By Steve Hinnefeld
The Indiana Citizen
July 1, 2025
The late economist Milton Friedman has been called the father of the modern school voucher movement. His 1955 paper, “The Role of Government in Education,” argued that government should help fund schools but not run them. It proposed state-funded vouchers to pay tuition at private schools that parents would choose.
For years, vouchers were a fringe idea, embraced mostly by libertarians. But in recent years, they have gone mainstream. At least a dozen states and the District of Columbia now have voucher programs. Others have voucher-like tax credit and education savings account programs. Indiana created a voucher program in 2011 and has expanded it dramatically.
Friedman and his wife created the Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice in 1996 to advance their ideas about schools. The Indianapolis-based foundation, which changed its name to EdChoice in 2016, has been a leader in promoting vouchers.
EdChoice makes the research case for vouchers with advocacy and reports like “The 123s of School Choice.” Critics say its presentation of research is biased and uses criteria that emphasize positive over negative studies. Indiana University education professor Christopher Lubienski, for example, faults it for a “vote-counting” methodology that adds up pro- and anti-voucher studies regardless of size and quality.
Robert Enlow has been involved with the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice since its launch and was named president and CEO of the foundation, now EdChoice, in 2009.
“For me, choice is about really trying to disrupt the existing system that hasn’t been showing itself to work, no matter how much money and time we give it,” he said.
Enlow spoke with Steve Hinnefeld for The Indiana Citizen about the group’s voucher advocacy. The interview has been edited for length and clarity. It follows an interview with Michigan State University professor Josh Cowen, a voucher critic.
QUESTION: The Indiana legislature this year expanded the state’s voucher program, making it available to all families, regardless of income, effective in 2026-27. That’s something EdChoice supported. Why?
ENLOW: I think as Hoosiers, we should care about an educated public. It should matter to us that our children get educated, not where they get educated. We support the idea that everyone in the state, regardless of who you are, should be free to get an education in the best possible setting for your children. That means in our great traditional public schools, in charter schools, and our existing nonpublic schools. And maybe even, down the road, a customized education where people can pick and choose from a variety of different options.
Q: Indiana’s voucher program was open to most families with school-age children. Couldn’t families covered by the expansion already afford private schools? Isn’t this just a transfer of money from the public to wealthy families?
ENLOW: Here’s how I’d answer that. How many rich families access choice now is by purchasing a house in what is typically an income-segregated community. We seem to be OK with allocating over $15,000 per child per year so that millionaires and billionaires can access traditional public schools in what is often an income-segregated area, but we freak out at giving them a $6,500 voucher to go to a private school. I think there’s something upside down about that. We should fund students, not systems.
Q: Michigan State University professor Josh Cowen, in an interview with The Indiana Citizen, argues that school vouchers are a key part of the Christian nationalist agenda. How do you respond to that?
ENLOW: He’s just wrong. Look, what we’re seeing in a place like Florida and Arizona, where there’s universal choice, is a wide variety of new types of schools. You’re seeing everything from classical Christian schools start up to a school specifically for LGBTQ+ kids, or schools specifically for kids who want to learn outside. It’s not an agenda except to get kids educated where they fit in. It’s not a Christian nationalist agenda in any way, shape, manner, or form. I’ve been in this movement for 30 years now. After 30 years, I think I would know whether that’s one of the key agenda items, and it’s not.
The fastest-growing voucher programs in America in the mid-2000s were voucher programs for special-needs kids. What’s happening now with private schools is a guy like Amar Kumar, who runs KaiPod Learning, who’s trying to start thousands of new microschools all across the country. Or Prenda Microschools. None of those have an agenda except to get kids educated. That’s what I see.
Q: In Indiana, some schools that accept vouchers exclude students and families for reasons of religion, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity or test scores. Why should the public fund schools that discriminate?
ENLOW: In Indiana, schools are required to follow federal law, which says schools cannot discriminate on race, color or national origin. I think the conversation around LGBTQ is very interesting. If you look at the GLSEN survey, they find that kids are bullied because of their sexual orientation in traditional public schools at significantly higher rates than in private schools. I think it’s a little more complex than the way we talk about it, and that’s one of the reasons I really like what’s going on in places like Florida and Arizona, where you’re seeing schools start up just for kids who are gay and lesbian. We obviously don’t believe in discrimination of any kind, and I think transparency is the way to solve that problem.
Q: Many people say, why should my taxes support schools that teach a religious dogma that I don’t share and that would reject my own children?
ENLOW: The money we’re talking about here is money to families; it’s not money to schools. No private school in the state of Indiana receives any dollar except for the truly private choice of the family. That’s true of public schools as well, except the difference is, you’ve got to buy a house. I mean, it’s painfully unfair for families who can’t afford to live in a place like Zionsville and don’t have access to that quality of education. This is why we want to separate these two things.
Q: When I talked to Josh Cowen, his big issue with vouchers wasn’t Christian nationalism but performance. He was involved in early studies that found modest academic gains for students. But studies of statewide programs in Indiana, Ohio and Louisiana have found large academic losses for students who received vouchers.
ENLOW: What Josh won’t tell you is that the latest data is showing that the second cohort of voucher students is getting better results. (Note: This data, for Indiana, is preliminary and has not been published but has been discussed confidentially at academic conferences). They’re actually outperforming their peers. And kids with vouchers are doing better on attainment; they’re graduating at higher rates. Plus, the programs are also showing dramatic parent satisfaction, dramatic improvement in civic tolerance. Families who are in the programs report that they’re more engaged with their kids’ schools, they’re more engaged with their kids’ homework. If you want your kids to end up being tolerant of other people’s beliefs, you send them to a religious private school.
Q: A big concern is how vouchers affect funding for public schools? It stands to reason that, if we’re increasing state funding for private schools, there may be less for public schools. State data show that about half of the K-12 funding increase in the 2025-27 budget will go to expanding vouchers. Are vouchers hurting public schools?
ENLOW: Of course not. We’ve seen dramatic increases in per-pupil allotments after inflation since the 1970s. We see increases in traditional public school funding in areas where there’s school choice. We’re not seeing public schools getting harmed. We, as a society, want to fund education to make sure that our kids are educated to the best extent possible. We do that through our traditional public school system, and we can do that through other means, through charters and privates. These are dollars that should follow kids, not dollars that belong to systems. I’ve never seen any study that shows that it actually hurts public schools.
Q: When vouchers go before the voters, they don’t seem to do so well. Kentucky and Nebraska, conservative states, voted solidly last fall against vouchers. Why?
ENLOW: Two things about this. One, we have a representative democracy, and so the voters’ voices are being heard through their representatives. When it comes to referenda, there’s no doubt that school choice has not fared very well — except, most interestingly, in Colorado (where a bare majority of voters rejected enshrining school choice in the state constitution). Colorado has a long experience with charter schools, micro schools and private schools. I think that result shows that over time, when families are seeing school choice in action, that it becomes less concerning for them. In places like Kentucky and Nebraska, which haven’t had school choice ever, really, they don’t have a great understanding of what it actually means.
Q: At the federal level, the Educational Choice for Children Act would provide tax credits for contributions to voucher funds. Do you think that’s a good thing?
ENLOW: I’m always worried about interaction by government in private sector issues, but I think they’ve designed ECCA to be the least restrictive possible. It’s a tax credit bill as opposed to a direct subsidy, so I think that allows one layer of distance. It also is at the Treasury Department as opposed to the Department of Education. The third level is it allows any group, any nonprofit whose job is to give out scholarships, to participate. I’m always hesitant about the role of the federal government, but I think that the ECCA program is probably a better version than anything we’ve got so far.
Q: Donald Trump wants to abolish the U.S. Department of Education. Do you agree?
ENLOW: I don’t think you should abolish the functions of the Department of Education. I don’t care if there’s a Department of Education. There are functions like civil rights, special ed, Title I, there’s a variety of core functions that are carried out by the department. I care that those get done, not that those get done in one office or another office. One of the things I think the Department of Education should be doing, which was its original charter in 1867, is to provide data on the condition of education.I think that we need to make sure that we don’t gut our data collection at the federal government level. We at EdChoice have been opposing that from the very beginning.
Steve Hinnefeld is a freelance writer based in Bloomington. He formerly was an adjunct instructor at the Media School at Indiana University, a media specialist at Indiana University and reporter for the Bloomington Herald-Times.
Dwight Adams, an editor and writer based in Indianapolis, edited this article. He is a former content editor, copy editor and digital producer at The Indianapolis Star and IndyStar.com, and worked as a planner for other newspapers, including the Louisville Courier Journal.
