”
Cowen explains in his book that education, which was a core function of democracy, had become, by 1960, a sectarian, theocratic version of publicly funded education. Here in Wisconsin, we are well aware that it was our state that established the first state-funded voucher program, signed into law by Tommy Thompson in 1990. Within years religious schools had been approved for the program by our state’s supreme court. Based on our state’s model, voucher programs soon sprang up in Cleveland, Washington, DC, Dayton and New York.
The Voucher Program Gained Strength
The author of The Privateers describes the first 40 years of the voucher school movement as “an isolated group of conservative scholars shouting their views from ivory towers.” He explains that the program was based on conservative priorities and libertarian economics, funded by “rich Republicans” hostile to government oversight, organized labor, public education.” In 2002 the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the right of cities and states to use public funding to pay for religious school tuition. New types of discrimination within school voucher programs quickly surfaced, including Indiana’s voucher funds giving $16 billion to schools with overtly LGBTQ+ discriminatory policies.
And remember when Betsy De Vos became Secretary of Education? She declared that states should move funding away from their public schools and should not be funneling voucher funds only to students from needy families. The US Supreme Court quickly gave the effort a leg up, ruling that funding cannot be denied to organizations precisely because they are religious. That, the court said, violated their religious liberty. (Interestingly, that decision voided two sections of the Wisconsin Constitution, adopted in 1848, that prohibited the use of public funds for religious or sectarian schools.) And, as for discrimination against LGBTQ+ children and families – such discrimination by voucher programs, the Supreme Court ruled, was simply their religious free exercise. Cowen says that, at that point, privatization of education was about values, not about academic success.
A Trojan Horse?
Cowen says that, from 2021 to 2023, the school voucher movement went from an academic movement to a parents’ rights movement to religious nationalism. In 2022 and 2023, seven states added voucher programs and nine states expanded their programs; most of these programs were in the form of ESAs or Education Savings Accounts. Now we see an effort to nationalize such a program, giving tax credits to those who can afford to donate to nonprofits that would control the funds, doling them out to parents to apply, as they see fit, to the school they choose for their child.
Wisconsin Public Education Network says, “we know a Trojan Horse when we see one. The architects of this plan are not educators or policy experts – they are lobbyists and partisans and profiteers whose stated goal is to dismantle public education, and who have spent decades doing everything in their considerable power to create chaos and distrust in our public schools. We know that the folks pushing this program are the ones we can trust the least when it comes to keeping our promises to our kids and their public schools.”
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