Budget-busting voucher expansion could bankrupt Wisconsin public schools

Yahoo

09-05-2025

As the Legislature begins working on the Wisconsin State Budget, a dangerous idea to give school vouchers their own separate line item could become a huge drain on resources. | Getty Images Creative
The top issue Wisconsinites brought to legislators' attention at budget hearings around the state last month was the need to adequately fund public schools.
But now, as the Legislature's powerful budget committee is beginning to work on the budget in earnest, a low-profile plan that never came up in those public hearings aims to turn school vouchers into a statewide entitlement, sucking up all the resources that might otherwise go to public schools and putting Wisconsin on a path to a full–blown budget crisis.
The plan, contained in two bills that failed in the last legislative session, would stop funding school vouchers through the same mix of state and local funding that supports regular public schools, and instead pay for school vouchers just out of the state's general fund.
'It's certainly something that I personally support. … I'm sure it will be part of the discussion,' Rep. Mark Born (R-Beaver Dam), co-chair of the powerful Joint Finance Committee, told Lisa Pugh on Wisconsin Eye when she asked about 'decoupling' Wisconsin voucher school funding from the rest of the school finance system.
'Decoupling' would pave the way for a big expansion in taxpayer subsidies for private school tuition. While jettisoning the caps on available funds and enrollment in the current school formula, voucher payments would become an entitlement. The state would be obligated to pay for every eligible student to attend private school. It's worth noting that most participants in Wisconsin's voucher programs never attended public school, so what we are talking about is setting up a massive private school system with separate funding alongside the public K-12 school system. That's more than Wisconsin can afford.
Anne Chapman, research director for the Wisconsin Association of School Business Officials (WASBO), has followed the issue closely. 'It could come up last-minute, on very short notice,' she warns.
She worries that Wisconsin is following the same path as other states that have steadily expanded public funding for private schools without accurately assessing what the expansion would cost. In a recent WASBO paper, 'The price of parallel systems,' Chapman writes that Wisconsin already ranks third among states with the highest proportion of state education dollars used in private schooling options (9%). The top two states, Florida (22%) and Arizona (12%), she writes, are 'cautionary examples.'
Florida's universal voucher program will cost the state $3.9 billion this year. The state, which until now has been running budget surpluses, is projecting a $6.9 billion deficit by 2027-28, fueled by the voucher expansion along with tax cuts. Arizona is also facing much bigger than expected costs for its universal voucher program. After projecting it would cost $64 million in 2023-24, the state found that it underestimated the cost of vouchers by more than 650%. The real cost of universal vouchers in Arizona in 2023-24 was $738 million. The result: a huge budget deficit and significant cuts to public schools.
Wisconsin, which launched the first school voucher program in the nation in Milwaukee 35 ago, has steadily increased both the size and per-pupil expenditures of its system of voucher schools. That's despite a research consensus that school vouchers have not improved academic outcomes for students and, in fact, have done significant harm.
Testifying recently against a school voucher bill in Texas, University of Michigan professor and school voucher expert Josh Cowen described the 'catastrophic' results of vouchers on educational outcomes across the country over the last decade.
Cowen has been evaluating school vouchers since the 1990s, when the first pilot program in Milwaukee had a measurable, positive impact on the 400 low-income kids who used vouchers to attend traditional private schools. As school vouchers expanded to serve tens of thousands of students and 'subprime' operators moved in to take advantage of taxpayer dollars, however, the results took a dramatic downturn. Cowen described the 'horrific learning loss' he and other researchers have recorded over the last decade among kids who started in public school and then moved to private school using vouchers. He was used to seeing trends in education that simply didn't work to improve outcomes, he told the Texas legislators, but 'it's very rare to see something that harmed kids academically.' The worst drops in test scores, he said, came in 2014-15 — the same year that states began taking the programs statewide. He concluded that the smaller programs that had paid close attention to students and offered them a lot of support became something entirely different when vouchers were scaled up. Yet despite the abysmal results, more and more states are moving toward universal voucher systems.
Imagine, Cowen told the Texas legislators, if '30 years ago a vaccine showed some positive effects in clinical trials for a few hundred kids.' Then, when the vaccine was approved and used on thousands of children, 'the health effects became negative, even atrocious.'
'No one would say, 'let's just hang our hat on the pilot and focus on results from 30 years ago,' Cowen said. But that's exactly what's happening with school vouchers. The kids vouchers were originally supposed to help — low-income children in underresourced schools — have suffered the most.
Studies from research teams in Louisiana, Indiana, Ohio and Washington, D.C., show learning losses for kids who left public school to attend voucher programs that surpassed the learning loss experienced by students in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina or by children across the country from the COVID-19 pandemic, Cowen said.
Instead of helping those struggling students, who often attend the 'subprime' schools Cowen discussed, the voucher programs in Wisconsin and other states mostly provide a taxpayer-financed benefit to private school families — 70% of whom have never put their kids in public school.
Anti-government ideologues and school choice lobbyists are selling a faulty product with the rapid expansion of school vouchers.
Part of the scam is the effort to hide the true costs from taxpayers. That's the part Chapman, the school business expert, is worried about. As school districts struggle with lean budgets, under the current system, at least local taxpayers can see how much they are paying to support the voucher schools in their districts. If the Legislature succeeds in moving the cost of school vouchers into the general statewide budget, that transparency will be lost. And, at the same time, the state will open the door to unlimited spending on vouchers, no matter how expensive the program becomes.
School choice advocates in Wisconsin have long pushed for 'a voucher in every backpack' — or universal eligibility for the private school voucher program.
'Eligibility' doesn't mean the same thing as 'access,' however: In Wisconsin voucher schools have a track record of kicking out students who are disabled, challenging to educate, LGBTQ or for any other reason they deem them a bad fit.
Those students go back to the public schools, whose mission is to serve all students. In contrast, private schools in the voucher system can and do discriminate. Yet, Chapman reports, we are now spending about $629 million for Wisconsin's four voucher programs, which serve 58,623 students. That's $54 million more than the $574.8 million we are spending on all 126,830 students with disabilities in Wisconsin, as school districts struggle with the cost of special education.
As if that weren't enough, at the federal level, the Educational Choice for Children Act of 2025 (ECCA), currently being considered by Congress, would give a 100% tax deduction on donations to nonprofits known as Scholarship Granting Organizations, which give out private K-12 school vouchers.
Normally, donors to nonprofits can expect a tax deduction of 37 cents on the dollar at most. The 100% tax deduction means financial advisers across the country will push clients, whether they are school choice advocates or not, to give money to voucher schools. Under the bill, contributors would also be allowed to give corporate stock and avoid capital gains tax. 'This would allow wealthy 'donors' to turn a profit, at taxpayer expense, by acting as middlemen in steering federal funding into private K-12 schools,' the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy reports. ITEP estimates that the ECCA would cost the federal government $134 billion in foregone revenue over the next 10 years and would cost states an additional $2.3 billion.
The very least we can do as citizens is to demand accountability and transparency in the state budget process, before we blow all of our money on tax breaks and tuition vouchers for people who don't need them.
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