A recent article on CNN had me grumbling aloud at my computer screen, shaking my head, and ranting to my cats while pouring a tea version of a McD’s vanilla-iced coffee. Reading about how Arizona greenlighted funding for its school voucher program to include private and charter schools has motivated me to hop on an important soap box this morning I’ve been meaning to get around to involving religious identity politics in education.

And seeing how this is Juneteenth, it’s oddly appropriate. So, buckle up.

The Pipe Dream of Universal School Voucher Programs

I don’t know many parents who think highly of the U.S. public education system nowadays. In my 29 years of parenting and being the child of a first-grade teacher, I can confidently say many have had this dour attitude since I can remember. This dissatisfaction has often been aimed directly at educators, laying the entirety of a school system’s failings at their feet. The average parent just doesn’t understand how education systems work, let alone how they’re created, and the ongoing political broad brushing of fault has hurt the teaching profession immeasurably.

Enter the school voucher. For those of you who aren’t overly clear about what this is, it’s a tuition assistance program for families to pay for their child to attend school outside of their current district in a (hopefully) better learning environment. In the past, these were aimed at underserved students, but over the past five years, this has changed dramatically.

Don’t like your school district’s rating? Hate the bussing situation? Feel the curriculum in your district is too ‘woke’? These programs can provide access to better programs elsewhere using your state’s taxpayer-funded education dollars. So the promise goes, anyway.

Vouchers are typically state-awarded and calculated based on the percentage of capacity public districts can afford to bleed out. Remember, funding public districts usually includes headcount in addition to forecasted costs. Scarily, some states have no guard rails for public enrollment whatsoever allowing anyone to qualify for tuition assistance and send their child elsewhere.

The “Exclusive” Nature of School Voucher Programs

I use the word exclusive lightly here because it’s the polite Christian way of talking about discrimination. But the reality is these schools are systemically discriminatory against race, class, and creed, which means this universal solution doesn’t line up with its marketing.

This isn’t a new concept, and in fact, the oldest running modern private school voucher program started back in the ‘90s in Wisconsin’s Milwaukee County schools. I emphasize the word private because the state pays for private and charter school funding, regardless of ideological content and questionable enrollment tactics. No conflict of interest there, right? Consider that last school year this district granted 55,000 vouchers with 96% of those going to religious-based schools. When you think about religious-based schools, do you think about quality education or how exclusive they are?  

Granted, Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits racial discrimination of any kind. It doesn’t matter your color or national origin; state education laws mirror this requirement. Yet, voucher-funded private schools are still managing to get away with being exclusionary. A 2019 study by the National Center for Education Statistics showed that in K-12 religious programs, black students are the second-largest demographic making up 11% of enrollment in Conservative Christian schools. 

11%.  

You may be thinking, sure, that’s not surprising considering the discriminatory attitudes of conservatives. But, this same study also revealed that branching out to religiously affiliated schools, meaning not Catholic or Conservative Christian but religiously oriented, black enrollment fell to just 8%.  

So, what happens when private schools mostly cater to white, conservative, Christian families? You get openly segregated schools that are being marketed as a quality education experience that is funded by taxpayer dollars. And they're using your tax dollars to do it.

The Devil in the Open Enrollment Details

While statistics are revealing, understanding how things got this way is more important. How are these schools managing to maintain a WASPish majority? Politics. You can't be all that surprised. Read more here on my Substack.