It has long been a conservative dream to drain funding from our public school system and divert it to expensive, often religious, private schools through vouchers. Minnesota has been fighting vouchers since they were first introduced in the state Legislature in 1996. Even now, legislation has been introduced to change our state constitution to create a right to a private or religious education.

Minnesota’s public schools have been underfunded for decades. Between 2003 and 2023, per pupil aid decreased by 20% after accounting for inflation. In the last budget cycle, Gov. Tim Walz and DFL legislators provided the largest one-year increase in school funding in a generation. Still, it wasn’t enough to restore decades of funding cuts. Rather than addressing this crisis, the Trump administration and Minnesota Republicans want to make the problem worse with vouchers — and North Star Policy Action has run the numbers to show the impact on Minnesota schools.

Even in conservative states, voters have realized it’s a bad idea to allow public dollars to flow to private schools. Voucher initiatives were soundly defeated on the ballot in Kentucky, Colorado and Nebraska last year.

But monied interests refuse to give up on a bad idea. In Arizona, a voucher program that was shot down by voters in 2018 was passed by the state Legislature four years later due to billionaire donors flooding the state to get pro-voucher candidates elected. Similar anti-democratic efforts in other states have allowed voucher programs to grow, even as public opposition to them has increased. At the turn of the century, 12,000 students were receiving taxpayer funding to attend private schools. Over 1 million students are today.

The upshot of private school vouchers spreading has been an extensive degree of research into their effectiveness. North Star Policy Action consulted that research to conduct our own analysis of how a voucher program, modeled after Wisconsin’s program, would affect Minnesota’s schools and students.

We found that Minnesota public school districts could lose an estimated $209 million in just the first year of a voucher program. In a bizarre waste of money, we find that Minnesota would spend $630 million a year on students who already attend private schools. Since those students’ families can already afford that cost, schools are able to capitalize on the infusion of taxpayer dollars to increase their tuition. That’s exactly what happened in Iowa, where one study found that vouchers led to tuition hikes of 21% to 25%.

In addition to cost problems, voucher systems fail students and leave them with worse educational outcomes. In Louisiana, the use of vouchers increased the probability of unsatisfactory math scores by 80%. In Washington, D.C., randomized control trials showed vouchers leading to a 7.3% decline in math scores and a 4.9% drop in reading scores. Similarly negative results have been found through rigorous studies conducted of voucher programs in Ohio and Indiana.

It should come as no surprise that sending more students to private schools that don’t have the same curriculum or standards as public schools doesn’t lead to good outcomes. For example, students in Wisconsin who attended religious schools that taught creationism performed worse on science tests. That’s not a shocking result. And research shows that when students exit vouchers and return to public schools, their educational attainment improves.

As Minnesota knows all too well, fraud is rampant when public dollars flow into a new, poorly regulated sector. Schools in Florida took voucher dollars for students who were not attending those schools. In Arkansas, horseback riding businesses have accepted voucher money. Over $1 million in voucher funds were spent on Legos in Arizona. If Minnesota’s lawmakers are truly on the hunt to reduce fraud in public programs and not simply looking to score partisan points, they should be the loudest opposition to private school vouchers coming to our state.

So if private school vouchers would drain our already underfunded public schools of even more money, and would harm student’s educational outcomes, what’s the point? Why do the Trump administration and Republicans keep pushing these programs, even in the face of repeated voter opposition? As with most bad ideas, it’s about giving even more money to the wealthiest Americans.

In 21 states today, voucher programs are partially funded through tax credits that allow individuals to donate money to a voucher program and receive a rebate on their taxes. These tax credits are far more valuable than charitable giving credits, frequently allowing tax savings of 100% or more on every dollar given to voucher programs. Tax credits like these are only valuable to the ultra-wealthy while starving our public schools of funding and worsening student outcomes.

Our schools need help, there’s no denying that. Stripping more funding from our already depleted public schools to give students a worse education so that the rich can get richer cannot be the answer. Minnesota’s lawmakers can be on the side of pro-voucher billionaires like Betsy DeVos, the Koch brothers and Elon Musk who want to line their pockets from the public treasury. Or they can stand with students, teachers, and their communities who believe in public schools that lift up every student and oppose private school vouchers.

Jake Schwitzer is executive director of North Star Policy Action, an independent research and communications institute dedicated to improving the lives of working Minnesotans. He’s also a public school parent.

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