A recent piece on NPR about school choice in Iowa asked a question I think about all the time: when school choice is booming, who actually wins? Proponents on both sides of the aisle would argue that School Choice = Improved Outcomes. But we need to talk about this latest school choice variant, because it is both highly contagious and potentially fatal to public education as we know it. And if we’re being honest about it, the answer is, NOBODY WINS. Students are no better off with school choice than they were without it.
I am not going to get in a kicking match with anyone about charters and magnets and open enrollment. I am a purist who believes that if we could go back in time and actually implement school desegregation with an anti-racist framework and with fidelity, we would have the universe’s most diverse, rigorous, equitable, expansive and robust system of public education. That’s my hill. Happy to die on it. And time travel isn’t a thing.
Back to Iowa…
More than 4,000 students left Cedar Rapids’ public school district this year alone. The families who left had real reasons. Overcrowded classrooms. Kids not getting the support they needed. Safety concerns that no parent should have to accept. We are not here to judge them. Their decisions make sense, one by one.
But here’s what the story also shows: every student who leaves takes more than $8,000 in public funding with them. Which means the district has less money to fix the exact problems that drove families away in the first place. Students with fewer options — those who can’t navigate the choice system, don’t have transportation, have complex needs, or simply aren’t prioritized by alternatives — are left behind in a school with a shrinking budget.
That is not a glitch. That is the design.
Cedar Rapids is not a cautionary tale about one city making bad decisions. It is a preview. With the federal government preparing to launch a national voucher program, what’s happening in Iowa is coming to a school district near you.
This Isn’t New, And It Was Never About Choice.
Many of us were taught that the school choice movement emerged from a genuine desire to help families — particularly low-income families and families of color — access better options. That story is a lie. Not a misunderstanding. A lie with a paper trail.
The modern voucher movement was born in the South, in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education. When the Supreme Court ruled in 1954 that segregated schools were unconstitutional, white political leaders across the South looked for a workaround. They found it in vouchers.
Virginia’s legislature passed a constitutional amendment in 1956 creating a state tuition voucher system — not to help Black families, but to fund white flight from newly integrated schools. When Virginia courts ordered Prince Edward County to desegregate in 1959, the county board did not comply. Instead, they defunded the public school system entirely and opened Prince Edward Academy — a private, all-white institution funded in part by public money — for 1,450 white students. Black children in Prince Edward County had no school to attend for five years.
This was not an isolated incident. By 1969, more than 200 private “segregation academies” had opened across the South. Seven states — Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana — ran formal voucher programs explicitly designed to incentivize white students to leave integrated public schools and take public dollars with them.
Economist Milton Friedman, now canonized as the intellectual father of school choice, wrote his foundational voucher essay in 1955 — the same year the South was engineering its resistance to Brown. Historian Nancy MacLean’s meticulous archival research shows that Friedman actively abetted segregationists, framing vouchers as “freedom” while enabling the denial of equal education to Black children. As NAACP attorney Oliver Hill put it at the time: “No one in a democratic society has a right to have his private prejudices financed at public expense.”
The courts eventually ended those programs. But the playbook survived. It was rebranded. And it is back — bigger, better funded, and operating in nearly every state in the country.
The Marketing Has Changed And The Mechanics Haven’t
Today’s voucher advocates will tell you this history is irrelevant. They’ll tell you that ESAs — Education Savings Accounts — are different. That they’re about equity. About giving poor families the same choices rich families have always had.
Here’s what the data actually shows.
In my home state, Arizona, which became the first state to adopt a universal ESA program in 2022, 71% of students using vouchers in 2023 were already enrolled in private schools before the program existed. They weren’t escaping failing public schools. They were getting a taxpayer subsidy for a choice they’d already made. A landmark RAND Corporation study released in early 2026 confirmed that Arizona’s ESA users are overwhelmingly drawn from the state’s wealthiest, whitest communities. Most of the program’s beneficiaries could have afforded private school without it.
In Arkansas, 95% of voucher users had never attended public school. In North Carolina, 87% of voucher recipients were already private school students when the program launched.
When Indiana expanded its voucher program to universal eligibility, private schools responded by raising tuition by as much as 25%. The families best positioned to absorb that increase? Wealthy ones. The families who hoped vouchers would finally put private school within reach? Left further behind than before.
The EdTrust put it plainly in their 2024 analysis: vouchers do not expand educational choice for all families. They subsidize the education of wealthy students — overwhelmingly white and wealthy — while deepening the inequities that disproportionately harm students of color, low-income students, and students with disabilities.
This is not school choice. This is a publicly funded subsidy for (private) segregation.
What’s Happening in Arizona – Another Cautionary Tale
I serve on the board of the Save Our Schools Arizona Network, a sister organization to Save Our Schools Arizona — the coalition that has been fighting Arizona’s runaway ESA program since voters rejected its expansion by 65% in 2018. The legislature passed it anyway in 2022. Voters don’t want universal voucher expansion, but the legislators are ramming it down our throats anyway.
Arizona’s ESA program has now surpassed $1 billion in annual costs — up from $2.2 million in 2011. It serves over 100,000 students. And for three years, the legislature has refused to add a single guardrail to the program. Not one. In that time, Arizona families have used ESA funds to purchase diamond rings, lingerie, gaming laptops, and ski lift passes. No joke.
This February, SOSAZ and the Arizona Education Association filed the Protect Education Act — a ballot initiative that would require unused funds to be returned to public schools, mandate fingerprint clearance for voucher-funded school employees, institute basic academic accountability for private schools receiving public money, cap eligibility at households earning $150,000 or less per year, and limit the purchase of luxury items with the money.
This initiative does not eliminate vouchers. It asks for accountability, transparency, and basic safety standards — things that every public school is already required to meet. To get this on the November 2026 ballot, organizers need 255,949 valid signatures by July 2. If you’re in Arizona — or know people who are — this is the fight right now.
The Doom Loop — And Why It Isn’t Inevitable
Back to Cedar Rapids.
The NPR story captures something important about how this spiral works. Families leave. Funding follows them out the door. The district can’t fix what’s broken. More families leave. The district shrinks further. The schools left behind become more under-resourced and more segregated — by race, by income, by disability status — than they were before.
And then someone points to those schools and says: see, public schools are failing. People are choosing to leave. This proves we need more choice.
It is a self-fulfilling prophecy, deliberately engineered.
We’ve seen this before. The strong predictor of white private school enrollment, research consistently shows, is the proportion of Black students in the local public schools. When white and/or wealthy families leave — each for their own individual, understandable reasons — the schools they leave become more segregated. Funding follows them. The cycle tightens.
Two things can be true here. Families deserve schools that work right now. And defunding public schools makes it harder for any child — including yours — to get one. These are not competing truths. They are the same truth.
Why This Matters to You
If you’re a parent with access to choices — the kind of parent Integrated Schools tends to talk to — you might be reading this and thinking: this isn’t really my issue. My kids are fine.
We want to offer a different frame.
Your child’s future is not separable from the futures of the children around them. The research on integrated schools is clear: all students benefit from diverse learning environments — cognitively, socially, and civically. The communities our children will inherit, work in, and lead will be multiracial and economically diverse. The question is whether they’ll have learned to navigate that — or whether they’ll have been educated in a bubble that told them they didn’t need to.
Beyond that: public schools are the only institution in American life that every family, regardless of income or background, has a stake in and a right to shape. When public schools are defunded and dismantled, that democratic infrastructure disappears. Not just for the families who stayed. For all of us.
Victor Glover, the first Black person to travel to the Moon, went to a Title I high school in Ontario, California — 97% students of color, 87% economically disadvantaged. A public school teacher planted the seed that changed his life. The next Victor Glover is sitting in a classroom somewhere right now.
The question is whether we’re going to build that school together, or let it collapse while we escape.
What You Can Do
If you’re in Arizona: Get involved with the Protect Education Act signature drive. Volunteers are needed now.
If you’re anywhere: Learn what’s happening in your state. At least 33 states now have some form of private school choice program. Twelve have universal ESA programs with no income restrictions. A federal voucher program has been signed into law, set to go into effect Jan. 1, 2027. States must decide annually whether or not to opt in, so now’s the time to advocate for your state to opt out. Senate Bill The Keep Funds in Public Schools Act (S.4297) would repeal this law — email your senators and representatives to support this act.
Show up for your public schools. Not because they’re perfect — they’re not. But because they belong to all of us. And that belonging is worth fighting for.
Anna Lodder is a Project Manager for Integrated Schools and serves on the board of the Save Our Schools Arizona Network. Integrated Schools supports families with racial and economic privilege in committing to integrated, public education for all children.
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