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U.S.|Voucher Push Is Reshaping Private School Education, Study Finds
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/12/us/voucher-study-private-school-tuition.html
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Vouchers are spurring the growth of low-priced, Christian schools that often serve small populations of students. They’re also pushing up tuition prices.
Sept. 12, 2025Updated 7:30 a.m. ET
Some private schools are raising tuition, and others are able to enroll more students as publicly financed voucher programs begin to reshape education across the country.
But the biggest beneficiaries of the new programs so far may be families whose children were already attending private schools, according to a new study.
The authors of the study, Douglas N. Harris and Gabriel Olivier, both economists at Tulane University, found that many students who did use vouchers to move from public to private education had enrolled in small religious schools with a median tuition of $7,000.
Spending taxpayer dollars on private schooling upends several core traditions of American public education, Dr. Harris argued, including public governance and the separation of church and state.
“This is the biggest change in education policy since Brown v. Board,” he said, referring to the 1954 Supreme Court case that outlawed Southern school segregation.
The report is one of the first to measure the effects of a relatively new type of private school voucher, called an education savings account. The accounts allow parents to spend public dollars on private education and home-schooling. They are available to families of all income levels in the 11 Republican-leaning states included in the study.
