Americans Are Turning Against School Vouchers

Ten percent.

That’s how many Arizonans support that state’s Wild West voucher scheme. If the figure seems surprising given the ardency of the sales pitch for “education freedom,” its source should send your eyebrows skyward. This bleak view of Arizona public opinion about the state’s $1-billion-plus Education Savings Account (ESA) program comes not from voucher haters but from their superfans: the American Federation for Children (AFC), the deep-pocketed and highly influential school-choice lobbying firm started by Betsy DeVos.

To understand why AFC is decidedly downcast even as vouchers are on the move, we need to make a trip to the Grand Canyon State, where last month, the state Supreme Court deprived voters of the opportunity to weigh in on whether the famously fraud-ridden voucher program should be more tightly regulated. The backstory is complicated — riddled with backstabbing, late-night shenanigans, and dueling ballot questions — which is why we’re speeding ahead to the aftermath. While Arizona’s pro-voucher forces popped the champagne corks over the death of the ESA reform effort, DeVos’s crew sounded a far more cautionary note to the effect of: “This program is deeply unpopular, and unless we crack down on fraud and implement some standards to convince the public that it’s actually working, vouchers in Arizona are doomed.”

Not Just an Arizona Problem

As a tireless, albeit increasingly weary chronicler of the intersection of politics and education, signs of a split within the school-choice coalition are my equivalent of catnip. It also confirms the argument that I’ve been making that the politics of “education freedom” are not just unsustainable but hurting the GOP at the polls.

Here’s the short version. While the idea of school choice may be very popular in the abstract, the universal programs that red state legislatures have rammed through in recent years deeply rankle voters. Talk to virtually any Democrat running, or winning, in a state with one of these programs on the books, and they’ll tell you that support for reforming and scaling back vouchers is nearly universal. Here’s Emily Gregory, a Democratic legislator in Florida, where vouchers are spreading like a red algae bloom, on what she’s been hearing from her constituents:“I hear unity,” she says. “I hear bipartisan support in the community — that these are reasonable expectations of accountability for taxpayer dollars.”

Gregory flipped a seat in the Florida legislature last spring, besting her GOP opponent via a campaign that stressed affordability and support for public education — and now represents the Palm Beach district that includes Mar-a-Lago.

Meet the School-Choice Extremists

So if voucher reform really is a unifying cause, as suggested by a growing list of red-to-blue flips and the dire warnings of none other than Betsy DeVos’s lobby shop, why do red state legislators seem to be moving in the opposite direction?

Here is where we introduce a new character to our education freedom tapestry. Let’s call him the “school-choice extremist,” an increasingly prominent figure in states where unregulated voucher programs are busting budgets and sowing political consternation. Take West Virginia, for example, where, back in 2021, supermajority GOP state legislatures enthusiastically enacted what’s been called the nation’s “broadest” voucher program. Fast-forward a few years, and that program is draining the state’s coffers and enabling a school closure crisis. Alas, GOP lawmakers like the chair of the House Finance Committee who called for “modest guardrails” for the program are no longer in office, having been primaried, thanks to a sea of out-of-state school-choice money and the governor, who wants unlimited funding for vouchers.

As for the cause of school-choice extremism, chalk it up to too much time spent in an echo chamber, which leads prominent pro-voucher voices like Jason Huffman and Jason Bedrick to become convinced that any criticism of voucher programs is either a leftist plot and/or the work of a single investigative reporter.

A Flawed Theory of Change

To make sense of the emerging conflict within the voucher coalition, we have to revisit the case for making vouchers universal as articulated by the school-choice evangelist formerly known as Seth Rose. In his 2024 book, The Parent Revolution, Corey DeAngelis laid out the case for 1) abandoning the civil rights justification for school choice in favor of 2) leaning into/pouring fuel on the school culture wars and 3) making even the wealthiest parents eligible to have their private school tuition paid for by the public. As DeAngelis explained, while more targeted programs were vulnerable to the changing political tides, as in the GOP’s decision to roll back civil rights, empowering the most affluent parents would create a built-in lobby group that politicians would find hard to buck. But while DeAngelis may have been correct about the political heft of wealthy voucher users, he seems to have forgotten about another key group: the public.

DeAngelis, you might recall, was formerly in the employ of the American Federation for Children, which cut ties with him after his previous career as a porn star came to light. Which makes it all the more interesting that AFC is now sounding the alarm regarding the lack of public support for vouchers. AFC Senior Fellow Patrick Graff, for instance, warned that the GOP’s insistence on a “black box” approach to school choice is unsustainable.

Public policies have multiple constituencies and, in addition to the students using the program, another is the general public — a group whose opinion is especially important if you want to maintain the program. Failing to provide any information on how students in the program are performing academically is putting the school-choice movement increasingly out of step with what voters expect of education programs, especially one that costs over $1 billion every year.

Meet the Flippers

The only poll that ultimately matters, the one on Election Day, keeps showing us that public anger over waste, fraud, and abuse in voucher programs has become a potent source of support for Democrats. In Arizona, where Democrats have a realistic shot at flipping the state legislature, candidates have been focusing relentlessly on the need to reform the voucher program, because they know it’s an issue that voters care about. While advocates may have fallen short of the support they needed to put the Protect Education Act on the ballot this fall, they still managed to collect some 420,000 signatures in fourteen weeks, engaging in roughly one million conversations in the process.

That’s precisely the political vulnerability that’s got the AFC so worried, and justifiably so. The bigger and more expensive these programs get, the more pressure there will be to reform them, even as GOP-dominated legislatures remain under the thrall of school-choice extremists. (There’s an irony here, which is that AFC created this dilemma by primarying even mild school-choice skeptics, often replacing them with more fringe extremists.) But for now, I see no evidence that the GOP understands how toxic this issue is becoming. In Texas, for example, where Democrat Gina Hinojosa is running neck and neck with incumbent Governor Greg Abbott, voucher proponents now want the legislature to double the size of the controversial new program, even as many conservatives in the state remain furious over its existence.

The good news is that at least some Democrats finally seem to be realizing that anger over unchecked voucher programs crosses lines of party, class, and geography, especially as public schools are drained of resources or close altogether. The bad news? Not all Democrats, as they say. That may be the greatest irony of all. Even as the wave of anti-voucher sentiment helps the party flip statehouses and claim governors’ mansions, the Democrat-led campaign to get blue state governors to opt in to Donald Trump’s federal voucher program is only intensifying.