How Are Funding Reforms Such as Vouchers — and Potentially Project 2025 — Affecting Public Education?

Newswise — Ohio has begun using more than $5 million in taxpayer funds for capital projects at 10 private religious schools — with the goal of enabling these 10 schools to admit more voucher students, according to media reports. Does this policy raise concerns about the separation of church and state, and the undermining of public education funding?

To my knowledge, the use of taxpayer dollars to subsidize the expansions of private and religious schools is unprecedented. At a minimum, it is extremely uncommon. 

If the logic of school voucher programs like that in Ohio is to increase competition among schools to better serve students, then it’s a bit hard to understand why the state government also would be subsidizing the expansion of some private religious schools, particularly if they’re just choosing a few of those schools. That sounds like the state government is picking winners and losers in the private schooling system.

That might worry us if we are concerned about the separation of church and state. Some of the previous research indicates that many students who use vouchers suffer some negative effects in the short term. It is worth asking whether the state is helping to expand specifically the schools that are serving students well — or whether they are making these choices on some other basis.

What ill effects have been found with students who access private education through voucher systems?

In several recent studies, the best evidence comes from student test scores in math and reading. There we find that, at least in the short term, the students who use vouchers end up being much lower achieving than we would expect if they did not use the vouchers. 

It is unclear why that is. But for whatever reason, it looks like attending a private school through these voucher programs has negative impacts on students’ test scores in the short term.

Arizona’s voucher and education savings account programs are used as models for Project 2025. But questions have been raised about these programs allowing parents to spend public funds on noneducational purposes such as extracurricular activities. Do we need more guardrails in place to ensure that funds are spent on learning activities? 

Conservatives would say that getting the government more involved and adding guardrails on how this money gets spent will interfere with families making their own choices and will reduce these programs’ efficiency and effectiveness.

A lot of what we want from our education system is to benefit society, and that is one of the reasons that we put so many guardrails around our traditional public schools and require so much from them in terms of transparency and accountability relative to private schooling. 

There are plenty of reasons to think that because we currently do not have much transparency about how these Project 2025-style education reforms work and where the money is going it is very hard to judge their effectiveness. But the evidence we do have is often very concerning.

Recent large-scale rigorous evaluations of private school voucher programs have often found negative — often substantially negative — achievement effects for students, and that raises questions about whether these programs are achieving the goals that we have for them. 

Without some level of accountability and guardrails, there is a risk that public interest might not be served. It is possible that families struggle to make these decisions in an informed way, even when we give them educational choices, and it could help them make informed decisions if we knew more about these programs, how they operate and their impacts on kids.

Project 2025 calls for eliminating the U.S. Department of Education and Title 1 funding that supports schools with high percentages of low-income students. What would the likely impact be?

Eliminating the Department of Education probably would not make much difference, in part because the federal government’s role in public education is relatively small.

Most policy and funding happens at the state and local levels, and much of what the Department of Education does could be done by other federal departments. That is how we did it until relatively recently. It’s only a few decades ago that we opened a separate education department at the federal level. 

That said, part of the long-standing conservative agenda is to cut back the government’s — especially the federal government’s — role in education. If that includes cuts to early childhood education or subsidized meal programs for low-income students, that will potentially have substantially negative impacts. We know that those programs can and often do benefit the kids who participate in them.

And there is some pretty good evidence that those benefits also spill over into other students in the same classrooms.