Amid the flurry of presidential executive orders, cabinet hearings on Capitol Hill, and mainstream media focus on Donald Trump’s return to the White House, there has been little attention paid to a growing movement in state capitals across the country: the expansion of private school voucher programs.

Many efforts to expand voucher programs have encountered strong opposition. In some instances, voters in states like Nebraska, Kentucky, and Colorado have defeated such measures by decisive margins. Despite this resistance, many state lawmakers continue to pursue proposals aimed at expanding the tax credit for higher-wage earners, allowing them to send their K-12 students to private schools. These initiatives have faced significant criticism from public school advocacy groups, including the National Coalition for Public Education (NCPE).

“Open and nondiscriminatory in their acceptance of all students, American public schools are a unifying factor among diverse communities in our society,” NCPE stated on its website . “Vouchers undermine this vital function, however, by diverting desperately needed public resources away from the public school system to fund the education of a few students at private schools—without offering any actual reforms.”

Voucher program advocates often stress the importance of parents’ rights and rescuing “low-income” students from being “trapped” in low-performing neighborhood public schools. Still, those deadset on pushing forward these reforms have been relatively slow to address the significant issues about the adverse outcomes of voucher programs and voucher tax credits, including their lack of accountability and transparency , and the siphoning of state and local public education dollars.

While debate about the merits and drawbacks of vouchers and private of school tax credits continues in the halls of state capitol buildings, there are still fundamental questions about their overall cost and impact on local neighborhood elementary, middle and high schools throughout America.

To best understand this debate, let’s look at legislation pending in the Kansas state legislature. Proposed as an "Education Opportunity Tax Credit" f or taxpayers with dependent children not enrolled in public schools, the legislation would allow families to claim up to $8,000 per child for private tuition or $4,000 for non-accredited private schools.

The seemingly harmless measure, aimed at supporting families attempting to enroll their students in one of Kansas’ private schools, caps spending at $125 million per tax year. While that number only represents roughly 2 percent of the Kansas State Department of Education's annual fiscal budget, its trade-offs could harm students, families and vulnerable populations throughout Kansas.

Ron Hobert , a 32-year veteran elementary school educator and current president of the American Federation of Teachers-Kansas, believes that the current voucher tax-credit measure could negatively affect students, families, and the economies of Kansas’ rural counties.

“In Kansas, vouchers do not support our rural schools,” Hobert said in his testimony before the Kansas Senate Committee on Education in January “Many times, the school of a small community is the center of all activity and could be the county’s largest employer.”

While voucher programs may benefit high-income families in Wichita, Topeka, Kansas City, and Overland Park—a wealthy suburb of Kansas City, Hobert anticipates the diversion of funds that smaller rural and exurban counties like Osage County are allocated for transportation and after-school enrichment activities.

“In rural countries and small towns throughout our state, where 300 or 500 residents live, they have to put their kids on a bus to go to another city to attend school,” Hobert said. “This measure could squeeze local education budgets and hinder the ability of those kids to participate in a play, musical, football, debate, or basketball, siphoning monies out of small communities and placing that burden on rural families.”

Kansas Governor Laura Kelly has been actively working to increase public education funding in the state for several years . In 2024, she signed legislation that allocated an additional $75 million for special education. This measure passed overwhelmingly, with support from Republican and Democratic lawmakers.

“Once again, the House and Senate have come together to fully fund education in our state, ensuring that every student has the resources they need to succeed,” State Rep. Blake Carpenter (R-Derby) said. “This budget also includes full funding for special education, demonstrating our commitment to supporting all students and addressing their unique needs.”

The pending legislation, unlike last year’s bipartisan measure, has a cost that doubles only to the benefit of students and families attending private schools in the state. It includes a cap of $125 million for the first year, with a potential 25 percent increase in subsequent tax years, provided that 90 percent of the cap is utilized.

This represents a significant shift for a state government that has been working diligently to fully fund public education.

According to data from the Kansas State Department of Education , there are currently 26,000 students enrolled in private schools across the state. This suggests that the annual cost of the voucher measure could exceed $200 million by the fourth year. Based on some rough calculations, it could divert between $1.1 million and $1.9 million in education funding per county each year.

This reality has left public education advocates like Hobert worried about the state’s most vulnerable students.

“Voucher programs don’t provide an actual choice for students and families living in a rural area, which is where we are in Kansas, a very rural state, “ he said. “Rural families have few access points to their schools besides their in-state, local public school in their district.”

Kansas is ranked 24th in K-12 education by U.S. News and World Report . Hobert says that the loss of $1 million to $1.9 million in funding for many local school districts could significantly affect their ability to hire essential staff such as school nurses, social workers, guidance counselors, and classroom educators.

Public schools, already grappling with funding challenges, rely on state support to maintain facilities, pay teachers, and provide essential services. Diverting such a substantial sum to subsidize private education could exacerbate existing disparities and leave public schools struggling to meet students’ needs.

This shift proves particularly troubling in rural areas, where public schools often serve as the sole educational option.

Because private schools rarely offer students transportation to and from school, many advocates in Kansas, including Horbert and AFT-Kansas, believe these added burdens could be deferred to families already struggling to make ends meet.

When created, school voucher programs were billed as opportunities for urban students, many Black and Brown, to escape underfunded neighborhood public schools. Regrettably, recent studies in Milwaukee, Cleveland and the District of Columbia have found that voucher recipients showed little to no improvement in reading or math, compared to those not enrolled in the program.

Beyond their failure, there isn’t much evidence of a mass exodus from public schools for voucher programs. Reporting from St. Louis Today found the opposite . In 2023, most of the students receiving vouchers in Missouri already attended private schools, and only 35 percent of the voucher recipients attended public schools in the previous school year.

According to a 2024 Gallup survey, satisfaction with America’s K-12 public education increased from seven percent to 43 percent. While not as high as public education advocates would like, public schools and their overall impact on society are unmeasurable. And while we have lived through decades of disinvestment in public education in school systems throughout the country, many of us wouldn’t be here without the work of a dedicated public school educator.

It should be parents, students and educators - not lawmakers lacking in-depth knowledge of the issue -- who debate the merits of expanding private education programs without evidence of their success.

In his state senate committee, Hobert said just as much.

“A free public education for all is perhaps the singular defining virtue of our American society, and vouchers pose a real threat, not just to the soul of public education but to the very existence of public education itself,” he told state senators last month.