By Sheila Suess Kennedy
September 25, 2026
As I have noted, I recently participated in an event sponsored by the Fort Wayne chapter of Hoosiers United for Separation of Church and State. (Hoosiers is part of the umbrella organization Americans United for Separation of Church and State). One of the concerns voiced both by Randall Balmer, the keynote speaker, and several of the panelists whose discussion concluded the event was the growth of educational vouchers, which have proven to be less about education and more about subsidizing religious institutions.
Those of us who have followed the “privatization” movement and the establishment and growth of educational voucher programs will recall that these programs were initially sold as a way to allow poor children to escape “failing” public schools. Unlike wealthier families, these children lacked the wherewithal to escape to the private schools that (we were assured) were doing a better job.
Several years later, the belief that private schools would improve educational outcomes has been pretty thoroughly debunked. But we are only now coming to realize that the real purpose of these programs was to send more of the nation’s children to religiously (and often racially) segregated schools, and to subsidize the already well-to-do.
Permit me to quote from a recent article from Chalkbeat.
Enrollment in Indiana’s Choice Scholarship school voucher program slowed in overall growth for the second year in a row last school year, new data from the state shows, but the number of higher income families using the program increased.
For the first time, more vouchers went to families making more than $100,000 than less than $100,000 this year.
It also turns out that, far from helping children escape “failing” public schools, “the majority of students in the program have never attended a public school.”
In Indiana, as in several other states engaged in siphoning off taxpayer money from public education, in 2025, the legislature authorized vouchers for all Indiana families regardless of income. While that added incentive won’t be in effect until next year, we can already see the effect of the program’s already generous preceding limits.
Approximately 7,000 students from families making more than $200,000 received a voucher in 2025-26, compared to around 5,400 in 2024-25 and 3,700 in 2023-24. More vouchers were also awarded to families in the $100,000-$150,000 and $150,000-$200,000 income brackets than in past years.
The number of vouchers given to students from families making less than $50,000 dropped from 16,000 in 2024-25 to around 12,000 in 2025-26.
And how much money are taxpayers transferring from our public school systems to these predominantly religious schools?
The state awarded $548 million for Choice Scholarships in 2025-26, according to the report, up from $497 million in 2024-225. The 2024-25 amounts were adjusted slightly because some students transferred out of their choice schools before the end of the year. The actual payments were around $491 million, according to this year’s report.
So we Hoosiers paid $491 million dollars to send students to “private” schools, 90% plus of which are religious (and a substantial portion of which are fundamentalist or close). Years of research confirm that those schools are not producing superior academic results; indeed, they are often are producing inferior results. Research also confirms that a number of these religious academies teach creationism rather than science, and use books that distort American history to accord with White Christian nationalist propaganda.
Now, we learn that We The People aren’t just subsidizing religion in contravention of the clear intent of the Establishment Clause, we are also subsidizing the already well-to-do. Let me repeat the central finding of that Chalkbeat report: more vouchers went to families making more than $100,000 than less than $100,000 this year, and 7,000 students from families making more than $200,000 received a voucher in 2025-26.
The underpaid teachers in our underfunded public schools are scrounging for supplies while We the Taxpayers are sending tuition dollars to families that can well afford to send their children to these religious academies. (Indeed, several studies have found that many families receiving vouchers previously had enrolled their children in these schools and had been paying the tuition.)
The Free Exercise clause of the First Amendment absolutely protects the right of parents to send their children to a religious school of their choice. The Establishment Clause–properly read–should prohibit the use of our tax dollars to subsidize that choice.
Public schools are constitutive of a public. In addition to teaching subject-matter, they should be laboratories of democracy–not underfunded and struggling while public dollars subsidize the wealthy and further erode what Randall Balmer accurately calls “America’s Best Idea: Separation of Church and State.”
Sheila Suess Kennedy is Emerita Professor of Law and Public Policy at the School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis. As an attorney, she practiced real estate, administrative and business law in Indianapolis before becoming corporation counsel for the City of Indianapolis in 1977. In 1980, she was the Republican candidate for Indiana’s then 11th Congressional District and in 1992, she became executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana. She joined the faculty of the School of Public and Environment al Affairs in 1998.
This column was originally published by Sheila Kennedy on her blog, “A Jaundiced Look at the World We Live In.” The views and opinions expressed are those of the author only and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Indiana Citizen or any other affiliated organization.
