School privatization advocates often suggest that an expanded marketplace of education options benefits everyone - increased competition for students (and the dollars they bring) leads to improved outcomes and to schools that tailor their offerings to meet the needs of students.
Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, writes in The Progressive that the so-called benefits of “school choice” are largely theoretical, while the harms to public schools by way of lost funds are very real.
Over the past four years, privatization efforts have seen heightened success across the country. Voucher programs (which began in the mid-1990s) have expanded from twenty-seven programs in 2022 to seventy-three programs in thirty-four states as of 2026, with multiple programs in several states. Vouchers pay for tuition at both secular and religious schools, and in some states, the purchase of goods and services by homeschoolers and microschoolers. Schools accepting vouchers also typically face little of the academic, financial, or civil rights accountability required of public schools, and many can reject or expel students based on disability, religion, sexual orientation, or academic record. And because voucher amounts frequently fall short of full private school tuition, the benefits flow disproportionately to families who could already afford private school without public dollars.
Most states have some sort of privatization scheme, Burris notes:
Only Nebraska and Kentucky are now the only remaining states free of both charter schools and state voucher programs. But the 2026 report card reveals a troubling and consistent pattern beyond the expansion of school privatization. The states most aggressively redirecting public funds toward private alternatives—charter schools, voucher programs, and home schools—are the same states that fund privatization at the direct expense of investment in public schools.
When asked about school vouchers in a direct ballot measure, though, voters in states across the political spectrum reject them:
Kentucky is also holding the line against charter schools, with the courts there holding that charter schools are not really public schools and therefore can’t be funded with taxpayer dollars.
Burris explains that privatization carries real harms:
In fact, our analysis found a strong and statistically significant negative relationship between the expansion of privatization and other indicators of public school support. Privatization and public school disinvestment, it turns out, go hand in hand.
The appeal of “school choice,” in which families are permitted to use state funds that would’ve been otherwise spent on public education on non-traditional programs like charter or private schools, is easy to understand. The promise of options and tailored education sounds reasonable in the abstract. But in practice, choice works best for families with the time, information, and flexibility to navigate it, and whose children the private school is willing to choose. For a family in rural Florida or a child with complex disabilities whose needs most private schools won’t accommodate, the marketplace of options is theoretical. The public school is the only institution legally required to educate every child who walks through the door. When it is weakened through funding cuts, the diversion of students and dollars, or a hollowed-out teaching workforce, the consequences fall hardest on the children least able to find alternatives.
In many states, school choice is simply the redirecting of funds from the families and communities least able to avail themselves of “options” toward families with both resources and options. In other words, the tax dollars of working families are being used to subsidize the private education of the wealthy.
As well as being demonstrably racist, transphobic and at least here, providing state funds to certain religious denominations.
https://www.ncpecoalition.org/vouchers-and-civil-rights