I’ve long been conflicted over the existence of private schools. As a public education advocate (and with a basic working knowledge of private school history in these United States) I find them incompatible with democracy and the concept of a shared society. Yet as a deeply religious person, I find it hard to deny families who are willing to pay for it an explicitly religious education for their children outside of the public system.

In some ways, my background straddled both worlds. I was homeschooled for elementary and part of middle school with a religious curriculum. I did the rest of middle and all of high school at my local public school. But homeschool is a far cry from private school.

In another round of “cards, meet table,” I’ll happily admit I’m a school choice advocate, particularly because I think it’s a critical way to ensure historically marginalized groups in society can access a higher-quality education. Society benefits from a system where multiple types of public schools exist that offer different options to families. Notice the word public doing some heavy lifting in that last sentence.

Yet how is a school choice advocate like me supposed to approach the existence, and recent expansion of, Indiana’s voucher program? Private school vouchers tend to be billed as school choice programs. They purport to make private school (financially out of reach for most Americans) affordable so that families have another type of school choice at their disposal.

But choice among a variety of public options vs. choice among both public and private options are two very different ball games. Especially when you consider the government’s role and responsibility in those two different games. The government should deliver programs and benefits that are for the public good. A quality public education system is clearly for the public good.

But is a private education system for the public good? Should the government be spending millions of dollars so that families can send their kids to private schools (including religious private schools)? While my brain says abolish private schools, my heart says it’s a lot more complicated than that.

A brief recap of Indiana’s voucher expansion

I’m going down this rabbit hole because we can now clearly see the financial impact of Indiana’s voucher program expansion for the 2023-24 school year. We spent $439 million on the program this year, up $127 million from last year. That’s well over a 33% increase in spending.

The biggest reason is that legislators raised the income threshold to 400% of the federal benchmark for free- and reduced-price lunch qualification. That led to nearly three times as many students from households earning between $150,000 and $200,000 taking advantage of vouchers compared to the previous year. In households making more than $200,000 per year, the number of students using vouchers soared by a multiple of ten. While it’s true private school enrollment in the Hoosier state hit a record high this year, it’s also true that the majority of students who were new to the voucher program were already enrolled in private school. Their families just no longer have to foot the entire bill.

This is what critics of the legislation warned would happen. We’d be paying for private school tuition for families who could clearly afford it. That has clearly come to pass, meaning our program is a long way from the days when it was touted as a way for low-income and other marginalized families to secure better educational options for their children.

I don’t see increasing private school enrollment (and increased educational spending that predominantly benefits wealthy families) as being for the public good.

But do vouchers work for their original purpose?

Setting aside the gripe I have with the income threshold raise, it’s worth being fair. Does our voucher program (and others nationally) fulfill its original remit of boosting opportunity for low-income and marginalized families?

If you want to get stuck in to the many research studies on the topic, this webpage is a great place to start. And here’s a more specific research paper from Indiana (though its 2018 publication date is starting to look a bit outdated). You can also pore through research round-ups from leading academics in this area, Josh Cowen (largely opposed to vouchers) and Patrick Wolf (largely in support of them). 

I tend to align more with Cowen’s conclusion. That early voucher programs showed promise but in many cases have actually led to worse student outcomes overall for the groups they were intended to help most. Still, research doesn’t point to a massive brain drain wherein academic outcomes at traditional public schools suddenly drop due to more students attending private school.

What is the future of Indiana’s voucher program?

There’s a snowball’s chance in Phoenix, Arizona that Indiana’s voucher program will be reduced or rolled back in future years. The bigger question is how it might expand from here. Other states have implemented universal private school choice programs (Arizona was the first in 2022, with seven more states implementing universal voucher or voucher-like programs since then).

Indiana could well follow suit. Now that the income threshold has been raised to include quite wealthy families, it’s not a small leap to just allow any family, no matter than financial station, to take advantage of vouchers.

I would oppose that move. Not because I like means testing. I loath when it crops up in public programs that deliver a necessary thing like food, healthcare, or housing. But private school vouchers (and private schools generally) do not deliver a necessary service. Public schools do. Yes, our public schools need to be improved. No, they do not need abandoned and bled dry by our society’s neoliberal insistence that the private sector is the answer for the basics we’re entitled to.

So for me, it’s hard to see Indiana’s voucher program as anything other than a vampire on the public purse, even if it is wearing khakis and a button down and talks in that oh so respectably sharp way rich people do when they talk down to you.

What kind of society do we want? What do we owe to one another? Which investments are for the public good and which are not? I don’t think subsidizing more wealthy families in their retreat from public schooling is the start of any kind of meaningful answer.