School vouchers are unpopular.

They are unpopular with liberal voters. They are unpopular with conservative voters.

In modern American politics, it is rare to find such agreement, with voters of all stripes recognizing that they pose an existential threat to public education.

Yet somehow, in Georgia and other states, voucher programs continue to be implemented against what appears to be strong bipartisan opposition.

How is that happening?

It’s happening because a relative handful of very wealthy people have made school vouchers their pet vanity project, using multi-million-dollar campaign chests to try to refashion state legislatures all across the country to do their will.

Jeffrey Yass of Pennsylvania, Betsy DeVos of Michigan, Richard Uihlein of Illinois, Charles Koch of Kansas and other billionaires are all funding crusades in states where they don’t live, threatening the health of public schools that their kids will never attend, because they believe they know better than residents of those states how their children should be educated.

In Texas, for example, Yass and others donated tens of millions of dollars to remove conservative legislators who had dared to vote against a universal voucher program. In legislative races, $10,000 can do a lot of damage, and in November they succeeded in removing 15 conservative anti-voucher legislators, replacing them with candidates willing to do their bidding.

In states such as Georgia, where public opposition has continued to frustrate straightforward attempts to implement universal vouchers, proponents have resorted to political intimidation, deception and bait-and-switch legislation to accomplish their goals.

Let’s start with the assertion that vouchers are highly unpopular.

In every single state, liberal or conservative, in which voters have had a chance to directly voice their opinion, pro-voucher referendums have been defeated, and usually by overwhelmingly margins.

It happened most recently last month in Nebraska, a conservative state that Donald Trump carried by 20 points. If vouchers are truly a grassroots conservative cause, with broad popular support, surely you would expect them to be popular in the Nebraska heartland.

Yet Nebraskans voted overwhelmingly, 57% to 43%, to repeal a voucher program that their state legislators had tried to impose on them. It was the third time that Nebraskans have directly voted against using taxpayer money to fund private schools.
In Kentucky, the story was much the same. State legislators, goaded by out-of-state donors, needed to change the state constitution to allow vouchers, but doing so required that they get voter approval. It didn’t happen. In a deep-red state that Trump carried by 30 points, the proposed voucher amendment was rejected by 30 points. It failed in every one of the state’s 120 counties, rural and urban.

It’s also important to note that the distorting effect of huge sums of campaign money from billionaire voucher proponents is not felt solely in legislative races. Republican megadonors have also made it clear to politicians with ambitions for higher office that if they want the type of large donations needed in national races, they better toe the line on vouchers.

So here in Georgia last year, Gov. Brian Kemp helped to strong-arm the state Legislature into narrowly passing what was sold to legislators and the public as a very limited voucher bill, estimated to provide $6,500 in taxpayer money to pay private-school tuition to students in the lowest-performing 25% of Georgia schools. As part of that bill, legislators authorized spending for vouchers for as many as 22,000 students who are supposedly “stuck” in those poor-performing schools.

Except ….

Suddenly, state education officials have reread that new law and now claim that it makes as many as 400,000 Georgia students eligible for vouchers, including hundreds of thousands who do not attend a low-performing school. That is a number that was never heard or seen during debate on the legislation.

State Rep. Chris Erwin, chair of the House Education Committee, told the Associated Press that wasn’t how the law was intended to work and he wants it rewritten.

House Speaker Pro Tem Jan Jones joined him, saying she also felt misled.

“That wasn’t my understanding,” she said of the expanded program.

This is hardly the first time that voucher proponents in Georgia have told the public one thing during debate on a bill, only to turn around and disavow those promises later. It’s the kind of bait-and-switch technique you turn to only when you know that your proposal is too unpopular to be adopted through honest means.

It’s also important to point out that the public’s distrust of vouchers is well-grounded in fact and reality. Study after study has found that vouchers do not improve education outcomes, and instead can cause significant harm. And just as opponents have warned for decades, most of the taxpayer money spent on vouchers is going to subsidize students in prosperous families who were already attending private school or being home-schooled. Relatively little is used to help public-school students “escape” into better schools, the supposed rationale for vouchers.

And because voucher advocates insist upon little or no regulation of such programs, abuses have become legendary.

In Florida, homeschooling parents are using tax money to fund family trips to Disney World. In Arizona, families are using vouchers to buy themselves big-screen TVs. In Arkansas, a state that ranks 45th in the country in teacher pay, a voucher program created in 2023 is paying for horseback riding lessons for home-schooled children.

Think about that. At a time when public schools often lack the funding for even basic supplies, voucher advocates are using taxpayer money for equestrian training.

You can cite any number of circumstances in which unregulated campaign money is distorting the political process in this country, but perhaps none is as egregious, blatant and potentially destructive as the debate over vouchers. Rural communities in particular are wary of proposals that would drain resources from their public schools, and if Democrats are looking for a way to restore common ground with those voters, the fight against vouchers offers a great opportunity to do so.