Congressional panel debates the future of school choice programs, vouchers
17th March 2025 · 0 Comments
By Shauneen Miranda
Contributing Writer
(States Newsroom) — As school choice continues to take heat across the country, the debate surrounding these programs came to the forefront last Tuesday at a hearing in a U.S. House education panel.
Republicans defended them as needed for parents unhappy with their local public schools while Democrats said the programs can drain money from school districts and have a poor track record when it comes to results.
The umbrella term “school choice” centers on programs that offer alternatives to one’s assigned public school and includes private school vouchers.
Parents can use these vouchers paid for with public funds to help with the cost of private education for their kids, and these programs have drawn strong criticism over who exactly benefits and how they can contribute to the underfunding and lack of resources already facing public schools across the country.
President Donald Trump took major steps in support of school choice programs during his first days back in office. He signed an executive order in January that gave the U.S. secretary of Education two months to offer guidance on how states can use “federal formula funds to support K-12 educational choice initiatives.”
The order also directed the Education secretary to “include education freedom as a priority in discretionary grant programs.”
Education data
Trump and other advocates for school choice programs have pointed to the latest data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which found that average math and reading scores in 2024 for pupils in fourth grade and eighth grade were lower compared to before the coronavirus pandemic, in 2019.
Rep. Kevin Kiley, who chairs the House Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Elementary and Secondary Education, said the report “paints an alarming picture – math and reading scores continue to decline despite a steady increase in overall spending.”
The California Republican said “embracing school choice means that parents should have a range of high-quality education options and that includes their neighborhood public school.”
Michael McShane, director of national research at EdChoice, a nonprofit focused on advancing school choice options, said school choice programs “have widened the educational opportunities open to our children and the variety of educational institutions available to them.”
McShane pointed out that “there are 8,150 charter schools educating 3.7 million students; 3,105 magnet schools educating 2.7 million students; more than 415,000 students enrolled in open enrollment programs and more than 6,750 private schools participating in choice programs educating 1.2 million students.”
‘Voucher scams’
Meanwhile, Democrats on the panel took specific aim at private school vouchers within school choice initiatives, arguing that these programs divert funds from public schools and exacerbate inequalities in education.
Rep. Suzanne Bonamici, ranking member of the panel, said “we need to protect public education and importantly, funding for public education, from voucher scams that funnel taxpayer dollars into private institutions.”
The Oregon Democrat said these vouchers “are often pushed with little or no income restrictions, meaning that every student, whether from a single parent home where the mom is working and making minimum wage or from a billionaire family like Elon Musk’s, they could all receive the same amount of taxpayer money, all while the public schools that serve the rest – the majority – are left to do more with less.”
Jessica Levin, litigation director at the Education Law Center, said “there’s an ever-mounting body of evidence that (private school vouchers) do not provide a better education for the most vulnerable, high-need students and, in fact, cause great harm to students, families and communities.”
“The data shows that academic outcomes for voucher students are dismal – study after study in places like Louisiana, Indiana and Ohio reveal that vouchers actually have a detrimental academic impact on participating students,” Levin said.
Rep. Summer Lee said “it’s clear that school choice, this school choice fallacy we’re talking about today, just exacerbates the inequalities, the inequities we already have.”
“Wealthy white families will continue to have their choices subsidized by depriving largely Black and brown and other marginalized children of educational opportunities,” the Pennsylvania Democrat added.
This article originally published in the March 17, 2025 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
