Education Voucher Policies Are Popping Up Nationwide. What Role Is Philanthropy Playing?

Education vouchers are on the move. Florida just expanded its voucher program, Arizona did the same last year, and Utah, Iowa and Arkansas recently passed new voucher laws. In all, Republican lawmakers in 34 states have proposed various versions of education voucher plans, according to Future Ed, and the approach has had major wins in the courts.

While plans vary state to state, education vouchers allow participating families to receive public education dollars to use for private school tuition, tutoring and homeschooling. Vouchers can also take the form of education savings accounts or education tax credits, both slightly different versions of the same idea. In all of their manifestations, voucher programs take money from already strained school districts, and education experts warn that they threaten the viability of public schools.

While they’re currently surging politically, vouchers are the latest incarnation of a long-running effort on the part of conservatives — and at times, Democrats — to reshape the public school system around the ideas of parental choice, competition and privatization. Education philanthropy writ large has thrown a lot of money at the school choice movement over the decades, but support for vouchers is harder to parse. We found that conservative giving platforms, foundations and mega donors are perhaps unsurprisingly lining up behind vouchers. Support from K-12 foundations, meanwhile, is mixed, with some clearly keeping their distance.

That may be due to the heated political fray surrounding the issue. Voucher policies have been around for a while, but regained traction during the pandemic, when mask mandates and school closures, along with so-called critical race theory and other culture war issues, fueled parents’ dissatisfaction with public schools. As The 74 reported recently, a number of Republican governors are hoping to turn this widespread parental frustration into support for education vouchers — and they appear to be having some success.

Who is funding the push for school vouchers?

Dark money and disclosure rules make it difficult to pinpoint the funders that support vouchers or how much they are spending on these efforts. But what we do know is that a lot of the typical channels of conservative-leaning philanthropy are funding the organizations that support vouchers.

One reason it’s so hard to track is that a lot of that money is going through donor-advised funds, which don’t have to identify which individual DAF holders are making specific grants. The conservative DAF DonorsTrust, for example, and its affiliated Donors Capital Fund have been moving money to groups that support vouchers. As my colleague Philip Rojc reported in 2021, “Since its founding, DonorsTrust has given out over $1.5 billion. In addition to the sheer volume of money, a large proportion of DonorsTrust’s grantees operate in the policy arena, magnifying the impact of this funding on the public sphere.” It also raked in over $1 billion that year, according to Politico.

DonorsTrust grantees include voucher advocates like the Heritage Foundation, the American Federation for Children, which was created by Trump administration Education Secretary Betsy Devos, as well as the conservative Independent Women’s Forum. The Cardinal Institute, which is supporting education savings accounts in West Virginia, is also a grantee.

We do know some of the non-DAF funders that are supporting the voucher movement, and a few names come up repeatedly. One of these philanthropies is the Milwaukee-based Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, a long-running conservative funder that has had a major influence in Wisconsin politics and also helped bankroll efforts to discredit the 2020 election results, as Jane Mayer reported in The New Yorker.

The Bradley Foundation has consistently funded the education voucher movement in Wisconsin, as Mayer pointed out in her book, “Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right.” “In an effort to ‘wean’ Americans from government, the foundation militated for parents to be able to use public funds to send their children to private and parochial schools,” she wrote.

The Bradley Foundation funds the Wisconsin Center for Law and Liberty, which supports education vouchers through its Bradley Impact Fund, a donor-advised fund. The Bradley Impact Fund includes among its grantees the Badger Institute, a conservative Wisconsin think tank that is advocating for the expansion of the privatization of the state’s public education system, as the Wisconsin Examiner reported. According to its 2021 grants list, the foundation has also supported Ohio-based Buckeye Institute and the Goldwater Institute in Arizona, which are both pushing voucher-type movements in their respective states.

DeVos herself is another major voucher backer, and has supported efforts in her home state of Michigan and beyond. She is involved with a number of organizations, including the American Federation for Children, which she chaired and helped found. That organization and its affiliates — the American Federation for Children Action Fund (a 527 group that supports candidates) and the 501(c)(3) American Federation for Children Growth Fund — have promoted education vouchers for years, including in Washington, D.C., as the Washington Post reported in 2017. More recently, it backed efforts to push ESA legislation in Idaho, according to a report in the Idaho Capital Sun (Republican state legislators just rejected a voucher bill there). The organization has also been active in privatization efforts in Texas, according to the Texas Monthly; and in Nebraska, the Nebraska Examiner reports that DeVos and her husband provided most of the dollars identified as funding from the American Federation for Children.

DeVos has worked hard to influence education policy in her home state of Michigan, with some success, but so far, has failed to establish a voucher program there. Most recently, in November, voters overwhelmingly opposed a school voucher plan she helped fund, as Chalkbeat reported. Devos and her family gave $6.3 million in support of the ballot proposal.

The State Policy Network also played a role in the pro-voucher campaign in Idaho, according to the Idaho Capitol Sun report. That organization, which oversees a coalition of state-based conservative think tanks, is backed by the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation and Charles Koch, according to a report by Documented, and has also received funding from DonorsTrust and Donors Capital Fund, according to Jane Mayer’s reporting. In an opinion piece for Washington Examiner, Chantal Lovell, the State Policy Network’s director of policy advancement, credited her group for expansion of education savings accounts across the country.

A number of organizations that Charles Koch has funded over the years have played a role in the voucher movement. The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a membership organization of right-leaning state legislators, promotes education vouchers, for example. ALEC has received support from Charles Koch, Donors Trust and the Bradley Foundation. ALEC-affiliated state legislators have spearheaded the voucher movement in Texas, according to the Texas Monthly. The libertarian Cato Institute, which Charles Koch helped create, according to Mayer, supports a form of school voucher called Scholarship Tax Credits.

Launched by Koch in 2019, Yes. Every Kid is another lobbying group backing vouchers and other conservative education initiatives at state houses across the country. Tom Newell, the organization’s vice president of government affairs, is frequently quoted in support of state-level voucher efforts, most recently in Arkansas. Yes. Every Kid is one of the organizations identified in a recent article in The Oklahoman as part of a coalition — including the American Federation of Children and the Heritage Foundation — that is pushing vouchers in that state. In the article, Oklahoman reporter Ben Feldman describes the coalition’s meticulous communications effort to make the voucher effort look like a grassroots, parent-led campaign.

Conservative religious funders are another force behind the voucher movement. The National Christian Charitable Foundation, also known as the National Christian Foundation (NCF), is the go-to DAF for conservative Christian funders, as IP has reported. NCF has supported organizations advocating vouchers, including ACE Scholarships (Alliance for Choice in Education) and EdChoice Kentucky, according to its 2020 tax filings. And last year in Texas, a Christian-nationalist-alligned PAC, with backing from two conservative Christian billionaires, doled out millions to candidates who supported vouchers, according to an NBC report.

We’ve also spotted some smaller, lesser-known conservative funders backing vouchers, including the Kovner Foundation, as IP’s Ade Adeniji reported recently.

In a lot of these cases, it’s hard to pin down the extent to which the funders of these groups support vouchers themselves, as they’re often making unrestricted donations for groups like the Heritage Foundation, which work on dozens of policy issues. But it’s clear that vouchers have become a popular pillar of conservative ideology that these groups and their longtime supporters are championing.

Are K-12 funders backing education vouchers?

What about the big K-12 philanthropic juggernauts? It is similarly difficult to pin down who, exactly, among the major ed funders are supportive of vouchers, because they also often support organizations working on many education programs that include vouchers. That’s because vouchers, education savings accounts and education tax credits are all tangled up in the broader school choice movement, which seeks to advance publicly funded options for parents outside of traditional district schools. It’s an umbrella term that describes several potential alternatives, including charters, home schooling, magnet schools and voucher-type programs.

For years, charter schools were the flagship strategy for school choice proponents, winning enthusiastic support from both Republicans and Democrats and from major education funders like the Walton and Broad foundations. Some of the luster has worn off of charter schools as a cure-all solution for public education woes, but charter networks still receive significant philanthropic support.

Some top education funders still support the idea of school choice and the organizations that promote it, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they support vouchers.

Arnold Ventures, for example, provides funding for many charter-related nonprofits, according to its grants database, as well as The City Fund, which promotes both public charter and traditional public schools. According to a spokesperson, however, Arnold Ventures does not do any work in the area of vouchers.

Ed funding behemoth the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation recently gave The Reason Foundation a grant of close to $1 million, according to Forbes. The Reason Foundation, which supports libertarian causes, as IP has reported, is a committed voucher advocate. Here again, though, according to a Gates statement, “Vouchers have not historically been an area of focus for our education work and are not a focus of our current strategies. We partner with a wide range of organizations.” The Reason grant “supports their work to provide analysis to stakeholders to help them understand the implications of general state budget pressures, such as lower revenues and other state spending pressures, in order to protect and uphold fair and adequate overall funding for public education.”

The Walton Family Foundation (WFF)’s outlook on vouchers is less clear, but the ed funding giant does have some connections to the movement. It helped fund research on vouchers in Milwaukee from 2005 to 2010, according to Joshua Cowen, a professor of education policy at Michigan State University. In 2013, it gave $6 million to the Alliance for School Success, a gift that aimed to double the number of students using vouchers, according to the Washington Post.

A WFF spokesperson offered a noncommittal statement about its position on vouchers: “Increasing access to high-quality learning options — of all types — creates student pathways to stable and successful futures. This is especially true for students with unique needs and in low-income communities. We focus on the needs of students and communities. In doing so, we help educators and families support kids in reaching their full potential.”

WFF’s grants database shows that it supports a number of organizations that back vouchers, including the State Policy Network, the Goldwater Institute, as well as the Alliance for School Choice (in all three cases, the funds were designated for K-12 Education, according to the database), but it’s hard to say whether Walton is specifically supporting their voucher work.

The foundation has also been involved in state-level efforts to promote vouchers. Over the years, many in the Walton family’s home state of Arkansas have accused WFF of using its influence to push vouchers and other school reform efforts. But it has been active in other states, as well. For example, an investigation by Oklahoma Watch found that WFF provided funding for Every Kid Counts Oklahoma, which supports vouchers in that state (Yes. Every Kid also provided support for that group). In a recent report, The Oklahoman included the Walton Family Foundation in a list of organizations backing vouchers there.

The issue of choice and how it’s defined came up when we reached out to Grantmakers for Education for a broader picture of how education funders view vouchers. GFE has close to 300 member organizations; it surveys education grantmakers annually about funding priorities and plans and issues reports about these findings.

For its upcoming report, “Trends in Education Philanthropy: Benchmarking 2023,” which will be released at the end of May, GFE asked foundation leaders about their support for school choice, but didn’t ask specifically about vouchers. According to Ulcca Joshi Hansen, GFE’s co-interim executive director, preliminary results from the benchmarking survey show that 25% of those surveyed said they were working in the area of school choice, and choice accounted for 7% of overall funding by respondents. In terms of funding plans going forward, about 17% said they anticipated increasing funding for school choice efforts; 71% said funding would stay at the same level; and 11% said that they’re likely to decrease investments in school choice.

Although respondents weren’t specifically asked about vouchers, Joshi Hansen doubts this approach has broad support among GFE members. “As an organization, we’re deeply committed, in our vision and mission, to having a public education system that serves all students,” she wrote in an email statement. “Some of the more recent research on large-scale voucher programs in places like Louisiana, Indiana, Ohio and Washington, D.C., point to mixed outcomes in that regard.”

Joshi Hansen points to research that shows somewhat positive impacts on how long students stay in school, but negative outcomes when it comes to student achievement. There are also concerns about whether voucher amounts cover the full cost of education and how that could negatively impact low-income families.

“Given that our membership is committed to racial justice and equity in education, it wouldn’t be surprising to me that fewer of them support the kinds of universal voucher programs we are seeing put forward.”

What’s the problem with vouchers?

Joshi Hansen’s comments speak to some of the controversy over education vouchers and why traditional public school backers are adamantly opposed to them. Meanwhile, although they are considered part of the school choice movement, there’s mixed support even among fans and funders of school choice.

Voucher backers go to great lengths to sell this approach in all its forms as a way to put parents in charge of their child’s schooling, free them from burdensome school district bureaucracies, and pursue an education that fits the needs of their particular child.

What’s not to like? Plenty, according to voucher opponents like education historian Jack Schneider and journalist Jennifer Berkshire. Their book, “A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door,” describes the network of conservative interests working to privatize public education. In a recent article for The Nation titled “Robbing From the Poor to Educate the Rich,” Berkshire and Schneider echoed Joshi Hanson’s point that wealthy parents who already send their kids to private school stand to benefit most from voucher programs. And when the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy examined data from three states that offer school voucher tax credits — Arizona, Louisiana and Virginia — it found that families with incomes over $200,000 are the primary beneficiaries.

Research also shows that public school funding takes a beating in states that adopt voucher programs. A recent report by Public Funds for Public Schools found that in the seven states researchers examined, state funds allocated to public schools declined, even as public school enrollment increased.

Berkshire and Schneider point out that private schools, even those that receive public funds through voucher programs, are allowed to pick and choose their students, while public schools are open to all. But all families will be impacted if voucher advocates are successful, as education professors David DeMatthews and David S. Knight argued recently in The Hill. Referring to vouchers as “a taxpayer swindle,” they write, ”most parents will find their top choice — a neighborhood public school — largely defunded and unable to recruit and retain high-quality teachers due to a transfer of funds into unregulated private schools.”

And there’s evidence that when it comes to learning, vouchers simply don’t work. In the Hechinger Report, MSU’s Joshua Cowen wrote that “as more states have created more and larger voucher programs, experts like me have learned enough to say that these programs on balance can severely hinder academic growth — especially for vulnerable kids.”

Cowen started his career as a voucher agnostic, but over the years, has followed all the independent studies on the impact of voucher programs on student academic outcomes, and says they are irrefutable.

“We’re talking about academic losses [for students in voucher programs] about as large as the pandemic’s effect on test scores — I mean, really, really, really bad,” he told IP. “I don’t know of another human-made program that has had such negative impacts on student test scores as school vouchers. Hurricane Katrina did and the pandemic did, but those are natural disasters.” (For more information on research findings, see Cowen’s recent Brookings article and an earlier report by the Center for American Progress.)

Charles Siler was once a voucher advocate, working in public relations and lobbying for the Goldwater Institute, a major ESA advocate in Arizona. Today Siler, who works at Agave Strategy, a communications firm he cofounded, is a vocal critic, having seen the flimsy data on student outcomes his former employers were using to push vouchers. He’s testified against the policies in a number of state legislatures.

“The proponents of vouchers love to do these studies with their own kind of scholars,” he said in a recent interview. “They obviously want to highlight the best kind of framing of the data that they can find, but when you look at the underlying data, it’s really bad for vouchers pretty much every time. … The data wasn’t made up per se, but it was very much cherry picking. We’d pick the best cherries, and then we’d heavily polish them.””

Despite the voucher movement’s recent wins, Siler doesn’t believe the effort to privatize public education will be successful in the long run. “Public schools are incredibly popular across the board, especially among people who have school-aged children, regardless of their political affiliation,” he said. “People like their public schools.”

Siler is right that Americans, overall, support public education. But the persistent assaults on public schools underway — evident in book bans, outrage over “wokeness” and restriction on discussions of race and gender — may be eroding that trust. As the flurry of new voucher laws in states across the country demonstrates, no one should discount the impact the voucher movement — and the wealthy donors, conservative policy brokers and a minority of parents animating it — could have on the future of our schools.

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