The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Sunday, August 31, 2025

Readings: The cover story in the current issue of Harper’s is Chandler Fritz’s reporting on the voucherization of American education (I call it a swindle). You know, the way Arizona and Florida, and an increasing number of red states, are handing out $8,000 per student to families, usually in cash in “education accounts,” so they can allegedly educate their child as they see fit. He calls it “a new frontier in American education,” but his analysis makes it difficult to imagine that this new frontier will begrime the basic principles of equality and democracy at the heart of the public education system. Here are essential excerpts:

“This sort of a priori justification for ESAs explains a few things. The first is why they have taken off in states with historically low investment in public education. This is backward on the surface: by committing to fund a student’s education regardless of whether she attends public school, conservative states with ESA programs have in effect created massive social spending programs; the expenditure in Arizona is swiftly approaching a billion dollars per fiscal year. Advocates claim that the program will save the state money in the long term because, by law, an ESA can give students only 90 percent of what the state would have paid for a seat in public school. But because Arizona’s system has universal eligibility, students who were already attending private schools can also opt in, which means that their ESA contracts represent a new burden to the budget. Currently, nearly half of all ESA kids attended private schools immediately before joining the program.

The moral imperative behind parental choice also clarifies why ESA programs have been so popular in neighborhoods with great public schools. If improving academic outcomes were the chief draw for ESAs, one might assume that the program would be most popular among families residing in the lowest-performing school districts. In fact, according to an analysis by the Phoenix ABC affiliate in 2024, half of Arizona’s ESA students come from the wealthiest quarter of zip codes in the state, which also often play host to good public schools. For many of these high-income families, a school’s academic rigor seems to have been displaced in favor of its ideological convictions. Meanwhile, in the program’s latest quarterly report, only 323 of the state’s 87,602 ESA students reported that they previously attended a D- or F-rated public school.”

“It seems clear that the principle driving the ESA movement is the right of parents to choose the best education for their children. Fine. As far as principles go, this may even, on its face, be a noble one. But it cannot change the fact that the underlying principle of education in a democracy is the right of a student to learn. This is what the Germans called Lernfreiheit—the freedom to learn—and it’s what Emerson was getting at when he counseled future teachers to “respect the child. Be not too much his parent.” What ESAs provide, in theory, are the conditions under which every student might learn in the way that befits their nature and ability—but they come with the risk of subsidizing a system that privileges parental paranoia over academic accountability and leaves American students more vulnerable than ever to the incentives of the free market.

At least for now. People on both sides of the education debate will have to wake up to the fact that, as my students’ responses attest, microschools like Refresh are also what many students want, and it may be incumbent on skeptics to participate in the ESA movement to reorient the system toward what students need. It can be done: Georgia, for example, reserves its scholarships for families residing near its lowest-performing schools and mandates that tutors be certified by a state standards commission; Iowa requires ESA applicants to be enrolled in an accredited nonpublic school, and then to submit to standardized assessments once in the program. Arizona could start by mandating fingerprint clearance for all vendors, setting income caps for program eligibility, instituting some form of standardized reporting of academic progress, and placing stricter limits on how funds can be spent, so as to keep taxpayer money within the K–12 system. Such regulations would ensure a greater degree of fiscal and academic accountability while dignifying family autonomy and make it easier to establish smaller schools.”

—P.T.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Jason Lebo (@jjlebo583)

[The] one idea that Mayor Rudolph Giuliani should not be pursuing is school vouchers. In last week’s budget he proposed spending $12 million over the next two years to establish the administrative structure for a voucher program in a volunteer school district. The money would be distributed through his office to avoid involving Schools Chancellor Rudy Crew, who opposes the idea. But once the structure was in place, the money for vouchers to be used at private and parochial schools would presumably come out of the regular Board of Education budget.The idea is a bad one on any number of counts. It probably violates the State Constitution. It would cause more friction between the Mayor and Dr. Crew. Most important, it would drain both money and attention from the public school system at a time the schools are struggling desperately to meet the strict new education standards imposed by the state. The prize at the end of this distracting and probably hopeless quest is a program that has not yet proved itself in cities where it is being tried on a wide scale. It would be better to fix the system than to waste time and money on a proposal that will leave Mr. Giuliani open to accusations that his main education priority is scoring points with the Republican Party rather than the city’s schools.

–From A New York Times editorial, April 27, 1999.

The Cartoon and Live Briefing Archive.