Frank Lara
The author is the Executive Vice President of United Educators of San Francisco (UESF) and the Peace and Freedom Party candidate for California State Superintendent of Public Instruction.
From the dismantling of the Department of Education to the vilification of DEI and ethnic studies, the Trump administration has escalated its billionaire agenda through attacks on public education. The latest of these attacks comes in the form of a federal voucher program, the Educational Choice for Children Act (ECCA), strategically placed in Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill.” ECCA will use the federal tax code to create a national school voucher program.
Billionaires claim that public schools are failing, and exploit anxieties about their outcry of crisis to push privatization efforts like vouchers. But the only real way to improve public schools is through fully funding them, not through undercutting the very premise of public education by encouraging private school flight.
Examining the racist history of school vouchers, the motives and narratives of billionaires in pushing it, and successful fights against school privatization can help shape a strategy to fight back against ECCA and other billionaire attacks on public education.
Vouchers, privatization and segregation
School vouchers, also referred to as Education Savings Accounts (ESA) and Tuition Tax Credits (TTCs), are publicly funded subsidies that give parents taxpayer dollars to cover tuition costs for private schools, including religious schools, and in some cases, for costs associated with homeschooling. Vouchers are a form of privatization that harm public education and students by taking funding away from already underfunded public schools, which serve the vast majority of students, and giving it to private schools that are unaccountable to our communities.
Since the 1950s school vouchers have been used to further segregationist goals and promote discrimination. Vouchers first emerged as a way for counties and states in the Jim Crow South to avoid adhering to Brown v Board of Education, the 1954 Supreme Court decision that found segregation in the schools to be unconstitutional. They did this by closing public schools, opening private white academies, and providing vouchers to white students to attend these private schools which, unlike public schools, were still permitted to discriminate based on race.
To this day, vouchers continue to exacerbate racial segregation and ableism, as private schools are not subject to the same regulatory measures as public schools, and can limit their admission based on race, sexual orientation, gender and disability.
Advocates claim that vouchers help low-income students attend high-quality schools otherwise out of reach to them. However, in states with existing voucher programs there is no proven link between vouchers and gains in student achievement. Some studies have found that voucher programs actually reduced student achievement and lowered test scores.
Additionally, data from existing voucher programs show the majority of the voucher funds have gone to students who were already enrolled in private schools. In Cleveland, two-thirds of voucher users attended private school the year before they received the voucher. State data in Oklahoma revealed that fewer than ten percent of the state’s voucher applicants were public school students.
ECCA: A federal voucher program
Under the Educational Choice for Children Act (ECCA) included in Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill funding for vouchers would come from individuals who make charitable donations to Scholarship Granting Organizations (SGOs) in exchange for a dollar-for-dollar tax credit up to $1,700 per individual. The SGO would then grant funds to families for private sector options outside of the public school system, like private school tuition, homeschooling materials and more. With no cap on the number of tax credits that could be issued this national voucher program is estimated to cost the federal government billions of dollars that could fund the public education system.
Not meant to benefit low income students
To make matters worse, the federal voucher program is not written to benefit low-income students, as the household income limit is set at 300% of a given area’s median gross income. A student from an area of the country where the median gross income is $100,000 could qualify as long as their household income is below $300,000. And if trends from existing state voucher programs hold, the majority of the students who apply will be students who already attend private schools and who live in wealthy zip codes.
A federal voucher program would have huge benefits for the school privatization movement backed by billionaires who will see enrollment drop in public schools and increase in private schools. It would also benefit wealthy families, who would be able to access public funds for private schooling that they could have afforded anyway. Meanwhile, public school students and workers will suffer, as the already underfunded public school system relies heavily on student enrollment for per-pupil funding in order to function.
An alternative to privatization: Fully funding public schools
This voucher bill is just the latest in a long history of billionaire attacks on public education which exploit people’s very real anxieties about schooling in the United States. While there are many issues impacting working class students under a capitalist education system, when we hear the “failing schools” narrative, it is important to consider who is saying it and why.
When asked about their own child’s education, 76% of American parents say they are completely or somewhat satisfied, but this fact is consistently obscured by billionaires, privatizers, policymakers and political pundits discussing public education.
“This country is in a student achievement crisis, and over the past decade it has continued to worsen, especially for our most vulnerable students,” Trump’s former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos stated in 2019. Why would DeVos, a billionaire champion of school privatization, express concern about “our most vulnerable students”? And how does it benefit her agenda to push the narrative that our schools are failing?
Billionaires push a “failing schools” narrative because it provides them with an opening to offer profit-driven “solutions” to a “failing schools” problem. Over the past several decades, these “solutions” have taken on different forms: charter schools, new standardized assessment programs, education technology, new “miracle” curricula, and now voucher programs – anything but fully funding the public schools.
These “solutions” offered benefit them, as they end up moving public money into private hands, thereby defunding public schools. For example, iReady, an all-in-one assessment and adaptive education technology program, is being rolled out across the country, with 14 million current student users. Districts purchase the program, often for hundreds of thousands of dollars, and the money goes straight from public school districts to iReady’s parent company, Curriculum Associates, a portfolio company of Berkshire Partners, a multi-billion-dollar private equity firm.
Less funding for students can result in larger class sizes, school closures and the cutting of essential services and programs. This can lead to poor outcomes for students, thereby reinforcing the devious “failing schools” narrative. As working people, we need to ask ourselves why we would accept “solutions” from the very people who want to defund our schools, when we know the solutions to our problems: Fully funding public education!
One real solution that comes from fully funding public education is smaller class sizes. We have had definitive data on this for decades. Holding class size to eighteen or fewer students in grades k–3 produces significant benefits in both reading and math, with the greatest benefits to Black, Latino and students from low-income backgrounds. And yet, because there is no profit or tax benefit to billionaires, and it actually requires funding and investment in our public schools, this solution is often cast as idealistic rather than a pragmatic, reasonable, research-based strategy to improve outcomes for students.
The “failing schools” narrative pushed by billionaires is a tactic to manipulate and misdirect anger over the real problems in public education. There are real problems with our schools, but they are largely due to underfunding under a capitalist education system. Many of these problems would be resolved under socialism, where our society would be planned around the needs of the people, and underfunding education would be a relic of a shameful past.
How we fight back
Fortunately, there is a rich history of educator unions and community partners fighting back against attacks on public education.
In 2012, The Chicago Teachers Union went on strike in part to fight back against the incessant push of privatization efforts in the school district. The great success of this strike kicked off a wave of other strikes confronting this issue over the next decade, including one in 2019 that won a moratorium on new charter schools. The CTU organized not only educators, but students, families and the broader community to prevent the supplanting of public schools with charter schools.
In 2016 the question of charter schools emerged again front and center in Massachusetts, this time on the ballot in the form of Question 2. Up against a political powerhouse coalition of the wealthy with almost twice as much funding, the Save Our Public Schools campaign managed a decisive victory, as the proposition to expand the charter school system and siphon ever-more money away from public schools was voted down by the people of Massachusetts.
Importantly, “No on 2” re-wrote the false narrative being presented that poor Black and Brown Bostonians were begging for charter schools. The struggle gave students and families the opportunity to speak for themselves about what divestment from their public schools actually meant to them. The success of the “No on 2” campaign raised consciousness across the state among suburban and urban families alike about the forces at work behind education funding.Major struggle shaping up in California,
Right now in California a dozen educator unions are lining up their contract negotiations to pressure the State legislature and political leaders to end the decades of austerity in education policy. Since the passage of Proposition 13 in 1978, which reduced public school funding by decreasing tax revenues, California has spent a notoriously pitiful amount per pupil in the public schools here, especially in comparison with the enormous economy this state enjoys.
The current bargaining struggles taking place across the state represent some of the sharpest and most potent counterattacks on California’s negligence towards its students in recent memory. The “We Can’t Wait” campaign offers a new urgency to fight back against the erosion of the core pillars of public education: fully staffed schools, safe and stable schools and competitive wages and benefits for those who work in them.
As the Executive Vice President of United Educators of San Francisco, I am so moved by the organizing we have been engaged in through the We Can’t Wait campaign. The dedication of educator unionists from around the state and their commitment to struggle has energized me and reminded me of why I wanted to be an educator in the first place– our children deserve so much more than what our state currently provides.
That’s why, in addition to my involvement in the We Can’t Wait campaign, I am running for State Superintendent of Public Instruction as a Peace and Freedom Party candidate. Our political program includes a “No Public Money for Private Schools” point, where we call for a state voucher ban as well as for charter and private school moratoriums.
As working class people we should be very skeptical of anyone who proposes “solutions” for public education that do not include fully funding our schools. Rather than fall for a failing schools narrative put forth by billionaires, we should be studying past struggles and organizing with our unions and community organizations to fight to fully fund our public schools.
Photo: California educators march in San Francisco in suppport of the statewide We Cant Wait campaign. Credit: Jodie Sheffels.
Source: liberationnews.org