School Choice Has Become Involuntary Tithing
States separate taxpayers from more money on behalf of churches
My parents gave a lot to the Catholic Church, starting at the saint-named university where they met. When my older siblings were in school, on top of school tuitions, my father tithed a remarkable amount of his modest salary. Later, my mother worked and two incomes allowed them to put more in the basket every Sunday. The payments only paused with the first wave of sex abuse scandals. My mother, who had been donating to hear the Word and help the poor, had no interest in bailing out those complicit in abuse.
Her choice – to fund religious institutions or not – is a freedom more Americans are losing. The tax-exempt status of religious organizations has long meant taxpayers indirectly help sustain them. And for many years, religious schools have benefitted from private-school choice programs that have sent education dollars from public coffers to private institutions. Now, emboldened, well-funded, and powerful forces are pushing more states to fund religious schools through voucher programs.
Ways these programs can work:
traditional vouchers provide parents with state funds to help pay private school tuition
ESAs (education savings accounts) allow parents to directly access funds for private school tuition or other education expenses, such as homeschooling costs
tax cuts to the wealthy whose “donations” to nonprofits as individuals or businesses are returned as tax credits, with “scholarships” then provided to private school students (sorry about all the quote marks, but analysis by the Institute on Taxation and Economy Policy shows just how much of a scam this is).
Last summer, in Carson v. Makin, the Supreme Court found that states that subsidize private education “cannot disqualify some private schools solely because they are religious," arguing that this amounts to religious discrimination. What seemed like a narrow ruling affecting only programs in a few states has inspired efforts such as an attempt in Oklahoma to allow religious charter schools. At the same time, tax credits, ESAs, and voucher programs have been exploding nationwide: 22 states have tax credit programs, 12 states have new ESA programs, and half of all states were considering some kind of voucher program at the start of this year.
Programs like these drain money from the funds states raise for public education. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities explains how they reduce the revenue base, cutting the amount available for public schools and/or leading to higher taxes to fill the gap:
In some extreme cases, they can be designed to divert money that’s already been designated for public schools through their state funding formula. School vouchers typically deplete available state revenues by cutting taxes for people who pay into voucher programs or through line-item appropriations in the state budget…
Some voucher proposals more directly harm public schools by taking education money away that would have otherwise gone to a student’s local school through the state K-12 funding formula. For example, Florida’s Family Empowerment Scholarship is funded by rerouting designated funding for a student’s local public school district to private schools instead.[6]
It may surprise some to learn that 75% of American private school students attend religious schools, with over a third at Catholic schools. A 2017 report by the National Bureau of Economic Research highlighted that “[r]eligious schools not only dominate private education, but also appear to dominate the market for voucher-accepting schools.” As a result, one of the biggest beneficiaries of this redirection of tax dollars is the Catholic Church.
In their study of Milwaukee’s voucher program, NBER found that churches running schools accepting vouchers were funded in good part by those vouchers and that the program had staved off parish closings. With both Catholic and Protestant churches in decline in the US — and some dioceses still in financial trouble as a result of abuse settlements — these programs put taxpayers in the position of helping prop them up.
Now news comes from Iowa that highlights what religious institutions gain from the rapid expansion of private-school choice programs. Within months of the passage of a new ESA program, Catholic schools in the state are hiking up tuition to get more public funding, as the Iowa Capital-Dispatch reported:
Several Iowa private schools announced their plans to raise tuition after the program was signed into law. Holy Family Catholic School in Dubuque raised tuition to be able to receive more of the available government money, with no increased cost to the families using ESA funds. Tuition for Wahlert Catholic High School students is $6,590 for the current school year — in 2023-2024, high school tuition will grow to $7,400. Students who aren’t Catholic will have a tuition of $8,600, and Catholic students whose parishes do not support Holy Family will pay $7,825 in tuition annually — both cases where an ESA would not cover the full cost of attendance.
The separation of church and state in schools is under attack within traditional public schools as well. Texas just passed a bill to allow public schools to hire chaplains as uncertified staff alongside school counselors, an act that would have been unthinkable before we had a Supreme Court determined to redefine religious freedom as the freedom of religious groups to preach on the taxpayers’ dime. Fighting for the separation of church and state in public institutions is hard work enough — there, citizens can vote out state and local officials who want to blur those lines and they have a voice as parents and residents via public boards of education.
In part because school funding is complicated, and because private schools are less transparent and accountable to the public, just understanding how privatization is unfolding is hard. The right has taken advantage of this, but they are pushing the envelope far enough to make plain this simple fact: taxpayers are increasingly being forced to fund religious institutions.
To learn more:
Josh Cowen and his recent piece at Time
Peter Greene and his recent pieces at Forbes and Substack
Jack Schneider and Jennifer Berkshire and their recent piece at The Nation
Derek W. Black and his forthcoming piece for the UC Irvine Law Review
Center for American Progress report on the history of vouchers