More on MAGA’s K-12 Plan and the Threat to Religious Freedom
Using school vouchers to weaken the wall between church and state
In a guest post last week for The Unpopulist, I discussed how MAGA has been using red states as laboratories for their national plans for K-12, plans this second Trump Administration makes more plausible. The focus: how MAGA education policy is helping break down barriers between church and state. But what I covered—their efforts within public schools—is just one of two major prongs of MAGA’s strategy. Privatization is the second.
How Privatization Threatens Church-State Separation
With the aid of a GOP-controlled Congress, MAGA could further weaken the separation of church and state by diverting public funds to private schools, religious institutions, and homeschooling through voucher programs and ESAs (Education Savings Accounts)—as a growing number of states already do.
A few weeks ago, echoing a Project 2025 demand, GOP senators reintroduced the Educational Choice for Children Act, which originated last year in the House. S. 292, like its predecessor, H.R. 9462, provides an “unprecedented,” extremely generous tax shelter to wealthy Americans who donate to private schools. The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy explains:
The basic design of H.R. 9462 follows the template set forth in model state legislation that the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has succeeded in shepherding into enactment in more than 20 states. At its core, the policy funnels public tax dollars into private K-12 schools using two different intermediaries (wealthy donors and voucher-bundling organizations) to obscure this flow of funds. This is accomplished by paying out large tax credits...to people who send money or corporate stock to organizations that bundle those dollars into vouchers that fund the operation of private K-12 schools.
The GOP is eager to pass this $10 billion tax cut for the rich as the Department of Education is dismantled and federal dollars for under-resourced public schools are cut—or threatened to ensure compliance with MAGA goals.
The upshot? We’ll see more of what’s happening now in states with voucher programs. Money that would otherwise be paid in taxes goes to private schools, the vast majority of which are religious schools. More than three–quarters of private K-12 students in the US attend religious schools.
Even when tax credits that reduce the revenue available for public schools aren’t involved, vouchers divert funds from public to private schools, what advocates have long promoted as a commonsense concept of money following the student. What this means in practice, given that most private schools are religious, is taxpayers funding religious institutions in a kind of involuntary tithing.
Billions of taxpayer dollars are already going to religious institutions via voucher programs in 29 states. In Florida alone, over $3 billion is going to private schools, 82% of which are religious. Upon passage of an ESA program in Iowa—where a whopping 96% of private schools are religious—some immediately raised tuition to take advantage of more state money.
A 2017 report by the NBER (National Bureau of Economic Research) on Milwaukee’s program found churches running voucher-accepting schools that were funded in good part by those vouchers. Indeed, they found that the program had staved off parish closings.
That vouchers overwhelmingly benefit Christian schools is no accident on the road to “school choice.” At ProPublica, Alex MacGillis details the political history of vouchers in Ohio. MacGillis documents the genesis of the state’s voucher program in the 1990s, when church leaders began collaborating with politicians—most notably, then Gov. George Voinovich—to fund Catholic schools from public coffers.
MacGillis provides receipts showing that Ohio’s voucher pilot was sold as a way to save poor children from bad schools, a calculated ploy to ensure its approval. The goal was much more far-reaching and based in “a conviction that the separation of church and state is illegitimate.”
Universal vouchers, which have few or no eligibility limits, have some support among libertarians and parents unhappy with public schools. Nevertheless, voucher expansion has been driven in good part by religious ideologues who believe their church—not the government or the broader community—should be providing education to America’s children.
Why Put “School Choice” in Quotation Marks?
Voucher programs are problematic even setting aside erosion of the church-state barrier. In The Privateers, education policy professor Josh Cowen demonstrates that, contrary to advocates’ claims that they rescue kids from inadequate public schools, vouchers mostly serve those already enrolled in private ones. Low-income families often find it difficult to use them, as ProPublica reported from Arizona, where the program touted as money-saving is causing budget problems.
Rural students can also fail to benefit as they can have few or no private options and because public schools losing students has a large impact on the whole community, as Jess Piper describes (link above). In Tennessee, where MAGA politicians just pushed through an unpopular voucher bill, State Senator Charlane Oliver highlights that rural citizens “will foot the bill for children in Tennessee’s largest counties to attend private schools, while 51 of Tennessee’s 95 counties have no private school options.”
Cowen shows how rapid expansion of vouchers has worsened learning outcomes, with fly-by-night schools opening and closing. In the end, those to whom vouchers provide choice tend to be wealthier families who can access established, higher-quality private schools. (When people think of private schools, they may think of the top-performers, but many elite schools don’t accept vouchers.)
In other words, vouchers fail to provide a real choice for many Americans. If there aren’t private schools nearby or transportation is unavailable or a family can’t afford to cover the gap between tuition and voucher, then they mean little.
No Choice But to Participate in Discrimination
Vouchers, which originated in the backlash to the Civil Rights Movement, have a history of racism and discrimination: “The rise of private schools in the South and the diversion of public funds to those private schools through vouchers was a direct response of white communities to desegregation requirements.”
Today, vouchers help perpetuate and could worsen segregation. In North Carolina, Jennifer Berry Hawes and Mollie Simon found more than three dozen:
likely “segregation academies” that are still operating and that have received voucher money. Of these, 20 schools reported student bodies that were at least 85% white in a 2021-22 federal survey of private schools, the most recent data available.
Of the 20 vastly white segregation academies we identified that received voucher money in North Carolina, nine were at least 30 percentage points more white than the counties in which they operate.
Of course, unlike their public counterparts, private schools are under no obligation to admit all children. In many states they can discriminate against students based on gender identity, sexual orientation, ability, and religion. They can also discriminate against faculty and staff. In one long-fought case, the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled in 2023 that a Catholic elementary school could fire a single teacher who had become pregnant.
That’s right, Jersey. Because this is an issue for states red, blue, and all shades of purple. As Jennifer Berkshire points out, Maine’s efforts to prevent discrimination in schools prompted Trump’s singling out at the White House last week of its governor—a righteous Janet Mills—for direct, personal threats, threats that were swiftly followed by the announcement of a DOJ investigation.
Under MAGA rule, more taxpayers who abhor discrimination may have no choice when it comes to vouchers— with public monies going to schools that practice it, they must support private institutions that treat children in ways that they may find offensive, immoral, or against their own religious beliefs.
Americans United for Separation of Church and State elaborates:
Religious freedom means that we are all free to financially support only the religion of our choice — or not fund any at all. Government-funded programs such as private school vouchers, construction of houses of worship, “faith-based” initiatives that include proselytizing, and other schemes funnel taxpayer money into the coffers of religious entities to pay for religious activities. This violates the fundamental right of conscience.
And whereas the public has a say in how their local schools are run, they don’t have one in voucher-accepting private schools, which don’t have the same requirements for transparency or accountability. So in addition to providing most parents little choice, these programs don’t provide the public much of a voice.
The Good News: MAGA Ed Policy is Unpopular
At the same time that Trump won the popular vote margin of 0.15%, voters in several states said a loud no to vouchers. About two-thirds of Kentucky voters rejected a proposed program, Colorado voters turned down an amendment to protect “school choice” including vouchers, and Nebraskans voted by a 14-point margin to repeal a private school scholarship program. If there is a mandate, it is for public funds to go to public schools.
For many parents, support for public schools is a practical matter. But public ed has wide and deep support, with two-thirds of Americans in a January AP-NORC poll saying the government is spending too little on education. Critically, the separation of church and state remains a core value of the majority. Even as Christian nationalist ideas appear ascendant, just 16% in a recent Pew poll said the federal government should stop enforcing the separation.
Historically, the Supreme Court has understood that religious freedom in schools is precious: that students are especially vulnerable to religious indoctrination and coercion and that, in the words of Justice Stephen G. Breyer, “America’s public schools are the nurseries of democracy.”
That MAGA, with a second Trump term and a GOP-led Congress, threatens this freedom should be setting off more alarms. The current, intentional chaos and assault on the rule of law has set too many sirens blaring and feels overwhelming.
Still, education—upon which so much of the nation’s future depends—remains largely driven by what happens at the state and local level. And the more people across the political spectrum learn about MAGA’s plans, including vouchers, the less they like them. Let’s keep educating.