Iowa Taxpayers Lose $230+ Million in Public School Funds
The new voucher program steals from citizens to pay for private education. Iowa is just a test run.
Just over a month ago, I wrote at length at Book Riot about the impending wave of public school closures that we need to anticipate. This is and has always been the target of attacks on educators and librarians–the books have been convenient tools to get there.
From the article, which talks about how one district in southern Iowa is already closing because of budget uncertainty:
[P]redicting enrollment rates has become increasingly difficult for them and other schools in the state because of the governor’s new open enrollment laws, as well as a new statewide voucher program. With open enrollment, which isn’t an uncommon educational option in the US, students can enroll at any public school district in the state where they live. Iowa’s new policies on open enrollment, however, mean that this can happen at any time, as opposed to during a specific period of time. If a student wants to leave their current district and go to another one, they do not need to wait or make a decision at a particular point during the year. The districts where students are leaving pay the new district the per pupil fee.
[…]
Iowa’s statewide voucher program launched in the 2023-2024 school year. It provides families with a per pupil stipend to attend the school of their choice; it’s the same amount of money that a district a student leaves via open enrollment would need to send to their new district of enrollment. But—and this will come as a shock—the vast majority of those who took vouchers in its first year, two out of three, were already enrolled in private schools. Their parents were already wealthy enough to send them to private schools; the vouchers were a scheme that allowed them to avoid paying taxes to the districts where they already lived.
This week, the Des Moines Register published a story about how the voucher program is working for the impending 2024-2025 school year. It’s not insignificant in any capacity. Per the story, 30,000 students across the state have already been granted access to the new vouchers for the school year. There is a photo of Iowa’s governor sitting beside Betsy DeVos and evangelical leader Bob Vander Plaats beneath a banner for a program at which they all spoke that was funded in some noteworthy part by The Heritage Foundation.
That 30,000 number is significant and worthy of pause. It does not represent the whole of private/homeschool enrollment of the state, though it’s close. In the 2023-2024 school year, there were over 36,000 in K-12 private education across the state. For the upcoming school year, only families who make 400% of the federal poverty level–about $60,000–are eligible for the $7800 vouchers; in the next school year, that will change and allow all families, regardless of income, to access that money.
In the 2023-2024 school year, about 17,000 students used the vouchers because of its income cap (at the time, 300%). But that number is nearly doubling for this coming year, sending the amount of taxpayer money funneling into private hands to over $230 million dollars.
That $230 million dollars* not only is money being used for private interests and private schools like those based on the Advanced Training Institute teachings. It is being used to supplement schools supported and approved of by groups like The Heritage Foundation of Project 2025 fame (and its affiliated arms like Moms For Liberty, who have played an outsized role in education policy in Iowa).
The combination of this voucher scheme with the new open enrollment policies in Iowa are going to decimate the state’s array of small school districts. As was seen with Orient-Macksburg Public Schools, there’s no longer a way for districts to anticipate what their annual budgets are. Students can enroll in new districts at any time and when they do, the district they’re leaving pays the money given for that student’s education to the new school. Add that to the over $230+ million dollars being handed over to individuals for private and homeschool programs, public institutions in Iowa are in deep trouble. If you can’t guess at how much money is available at the state level for funding the schools and you can’t guess how many students will be be playing frogger between districts, you can’t budget for things like having an adequate number of educators in your buildings.
And that’s the point.
Iowa is one dot on a map of states that are reaching their hands into the pockets of taxpayers, stealing money pooled to ensure strong public, democratic institutions like schools and libraries exist and sliding it into the pockets of those who already have the means to afford sending their students elsewhere. There hasn’t been an increase in private school enrollment in Iowa. The students there have families who can already afford the costs; now, they’re able to cash in on it, too.
Taxpayers should want their tax money to support their local goods, even if they are not using it. Plenty of roads are built with tax money that are not driven by any single individual but those roads are still used to help support the individual not using them (Iowa is an agricultural state, after all, and goods are transported in and out of the state every minute). You want your future doctors to have a strong education, regardless of their family’s means, just as you should want someone whose future is in culturally-maligned industries like fast food to have skills, passions, and knowledge provided and cultivated through robust public education.
Unfortunately, years of “nobody wants to work anymore” rhetoric combined with a capitalist society where jobs that pay a living wage are rare creates an environment of self-centered entitlement. But more, if the wealthy can privatize something they will. They’ll then blame the individual for not spending money on the private good or service, even when they have done the dismantling of the goods available for public use. Can’t send your kid to private school because the public schools have lost their means of funding? Sounds like you didn’t take advantage of the voucher program meant to help you solve that problem.
Voucher programs like these are entitlement programs. But they’re not rendered that way. When entitlement programs benefit the already financially stable, they’re not derided like those programs out there helping the most needy.^
Public education is a public good. As money is sent to voucher programs, the public schools suffer. Less money is less access, and less access is most dangerous to those who are already the most vulnerable and marginalized in society.
It’s not the poor kids who are benefitting from these new laws. It’s the rich kids and the kids whose parents have no problem affording pricey private institutions or who have the time and means to indoctrinate them with white Christian nationalism educate at home.** Parents have always had the right to choose where and how their students are educated. They have not—and should not—have the right to decide how that impacts other students.
Those most hurt by the policies and plans pushed by the far right–anyone not wealthy, white, cishet, able-bodied, or Christian–are those who will see the services built to support the entirety of America’s diverse people most impacted. Each and every person deserves a quality education, whether they’re at a district serving 300 people in rural Iowa or tens of thousands in Iowa’s bigger cities. We as a species should care about the good of all and not the interests of the few. That’s why taxes exist.
Yet, for Reynolds, Moms, and groups like The Heritage Foundation, voucher programs like this one are one of the biggest wins. If they can cash in on that taxpayer money, they hold each and every one of us in their grips. Their interests aren’t for the good of all.
Iowa is a warning.
Iowa has been a warning for years.
Iowa’s not alone, of course. It’s just that it followed the playbook move by move and the results are surprise to those who’ve elected not to pay attention until the flames of the fire were on their roof. The latest from Arizona is the state has a $1.3 billion dollar shortfall in its budget, most of which is directly tied to their voucher scheme and, naturally, most of which went to the parents of students already enrolled in private or homeschool programs, just like we’re seeing in Iowa.
Texas has a similar voucher scheme on its house education committee agenda for mid August. The right weren’t happy with what they’ve done to public schools in the state already. Now, they want to rob them.
Notes
*I’ve seen several numbers reported, all of which are higher than this, as the real cost to taxpayers. In lieu of choosing one of them, I just took the money allotted per student by the number of students, so the $230 million is likely an undercount.
**If you’ve been reading my work for the many years I’ve been making it, you know that homeschool here means capital-H homeschool. The kind created and distributed by private, religiously-affiliated interests that push white supremacy (actual indoctrination). A knee-jerk reaction to say “not all homeschools” is akin to “not all men” in conversations about misogyny.
^You’ve heard the one from JD Vance’s book about seeing someone paying for food with food stamps but talking on the phone in the grocery store line and/or paying cash to buy booze or cigarettes and the disgust that rolls off it. So where do these voucher entitlements fit in?