School Vouchers

A school voucher is a public payment that follows a child rather than a building. Instead of funding a district and assigning families to it by postcode, the state issues the family a certificate worth some portion of per-pupil spending and lets them spend it at a school they choose, including a private or religious one.

Conservatives support vouchers on two grounds that are related but distinct. The first is authority: parents, not administrators, hold the primary responsibility for the formation of their children, and a system that assigns a child to a failing school because of his address has inverted that order. The second is competition: monopoly providers respond to the people who fund them, and a school that keeps its money whether or not families are satisfied has no structural reason to improve.¹

Key Takeaways

• Milton Friedman proposed the modern voucher in a 1955 essay, “The Role of Government in Education”, and restated it in Capitalism and Freedom in 1962.
• Wisconsin created the first modern American programme, the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, in 1990.
• The Supreme Court upheld Cleveland’s voucher programme against an Establishment Clause challenge in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris in 2002, by five votes to four.
• Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue in 2020 and Carson v. Makin in 2022 barred states from excluding religious schools from otherwise available choice programmes.
• Achievement evidence is mixed and in several rigorous studies negative, which is the strongest empirical objection to the policy.

History And Context

The idea is older than Friedman. Thomas Paine floated public payment for private schooling in Rights of Man in 1792, and John Stuart Mill argued in 1859 that the state might require and finance education without producing it, warning that a general state education is a contrivance for moulding people to be alike.

Friedman gave the argument its modern economic form in 1955. He accepted a public interest in an educated citizenry, which justifies compulsory attendance and public finance, but denied that this interest requires government to own and operate the schools. Separating the funding function from the production function, he argued, would open the sector to entry and let parents exit failing schools without moving house.²

Practice arrived thirty-five years later. Wisconsin’s 1990 Milwaukee programme began with roughly 300 low-income children at non-religious private schools and was later extended to religious ones. Ohio followed in 1995 with the Cleveland Scholarship Program, which became the test case for the constitutional question. In Zelman the Court held that aid reaching religious schools through the private choices of individual families does not amount to government establishment of religion.³

The 2020s brought a change of scale. Arizona enacted universal eligibility for its Empowerment Scholarship Account programme in 2022, and Florida, Iowa, Utah and Arkansas moved to near-universal education savings accounts in 2023. The policy that began as a targeted rescue for poor children in failing urban districts has become, in much of the American south and west, a general entitlement.

The Conservative Position

The conservative case starts with subsidiarity: decisions belong at the smallest competent level, and in education that level is the household. Schooling is not the transmission of skills alone; it forms character, transmits an inheritance and shapes belief. A state that assigns that formation by geography while collecting tax from everyone has taken something from parents that was theirs to give.

The competition argument is secondary but substantial. Public school districts hold effective monopolies over families who cannot afford private tuition on top of the taxes they already pay, which is to say over the poor. Wealthy parents have always had vouchers; they buy them with mortgages in good catchment areas. Conservatives point out that the existing system already distributes choice by income and that vouchers extend it downward.

There is a further argument about pluralism. In a society divided over religion, sexuality and the national past, a single public curriculum guarantees a permanent fight over whose convictions the schools will teach. Funding families rather than institutions lets Catholics, evangelicals, Orthodox Jews, Muslims and secular parents each educate their children without conscripting anyone else’s. Conservatives regard this as a way of lowering the temperature of the culture war rather than winning it.

Differing Positions

The strongest objection is empirical rather than philosophical. Large-scale evaluations of the Louisiana Scholarship Program found substantial negative effects on mathematics achievement for students who used vouchers, concentrated in the first years of participation.⁴ Studies of Indiana’s and Ohio’s programmes reported losses of a similar direction. Earlier, smaller programmes had produced modest gains, particularly for black students in Washington and New York, so the record is genuinely divided. Advocates respond that the negative results come from programmes with heavy regulation that deterred stronger private schools from participating, and that longer-run measures such as graduation and college enrolment look better than test scores.

The fiscal objection holds that vouchers drain districts of revenue while leaving their fixed costs intact, so the children who remain attend schools with less money per unhappy classroom. The rural objection notes that a voucher is worth little where there is no alternative school within an hour’s drive, which describes much of the American interior.

Accountability is the fourth line. Private schools receiving public money in most states face no requirement to administer the state test, accept students with disabilities or disclose results, so families choose with less information than the system’s logic assumes. Critics add a selection worry: schools that control admission can shape their intake, and measured performance then reflects who enrolled rather than what was taught.

References

1. Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (University of Chicago Press, 1962), chapter 6.
2. Milton Friedman, “The Role of Government in Education”, in Robert A. Solo, ed., Economics and the Public Interest (Rutgers University Press, 1955).
3. Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, 536 U.S. 639 (2002).
4. Atila Abdulkadiroglu, Parag A. Pathak and Christopher R. Walters, “Free to Choose: Can School Choice Reduce Student Achievement?”, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 10, no. 1 (2018).