Conservative Christian activists hope President Donald Trump’s pledge to close the Federal Department of Education and “move everything back to the states” will help them expand “school choice” programs that use taxpayer dollars for vouchers students can use to attend private religious schools.
The nation’s first voucher program was launched in Milwaukee in 1990, followed by Ohio in 1996, Washington, D.C., in 2004, Indiana in 2011 and Louisiana in 2012. Billionaire Betsy DeVos has used both her fortune (donating a quarter billion dollars) and her time as Secretary of Education during Trump’s first administration, to promote school choice.
Today, a dozen states offer “universal” vouchers available to all, including Arizona, Florida and North Carolina. Studies regularly show voucher programs fail to provide better educations for students, and voters typically don’t support them, but they remain popular with red-state legislators.
Ohio is home to “one of the most dramatic expansions of private school vouchers in the country,” according to a recent 6,500-word report by Politico and The New Yorker. The story unearths private correspondence and phone logs to show how state leaders used deceit and false promises to “redirect billions of taxpayer dollars to private religious schools.”
George Voinovich ((Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)
Conservatives hail the “Ohio model,” which began in 1995. Gov. George Voinovich, a devout Catholic who believed the state should promote the Catholic faith, worked privately with Catholic bishops and laypeople to grow parochial school enrollments while concealing his advocacy from the public.
“The Catholic Conference will continue to maintain a low profile in terms of its formal position on voucher legislation,” wrote an adviser to Gov. Voinovich, who worked to cut state budgets while encouraging increased spending on vouchers.
Today, the Center for Christian Virtue, an $4.2 million Ohio advocacy group closely affiliated with Focus on the Family, is leading the charge for expanding vouchers. The Center was formerly known as Citizens for Community Values, a Christian group that got its start battling pornography and abortion.
The Politico/New Yorker report shows how Ohio’s voucher advocates started small with a program in Cleveland that allowed “the poorest of the poor” to receive vouchers to attend Catholic schools. Republicans have expanded the voucher program ever since. Today, families earning $135,000 annually qualify for vouchers, which now cost Ohio taxpayers $1 billion a year, much of that coming from public education budgets.
Here’s how Ohio’s voucher program ballooned from small to big:
- 1996: Ohio creates a targeted voucher program for underserved public school students in Cleveland
- 2005: A new program, EdChoice, offers vouchers to students statewide if they attend schools judged to be failing
- 2013: EdChoice expands to families with income of twice the poverty rate
- 2017: EdChoice expands to families with income of four times the poverty rate
- 2022: The “Backpack Bill” offers vouchers to every family in the state to spend on private schools or expenses related to homeschooling
- 2024: Ohio makes history, becoming the first state to offer $4 million in grants directly to religious schools for renovating and constructing buildings, so they can welcome even more students
“More than 30 years after Voinovich and the bishops proposed vouchers as a solution for underprivileged children in a single city, public subsidies for private school tuition were now universal in Ohio, covering tens of thousands of families,” says the Politico/New Yorker report.
Ohio’s Center for Christian Virtue operates the Ohio Christian Education Network, which “protects the religious liberty of Christian schools and ensures every family in Ohio has access to a gospel-centered education.”
The Network says it represents “more than 170 evangelical and Catholic schools across Ohio,” and it charges schools a membership fee ($5 per student) to advocate and lobby for school choice.
The Center recently congratulated Ohio Lt. Gov. Jon Husted, who has been named to fill the Ohio Senate seat vacated by Vice President JD Vance.
“Throughout his service to Ohio, Lt. Gov. Husted has been a champion for Ohio’s children and families,” said a Center for Christian Virtue statement. “Under his leadership, Ohio has become a national school-choice leader and has taken significant steps to protect parental rights.”
The Center is a partner with the Heritage Foundation, creator of Project 2025, which calls for cutting federal education funding and for diverting funds to private schools during the second Trump administration.
In the 2024 elections, voters in Colorado, Kentucky and Nebraska rejected voucher programs, a significant speed bump for “school freedom.” As BNG reported, voters in Nebraska made history, with 58% of them supporting a repeal of a voucher law passed by GOP legislators in the previous year.
“Vouchers have never survived a direct vote by voters.”
“Vouchers have never survived a direct vote by voters,” says Josh Cowen, professor of Education Policy at Michigan State University and author of the recently released The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers.
He says the billionaire activists and think tanks seeking to privatize education are aided by a supportive Supreme Court majority and conservative legal groups such as Alliance Defending Freedom.
Cowen has spent much of his career studying data about educational outcomes, which leads him to conclude:
- Voucher programs primarily subsidize private school students who never attended public schools
- “The larger and more recent the voucher program is, the worse the academic results”
- The most vulnerable students suffer the worst educational outcomes
- Many private schools engage in “cream skimming,” admitting advantaged students while rejecting their disadvantaged peers
- Parents looking for academic quality struggle to find room in private schools
In Ohio, private schools have raised their tuition to take advantage of vouchers, and 90% of the new voucher recipients are white, in a state where only about two-thirds of students are, according to the Politico/New Yorker report.
Catholics account for about 17% of Ohio’s population, but they make up more than half the Ohio Senate and a third of the House.
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Florida’s homeschooling voucher program growing rapidly
State leaders of Pastors for Children gather to strategize on protecting public education