Nick Covington is an Iowa parent who taught high school social studies for ten years.

For decades, the same charts and arguments about public school spending have made their way from think tanks to the media and state capitols around the country.

“After 40 years, trillions spent, and declining test scores, doing more of the same isn’t just failing – it’s insanity,” Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds shared in March 2025. “The status quo is unacceptable. It’s time to put parents and local communities back in charge.”

The cost of our public schools keeps going up and test scores don’t, the argument goes, so we should give public money to private schools to see if they can deliver better educational outcomes for less money. (Hint: they do not.) Richard Rothstein, author of The Color of Law, weighed in on the debate about “school productivity collapse” more than 30 years ago:

There is a widespread perception among the general public, policy makers, and even education professionals of a ‘school productivity collapse.’ It is based on the belief that real elementary and secondary education spending per pupil has doubled in the last quarter century, and that school outcomes have not improved to justify these new investments.

Is every dollar spent on public education justified? Of course not. But it’s exactly because this difference between costs and tested outcomes has been misunderstood and exploited year after year, and because that difference hides the values of our public education system, that it deserves an explanation from public school advocates. “[School productivity collapse] assumes that all school spending aims for a single outcome—improved academic achievement of regular students,” Rothstein argues, “But schools actually seek a variety of additional outcomes as well: training of the disabled, student health and nutrition, vocational education, assimilation of the non-English speaking, etc.”

In the second half of the 20th century, we recognized the rights of Black families to integrated schools, of bilingual students to comprehensible instruction, of students with disabilities to a free and appropriate public education, and the promise to children in poverty that school could not offer them less because their families had less. The costs of public education have expanded in proportion to its constitutionality. Each expansion required public schools to add staff, programming, buildings, transportation, and technology, and expanded federal accountability to ensure the rights of students and families were being met.

Costs rose faster than test scores largely because our rights-based obligations expanded, and intentionally expanded to include children who require more from school than what they may produce on a scorecard, not because schools became less efficient. As states adopt privatization schemes with headlines about cost-cutting and making schools more efficient, it’s worth evaluating the multiple outcomes of schooling and understanding this hard-fought history as a reminder that what we pay for public education is the cost of becoming constitutional.

Federal spending on elementary and secondary education more than doubled between 1965 and 1975, years before the Department of Education opened its doors in 1980. Today, three programs account for nearly $35 billion of the department’s $45 billion budget for K-12 programs: Title I for students in poverty, IDEA for students with disabilities, and Title III for English learners. Each was created to meet a legal or needs-based deficit in our public education system, and each represents a partial and chronically late federal payment on a bill covered largely by state and local taxpayers.

Instead of expanding federal funding to meet its legal obligations and support the rights of parents and children, the current Congress and administration have doubled-down on the illusion of school choice. Last year’s embarrassingly named One Big Beautiful Bill Act contained the nation’s first federal tax-credit provision for donations to private scholarship-granting organizations. Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider call these neo-voucher programs “a laundromat for tax dollars.” “While the state wasn’t sending money directly to private schools,” they write, “the impact on the treasury was the same: funds were diverted from tax collection and sent to private schools.”

What happens to these rights at the private schoolhouse door?

The privatization and voucherization of our public education system is a return to separate and unequal education, as private schools receiving public dollars are accountable to few of the rights children and parents secured in the last half of the 20th century.

Private schools accepting public dollars have no obligation to meet your child’s individualized education program (IEP) or provide a free and appropriate public education (FAPE). One Ohio family found out when their granddaughter, receiving a state voucher for students with disabilities, was told her “physical and educational needs were too extensive for her to continue” attending Cincinnati Christian Schools, and that they would need to pay the cost of an aide out of their own pockets. “Disability advocates warn that as private school voucher programs spread, more parents will find themselves in similar straits,” writes disability advocate Pepper Stetler.

“Kelly doesn’t remember…being told that the rights and protections that apply to students with disabilities in public schools do not extend to private schools…But [Ohio law] does mention on a page of regulations that if a student is enrolled in a school that is not public, it is ‘not obligated to provide the child’ with a free appropriate public education. Ultimately, the private school is not required to follow the IDEA, and parents have little recourse if the school chooses not to.”

When private school parents seek evaluations, the local public system is required to pick up the tab, and when students require services above what private schools can provide, families are told to pay for them out of pocket.

Privatization also creates a negative feedback loop that seems intentionally designed to pick public education apart at the seams. Where narratives about “school productivity collapse” fuel privatization as a political project to make education more efficient, voucher programs get passed as the mechanism to “hold schools accountable.” While many of these programs are initially targeted and means-tested, families with means get the most advantage from voucher schemes, either through subsidizing existing private school attendance or crowding out lower income families.

As private schools raise tuition, public schools become schools-of-last-resort for parents who can’t afford the difference or whose children’s needs cannot (or will not) be met by the private sector. Concentrating students with greater needs in public schools that have increasingly scarce public resources to meet them exaggerates the difference between the resources students require and the testable outcomes they produce.

All of this contributes to next year’s argument about “spending more to produce less,” making public schools the scapegoat to justify spending cuts. The public school system is the only one legally required to accept all students and the only one blamed for what that costs.

I think of a young man at a school where I taught, whose classroom shared a hallway with mine. He had profound disabilities and needed at least two adults, a nurse in the building, staff in our hallway trained in crisis intervention, and an adapted bus to be safe and cared for; to be in our building at all. In 1970 he wouldn’t have been, and there’s no private school that would take on that cost for an $8,000 voucher.

Private schools have always existed in America, and they always will. That’s not up for debate in this country. The premise of “school choice” is certainly correct about private schools being able to choose their students, the question is whether public money should follow a child to a school that is free to turn them away.