Stop State ESAs and Vouchers — Don’t Shackle Parents With Government Subsidies

State legislatures are increasingly considering and enacting school vouchers and Education Savings Accounts (ESAs). Although these proposals might sound good, they severely threaten individual freedom and parental rights by shackling parents and religious schools to government funding — and the various strings attached. It is imperative that state legislators oppose vouchers and ESAs, and instead protect educational freedom!

State legislatures are increasingly considering and passing legislation implementing vouchers and ESAs, with West Virginia and Arizona being the first states to enact broad-based versions of this policy. Now, in 2023, even more states are considering and enacting such legislation.

Supporters of vouchers and ESAs often describe it as “school choice” or “money following the child.” However, these policies actually represent a major — and potentially disastrous — intrusion of government into private and home education.

First, vouchers and ESAs are closely connected to the United Nations and its push to indoctrinate children with international-socialist ideology. For example, the UN’s education agency, UNESCO, has advocated subsidizing private schools with tax money in order to control them — i.e., impose the same leftist standards on them as public schools — thus enabling the implementation of the UN’s totalitarian Agenda 2030 scheme.

As implied above, vouchers and ESAs are dangerous also because government can easily attach strings to the funding, forcing parents and private schools to submit to far-left indoctrination and other draconian government policies. In foreign countries, including Sweden, Australia, and Canada, private schools — including Christian ones — now teach leftist ideology and are practically indistinguishable from public schools, because they are shackled to government funding. The United States is next — a Republican-sponsored bill in Florida would have placed draconian restrictions on homeschoolers in exchange for government funding. This bill won’t be the last.

Furthermore, contrary to the slick “fund students, not systems” slogan, government schools will continue to receive the same levels of funding under ESA/voucher policies. Such policies will simply increase — not shift or reduce — government meddling in education.

More information on the dangers of vouchers and ESAs can be found in Alex Newman’s article “Vouchers: ‘School Choice’ Trap” in the April 10, 2023 issue of The New American magazine.

Urge your state legislators to oppose all ESA and voucher programs, and to instead support fully defunding and abolishing the government-school system. Only then — rather than by false solutions — will we achieve fully educational freedom.