Do Private School Choice Programs “Take Money Away” from Public Schools

In a recent post, I argued that the claim that school choice was "welfare for the rich" was a red herring. This argument diverts attention away from the real opposition from school choice critics. Opponents of school choice are not really concerned with wealthy families receiving public support for education. As long as those rich folks choose a public school, they can have their allotment of education dollars with no objection. The concern only arises when rich people choose a non-public school. For that matter, most of the die-hard supporters of public education are opposed to means-tested voucher programs that give money to only poor families. In other words, it has nothing to do with wealth and everything to do with choice. They simply do not believe parents should be able to direct those education dollars to the school of their choice.

My post got a bit of attention on X (formerly Twitter), where many took issue with my claim. For the most part, the objections failed to engage with my argument but instead proved my point. As one person wrote: "My fundamental objection is that you cannot take away funding from public schools. Do what you want with your own non tax related money." That was my point. School choice opponents do not care about rich people receiving public dollars; they object to allowing people the freedom to control those dollars.

X, for all its good traits, is not the place for a substantive back and forth. Nevertheless, this claim that school choice takes money from public schools deserves some scrutiny. There are two issues to consider. First, it is not necessarily true that a school choice program will take any money from public schools. In a system that funds schools based on a formula, such as Missouri's foundation formula, public schools will only lose money when a student leaves. This leads me to my second point-schools that lose students should lose money.

Missouri's schools are funded by a combination of local, state, and federal dollars. If a school choice program funds students already in private schools, as is often claimed by opponents, this would not change funding for the local public schools at all. The school district would continue to receive the funds as determined by the funding formula. The only thing that could possibly be argued is that the additional cost of paying for private school students may lead to constraints on the expansion of funding for public schools in the future, but that is a downstream argument.

The only way school choice takes money away from public schools is when a student switches from a public school to a private school. This could actually lead to an increase in per student revenue for the public school as they lose only the state (and possibly federal) funding for the student but retain local dollars. Setting that aside, it is true that the switch could lead to lower total revenue for the public school. Once again, however, this is not the real objection. Schools always lose money when a student leaves. If the student moves out of state or to another public school, the district will lose money. The district will even lose money if the student leaves to attend a public school that his or her parents pay for. Indeed, the dollar amount lost by the district is no different in any of these scenarios than it would be with a private school choice program (unless the program was designed to take local education dollars).

Opponents of school choice do not argue public schools should not lose dollars when a student leaves. They only object when the student is equipped with public dollars (or tax-deductible contributions to a scholarship fund). The takeaway is clear. Opponents of school choice are fundamentally opposed to freedom of choice in education. They do not believe individuals should be allowed to spend education dollars on the school of their choice.