The School Privatization Movement Is Broadly Unpopular
For years, the loudest opposition to school privatization has come from public-school advocates and teachers’ unions, who argue that vouchers steal tax dollars from local public schools. They are now increasingly being joined by critics on the Right.
A person holding a sign during a protest rallying against Governor Bill Lee's school voucher program on March 12, 2024, in Nashville, Tennessee. (Seth Herald / Getty Images)
When the Texas state House education committee held a hearing on a proposed voucher bill on March 11, parent Hollie Plemons was among the first people to arrive in the committee room. She’d spend much of the next twelve hours in the cramped, crowded space, waiting for her chance at the mic. And when her name was finally called, she didn’t hold back.
“I told them exactly how bad this bill is and that we’re being bamboozled by our own party,” recalls Plemons, a Republican Party activist and precinct chair in Tarrant County. “Vouchers aren’t conservative. They’re just not.”
In recent years, “school choice” programs that allow families to use public tax dollars to pay for alternatives to public schools for their kids have been proliferating wildly. This January, Tennessee became the latest of a dozen states to adopt so-called universal vouchers. Such programs allow even the wealthiest families to access public funds to pay for private school tuition, homeschooling costs, and virtually anything that can be defined as an education-related expense. In Arizona and Florida, both of which have universal voucher programs, taxpayer dollars have been used to purchase theme park tickets, flat screen TVs, and golf equipment, all in the name of “education.” Texas may be next.
But while voucher proponents point to the growing list of states joining what they call the “education freedom” club as evidence of their cause’s momentum, such cheerleading ignores a growing revolt from the Right.
For years now, the loudest opposition to school privatization has come from public school advocates and teachers’ unions, arguing that vouchers steal tax dollars from local public schools, ultimately bleeding public education dry. They’ve often been joined by rural Republicans who represent small towns where public schools are among the largest employers. They see vouchers as an existential threat, not just to their local schools, but to the survival of their very communities.
The movement opposing vouchers has now changed. Today resistance to school voucher programs is also coming from a patchwork coalition of conservative groups and activists — including many who have long disparaged public schools as “government schools” — that has emerged to block what they now characterize as “government school choice.”
Lead-Pipe Tactics
When the Tennessee legislature reconvened in January, Republican Gov. Bill Lee made clear that enacting an expansive private school voucher program was his top priority. The Education Freedom Act, which comes with a nearly half-billion-dollar price tag, starts relatively small, providing vouchers worth roughly $7,000 to some 20,000 students, half of whom must meet income limits. But in year two, those income limits will come off, meaning that even wealthy parents whose kids already attend private school will be eligible for the new state subsidy. The program is all but certain to balloon as a result.
A similar proposal was stymied last year, after opponents across the political spectrum rallied to defeat it, but the 2025 session likely looked more promising to Lee. Some of the legislature’s fiercest voucher opponents were dispatched in 2024, after national advocacy groups poured money into Republican primaries to take them out. This time around, Lee and his pro-voucher forces were willing to go to extraordinary lengths to ensure the bill’s passage.
Lee convened a special session of the legislature, meaning that controversial bills, typically debated for days and weeks, sailed through committees in hours. Meanwhile, deep-pocketed groups including the American Federation for Children and Club for Growth blanketed the airwaves and social media with pro-voucher messaging and threats to primary legislative holdouts.
For conservative activist Kelly Jackson, creator of the Tennessee news site TruthWire News and a legislative advocate with the influential grassroots group Tennessee Stands, such heavy-handed maneuvering raised an obvious question. If Tennesseans really were clamoring to spend public tax dollars on private religious education, as Lee and his allies kept insisting, why were such “lead-pipe tactics,” plus millions in dark money funding, necessary?
“If you talk to conservatives, they don’t want vouchers. Universal school choice is not a conservative value,” insists Jackson, before posing a riddle: “What do we call something that you can’t afford but the government gives you money [for]?” Answer: “It’s a subsidy.” (That view comes up repeatedly among critics on the Right, who deride vouchers as “handouts,” “giveaways,” or, as one activist put it, “government cheese.”)
Tennessee’s voucher program passed, over the loud objections of Tennessee Stands and other conservative groups, and the defection of several GOP legislators, including one who called the program a nonconservative “scam.” Programs in other states haven’t fared as well. In January, a bill that would have established a universal voucher program in South Dakota was brought down by an unwieldy coalition of public education supporters, the Chamber of Commerce, home schooling groups, and Young America’s Foundation (formerly Young Americans for Freedom), which viewed the proposed program as too restrictive.
If such bedfellows seem unlikely, welcome to the roiling politics of school choice.
Seeing Red
For decades, school choice was marketed as a civil rights cause aimed at helping minority students trapped in low-performing urban schools. Advocates typically proposed small programs targeting specific student populations including students with special needs, foster children, and students on Native American reservations. While true believers in the cause always aspired to vouchers-for-all, this piecemeal strategy proved highly effective at winning bipartisan support.
Then came the pandemic and the school culture wars, which voucher proponents seized upon as an opportunity. As conservative activist Chris Rufo explained in a 2022 speech, “To get to universal school choice, you really need to operate from a premise of universal public school distrust.”
Voucher proponents also shifted course on who they courted as supporters, as “school choice evangelist” Corey DeAngelis outlines in his recent book, The Parent Revolution, abandoning efforts to attract Democrats and instead targeting GOP holdouts in red states. From then on, school choice became a litmus test issue for Republicans. Legislators who failed to support vouchers would be replaced.
Over the past few years, this strategy has been wildly successful, knocking out Republican resistance in state after state. But as a recent study of public opposition to vouchers concluded, “overcoming legislative roadblocks” turns out to have been the easy part. “No similar mechanism exists for overcoming opposition among the mass public.”
In November, voters in Kentucky and Nebraska decisively rejected school voucher ballot measures, while Coloradans thwarted a proposed amendment that would have enshrined the right to school choice in the state constitution. In Kentucky, voters from every single county rejected a similar amendment to the state constitution that would have allowed public dollars to fund private religious education, “despite an ad campaign aimed at convincing voters that Donald Trump wanted them to vote yes.”
Indeed, some of Trump’s staunchest supporters were the most emphatic in saying “no” to school vouchers. Nearly nine out of ten voters in Monroe County, which borders Tennessee, supported Trump while rejecting the voucher amendment by 70.5 percent. In Robertson County, voters cast more than 80 percent of their votes for Trump, nearly the same margin by which they opposed school vouchers.
Voters in these states joined a tradition, now fifty years long, of rejecting vouchers when given the chance. And in doing so they made clear that today’s rapid spread of “education freedom,” particularly across the South, hasn’t been driven by voters but by state legislatures in concert with powerful national advocacy groups and billionaires for whom vouchers are a near obsession.