Do Vouchers Take Money Away From Public Schools?

January 10, 2006

Opponents to the concept of education vouchers say that they drain money from public education. It's an interesting piece of criticism: dollars to pay for an Opportunity Scholarship voucher in Florida (recently deemed unconstitutional) were actually state funds originally slated to go to the public schools, but diverted to the private school of the parent's choice.

While there are some voucher programs that are either privately-funded or federally-funded, for the most part vouchers are designed to have public school money be used to help pay for private school tuition. So yes, vouchers take money away from public schools.

But is this criticism valid?

A Tale of Two Districts: Let's take two hypothetical public school teachers, Joe and Guy, talking shop about school district finances. The two teach at different districts, and money is a bone of contention.

Joe, whose school district has low scores, complains to Guy, whose district has high scores, "But your district has more money than mine!"

This certainly is true, as the table on the right shows, Joe's district has over $33 million less in its budget.

Guy doesn't accept this criticism at all, "Yes, but my district teaches more students than yours! If anything, I should be the one complaining."

Which is also true. Taking into account the different sized populations, we see that in fact Joe's district spends more per pupil than Guy's.

As shown above, they spend about $1400 more pupil than Guy's high-scoring district.

Enter Vouchers: Joe concedes Guy's point. But what he's really steamed about is this new voucher plan they're proposing for his district, "They're just draining money away from the public schools!"

The plan, shown above right, is to offer to 500 of the neediest students a voucher worth $4500 apiece, to be used at any private school. The voucher plan would cost about $2.2 million.

"Not so quick!" Guy counters. "Sure, it's going to take money away from your school district, but it's also taking students."

As we see with the numbers crunched, after the voucher plan is enacted, the district finances have changed in two dimensions: number of pupils and total budget. The district now can spend about $300 more per-pupil.

This is significant. In a classroom of 25 students, they'll have about $7500 more available to spend, on average, and even more measured in terms of an entire school.


Yes, voucher programs can take money away from public schools. But they take away students at a faster rate, leaving district finances in better shape.