Vouchers Eat State Budgets
And leave scraps for public schools
Tennessee’s universal school voucher program starts in the 2025-26 school year and based on the current volume of applications, all available vouchers will be taken - costing the state nearly $150 million.
Policymakers and taxpayers should be concerned: The results from other states indicate that voucher programs break state budgets and also leave students behind.
Stateline reports:
In submitting her updated budget proposal in March, Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs lamented the rising costs of the state’s school vouchers program that directs public dollars to pay private school tuition.
Characterizing vouchers as an “entitlement program,” Hobbs said the state could spend more than $1 billion subsidizing private education in the upcoming fiscal year. The Democratic governor said those expenses could crowd out other budget priorities, including disability programs and pay raises for firefighters and state troopers.
It’s a dilemma that some budget experts fear will become more common nationwide as the costs of school choice measures mount across the states, reaching billions of dollars each year.
Vouchers also eat tax dollars in Florida:
An analysis of the Sunshine State's private school voucher program reveals the total cost to taxpayers is $3.9 billion annually.
The Education Law Center in conjunction with the Florida Policy Institute conducted the analysis of the state's school voucher program. The results of the study show the cost of vouchers growing steadily. Vouchers now consume 23% of state education dollars, up from just 12% in the 2021-22 school year.
And, Tennessee is not alone:
A new universal voucher program in Texas is expected to cost $1 billion over its next two-year budget cycle — a figure that could balloon to nearly $5 billion by 2030, according to a legislative fiscal note.
But are vouchers worth the cost - do they help kids?
No. Not really. In fact, recent data out of Ohio is alarming.
On all proficiency tests, students getting a voucher for one year or less overall are about 75% proficient. Three years later, they’re 54% proficient.
That’s a drop of nearly 1/3!
Ouch. Not great. Students are LOSING ground academically after taking vouchers.
Put another way, the voucher students’ first-year scores would rank in the top 1/4 of all Ohio Public School Districts; their third-year scores would rank in the bottom 1/5 of all Ohio Public School Districts.
So it looks like Tennessee is at the beginning of a very expensive education experiment that has failed in multiple states.
While the initial cost may not break the budget, the long-term experience in states like Arizona, Florida, and Indiana suggests taxpayers could soon be funding a failed voucher program at the expense of other key state needs - including our public schools.
Tennessee legislators could read/see what was happening in other states before they went down this road. With Tenn Care, Snap cuts, this next legislative session could be facing trouble.
Education is in need of a revolution. As shown in the numbers in your post, throwing money at the systemic challenges will not make positive changes.