By Sheila Suess Kennedy
August 29, 2026
Can you stand one more diatribe about school vouchers?
I have posted dozens of blogs addressing the multiple negative consequences of starving the nation’s public schools in order to funnel tax dollars into the pockets of people who mostly don’t need those dollars. But the incredibly negative fiscal consequences of voucher programs aren’t even what makes these programs most damaging.
There are several reasons that the authors of Project 2025 promoted school vouchers so heavily.
As I have pointed out, most of the “private” schools accepting vouchers are religious schools–and a significant percentage are fundamentalist. Not only do several of them teach religious dogma rather than science or accurate history (in Louisiana, a study found several substituting creationism for evolution), the segregation of children by religion reinforces social polarization. In public schools, children from various backgrounds mingle in the same classrooms, an often-overlooked element of efforts to achieve e pluribus unum, or “from many, one.” (I’ve also previously reported on my own co-authored study of voucher schools in Indiana, which found few of them bothering to teach civics.)
A number of those schools also actively discriminate on the basis of religious dogma–refusing to accept gay children or the children of gay couples. And despite initial efforts to describe vouchers as a measure to help minority children “stuck” in substandard public schools, some studies have found that voucher students are overwhelmingly White.
Several scholars have pointed out that these programs operate almost entirely in urban regions. Rural areas simply don’t have enough children to support additional schools, so the net effect in many states is to siphon funds from rural public schools to support voucher options in the more densely populated urban areas.
Other studies have confirmed that the bulk of the dollars being taken from public education are going to wealthier families, many of whom were paying private school tuition before We the Taxpayers thoughtfully took that burden from them.
By far the most telling consequence of this movement to destroy public education has been the utter failure of these private religious schools to produce the educational outcomes promised. Children in voucher schools do not perform better--and often perform signifiantly worse–on standardized tests of reading and math.
Recently, Heather Cox Richardson visited the voucher debate, and put it into historical context. She began by revisiting the Nat Turner uprising and the reaction to that event by the slaveholding South–a reaction that was twofold: justifying slavery and withholding education from enslaved Blacks.
Denying enslaved Black Americans access to education exiled them from a place in the nation. The Framers had quite explicitly organized the United States not on the principles of religion or tradition, but rather on the principles of the Enlightenment: the idea that, by applying knowledge and reasoning to the natural world, men could figure out the best way to order society. Someone excluded from access to education could not participate in that national project. Instead, that person was read out of society, doomed to be controlled by leaders who marshaled religion and propaganda to defend their dominance.
Richardson then traced the efforts of the then-Republican Party to rebut this anti-education effort, from Lincoln to Brown v. Board of Education. Brown, as we know, was met with the South’s “massive resistance” to integration. Some areas closed their public schools, while others took funds from the newly integrated public schools and redistributed them to segregated private schools.
Richardson notes that this massive resistance has never died–that “The drive to push tax dollars from public schools to private academies through a voucher system remained a top priority for those on the right.” She documents the massive amounts being siphoned from public schools in Arizona and in Texas, where a study by the state comptroller showed that “of the more than 100,000 families participating in the new private school voucher program, most are white and from urban areas… About 70% were already attending private schools or being homeschooled.”
I encourage readers to click through and read Richardson’s lengthy post in its entirety. Her report amply supports her concluding paragraph:
In 1831, southern lawmakers tried to create a white nation by making it a crime to educate Black Americans. In 2026 the intent to exclude certain Americans from participation in the Enlightenment principles that undergird the nation remains the same, only less explicit.
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 1th 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.
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.
