School Vouchers – Giving Families School Choice or Taking Funding Away from Public Institutions?
By: Savannah Cunningham
School voucher programs are instituted at the state level to give greater educational choice to families regarding where they send their children to school. By the end of 2025, eighteen states had instituted state-wide, universal school choice programs (Ballotpedia).
These programs emerged after the 1954 Brown vs Board of Education decision with the goal of allowing families to circumvent the integration of students mandated in schools following the court decision (Klaine). Since then, the idea of school vouchers has shifted from a way to bypass integration in schools to a method of creating market-driven educational reform by providing different school choices (Klaine).
The goals of these programs are to increase competition amongst schools and allow greater freedom to parents who want education different from public schooling for their children. The idea is that families with strong religious values, have children with learning differences, or any other unique circumstance should be able to make the best choice for their families surrounding the type of education their children receive.
Policymakers in favor of school choice programs see them as an opportunity for children in underperforming school districts to leave these districts and attend other forms of schooling such as private or charter schools. Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders stated, “Families find themselves trapped in failing schools simply because they live in the wrong ZIP code” (Lieberman). This choice for families is thought to create more competition amongst school choices, with the hope that these underperforming schools will implement measures to improve performance to compete with the other school options provided to families through voucher programs.
These programs, while seeking to expand parental freedom and choice in schooling, are not always having the desired effect. Data from multiple states shows that families taking the publicly funded school voucher money were overwhelmingly enrolled in private schools or homeschooling programs prior to receiving school voucher money (Lieberman). In Arkansas, 95% of students whose families received voucher money had never attended a public school (NCPE).
Additionally, these vouchers do not always serve the communities that lawmakers say they are designed for. In Florida, 44% of school vouchers in the state were received by families making over $200,000 a year. While voucher amounts vary by state, they often do not cover the full cost of attendance for non-public education. In Texas, vouchers for students attending private school provide $10,474 per student for the 2026-2027 school year (Texas Education Freedom Accounts). The average cost of private school attendance across Texas is $13,995 for 2026, higher than the voucher meant to cover cost of attendance. In metropolitan areas such as Dallas, the average cost of attendance is $16,500 per year and for non-religious private schools, the average tuition is around $20,000, demonstrating that low-income families living in underperforming school districts do not have as much choice as the voucher program seeks to provide (Latest Cost).
Because these vouchers divert funds from public schools to other forms of schooling, public schools in states with statewide school voucher programs face funding cuts. These voucher programs are calculated on the “per child” funding given to public schools, meaning that for each child enrolled in a public school that institution receives a certain amount of funding per child. The idea is that the per child cost is given back to families who choose to take the vouchers, meaning that public schools have the same amount of funding per child enrolled in that specific school. The issue, however, is that the vast majority of voucher participants never attended public schools. Therefore, public education budgets are being actively drained to subsidize students who were already paying for private tuition (Wething). These funding cuts also lead to declining enrollment, worsening the issue.
The legal ethics of these vouchers have additionally been questioned, especially due to the fact that many of these programs allow vouchers to be given to families wanting to send their children to religious schools, with public money being used to fund the tuition of religious schools, causing questions about potential violations regarding the separation of church and state (Klaine).
Public education faces many challenges, from funding to ensuring safety to school performance issues (neaToday), and school choice programs have emerged and gained popularity as a possible solution. While increasing competition and allowing families greater choice in schooling for their children seems great in theory, in practice data has shown that these programs mainly subsidize families already enrolled in non-public forms of education. This leaves low income students without the resources to pay the tuition of alternative institutions not covered by vouchers, taking away funding from public schools, and creating a greater socioeconomic disparity across educational institutions. When vouchers are taken by families, public schools lose out on per child funding while still having to manage fixed costs of operating a school, leading to funding cuts that further impact children unable to attend private or alternative schools (Wething).
References
Which States Have Private School Choice?
Most Students Getting New School Choice Funds Aren't Ditching Public Schools
Home - Texas Education Freedom Accounts
Texas Private Schools By Tuition Cost (2026)
Average Cost of Private School in Texas 2026 – LatestCost – Real-Time Price Insights
States with and without universal school choice programs - Ballotpedia
School Vouchers: Impact on U.S. Public Education and Equity | Education Curated
