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A school voucher program is an education policy that allows state governments to use public funds pay tuition for students to attend private schools. Voucher programs or voucher-like programs have been enacted in the United States in 24 states, costing more than $1.2 billion and enrolling more than 115,000 students nationwide in the 2013-2014. Most states’ voucher programs are targeted for either students with disabilities, or students from families below a given income limit. There are varying limits on the number of students who can participate, the fiscal value of the vouchers, and the level of accountability applied to schools receiving voucher-provided tuition dollars.

Origins of school voucher programs. The philosophical justification for creating and implementing school voucher programs is based in two seminal texts. In Milton Friedman’s famous work, Capitalism and Freedom, he argues that the failure of public schools can be explained by lack of competition. Without the threat of revenue loss as an incentive to improve, public schools will not meet the demands of the consumers (students and their parents). Friedman proposes a universal voucher system, in which all students are given an equal amount of funding to use at the institution of their choice. This program, as opposed to the traditional public education system, will create an educational market that encourages schools to meet the demands of individual students. Chubb & Moe developed a vision for school vouchers based on a supply and demand model. In their argument, public schools struggle under the weight of unnecessary bureaucracy—an obstacle that does not exist for private schools. Offering school vouchers for use in private schools will lower the costs of education and create incentives for public schools to compete with private institutions.

Wisconsin was the first state to enact a school voucher program when it created the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program in 1989, followed by Ohio's creation of the Cleveland Scholarship Program in 1995 and Florida's McKay Scholarships for Students with Disabilities Program in 1999. More than 15 additional voucher programs have been enacted by state legislatures between 2013 and 2015. Proponents of school voucher programs have cited studies which show that voucher students show greater yearly growth than their peers in public schools, as well as higher graduation and college matriculation rates.

Critics of school voucher programs. Many disagree that school voucher programs have had the ‘improvement by competition’ effect that Friedman and Chubb & Moe predicted. Student achievement in public schools has not improved in tandem with the introduction of voucher programs, and evidence has not shown that students utilizing vouchers in private schools are more successful than their peers in their public school district. Opponents argue that school voucher programs serve only to privatize education and redirect public funding into private and religious schools. In addition, many have argued that voucher programs exacerbate segregation, removing the highest-achieving students and the most involved parents from low-income school public districts, and leaving behind the lowest-income students, higher concentrations of students with disabilities, and less racially diverse student populations. Critics also argue that school vouchers may not have as strong a positive impact as advocates claim. Some researchers have argued that the increase in student growth could be attributed to parent involvement, while others challenge the methodology of supportive research and argue that there is little positive return on school voucher programs in the way of student achievement.

Legal status of school voucher programs. Voucher opponents have litigated many cases against vouchers programs across the country, and the results have been highly variable. While state constitutions tend to have similarly-worded obligations regarding the provision of public education, courts’ interpretations of these education clauses have been quite different from case to case. In Bush v. Holmes, the court found that the creation of a school voucher program violated the state’s uniformity clause, which required the state to provide for a “uniform, efficient, safe, secure, and high quality system of free public schools.” However, a similar challenge in Indiana failed in the courts. The Indiana Supreme Court ruled that the creation of the state’s voucher program did not interfere with Indiana’s constitutional obligation to provide “a general and uniform system of open common schools without tuition.” As such, legal challenges to states’ voucher programs have been unpredictable, and the constitutionality of such programs under uniformity clauses is unclear.