This past legislative session, Hoosiers discovered that our state is facing a budget shortfall of $2.4 billion over the next three years. This is less than ideal, especially coming on the heels of changes to our tax system that will strain budgets for public services ranging from public schools and libraries to police and fire departments to helping citizens survive and recover from the most vulnerable points of their lives. Now, with the shortfall, it’s likely all public services will suffer even more than previously thought.

Were our legislature serious about addressing the problem, it could make enormous headway by eliminating one line item from the budget. By getting rid of just one program that serves a relatively small percentage of Hoosier families and provides no general benefit to our state, we could immediately save more than $1 billion over the next two years. 

(Click to enlarge graph) In one year alone, the Indiana Choice voucher program is costing nearly one-half a billion dollars, which, if you remove it from the tuition support bucket (item 1), is greater than all state appropriation funding buckets except for four – Tuition Support, Medicaid, Retirement, and Family & Children Fund. Next year it will move up in ranking to slot number four.

Unfortunately, billionaire-funded special interest groups have spent millions of dollars both buying the support of our legislature and spreading propaganda throughout our communities. As a result, it is highly likely the Choice Scholarship voucher program will not only continue to consume billions of taxpayer dollars, but may even be further expanded.

Taxpayer-Funded Tuition Hikes

The longstanding narrative promoted by lobbyists has been that vouchers put private school education within the reach of everyone. That’s a sympathetic story that bears less and less in common with reality.

In 2011, prior to voucher availability, the largest private school in our state charged an average of $8,336 tuition for a single student. Today, it charges $16,523. For those students who receive them, the average value of a Choice Scholarship voucher to the school is $6,452. In other words, parents receiving a voucher today will pay $1,735 more than they would’ve in 2011, when vouchers didn’t exist.

At the other end of the spectrum, a much smaller, church-based school charged its parishioners $995 in tuition in 2011. Today, it charges $7,200, with an average voucher value of $6,516. Thanks to the government providing the church/school with $6,516 per student, parents’ tuition cost has been reduced by a whopping $311.

Those examples are indicative of two significant trends among private schools. Large private schools without a church affiliation tend to ‘split’ the state money with parents, raising tuition by amounts that families would reject if they had to actually pay them. 

At the other end of the spectrum, small private schools that were historically funded by churches mostly used to be very inexpensive, or even free, for kids to attend. Those church-based schools have generally adjusted their tuition rates to maximize the welfare they receive from the state, essentially transforming their self-described school ministries from a significant cost for these churches into either a small cost or even a source of revenue.

Granted, neither of the above two examples adjust for inflation. By converting historic 2011 tuition rates into 2025 dollars, the large school could claim its $6,452 vouchers are actually reducing tuition by $1,543, while the parent savings at the small school would jump to $702. Both numbers are obviously still far below the savings the average person would expect.

To take a broader look, historic tuition data is available for 148 of the 370 schools currently receiving vouchers. By adjusting for inflation and analyzing their historic trends, we can see that for every $1 the state spends, only $0.66 reduces cost to parents. As bad as that value is, it’s getting worse, as tuition growth rates are increasing in line with expanding eligibility for the program. It is entirely feasible that funding of universal vouchers will eventually result in parents effectively paying the same amount of money as if the program had never existed.

Spending More for Less

Despite only $0.66 of each $1 reducing cost to parents of private-school students, some argue that Choice Scholarship vouchers still provide value to taxpayers. This argument might have merit if the program were causing a significant percentage of students to move to private schools AND superior academic outcomes resulted from those moves. Neither of these is true.

The special interest groups behind vouchers have long funded dubious research designed to support its arguments. During the push to legalize vouchers in 2011, they released such research that made an incredible claim: 41% of parents would transfer their kids to private schools if they could.

In Indiana, we have somewhat limited visibility into total school enrollment. The state tracks numbers for public schools and accredited private schools. It attempts to track non-accredited private school enrollment, but that data is fairly unreliable. It does nothing to track the number of kids receiving homeschooling.

Among the kids we can actually see, public schools accounted for approximately 92% of enrollment prior to vouchers, with 8% attending private schools. Today, that has shifted to approximately 91% public** and 9% private. But even that is almost certainly overstating the change. The availability of government money caused many non-accredited private schools to seek accreditation, which requires them to submit enrollment data to the state. Private school becoming somewhat more affordable also caused some number of homeschool families to enroll in voucher-eligible schools. 

In reality, the trend in public school enrollment looks incredibly flat when viewed by cohort. That is, if we look at growth within the class of 2025, class of 2026, class of 2027, etc, we see changes in population growth, but we don’t see an exodus from public schools.

Additionally, we tend to see worse academic outcomes for the students whose families do use vouchers to switch them from public to private schools. The most comprehensive research on the topic, “Voucher Pathways and Student Achievement in Indiana’s Choice Scholarship Program,” reveals that these students see their average performance on math tests decline, while their performance on English tests stay the same.

That may be surprising to some, as privatization special interest groups have spent incredible amounts of money promoting the message that vouchers improve academic outcomes. These groups fail to mention that they also funded the research they reference, that they hand-selected who performed it and that it is literally decades old at this point. 

What About Parent Rights

When someone has the audacity to point out that vouchers create taxpayer-funded tuition rate growth while failing to meaningfully increase enrollment or improve academic outcomes, two words often get dropped: parent rights. What about a parent’s right to get their child the exact kind of education they want?

It’s important to note how the terms ‘parent rights’ and ‘school choice’ rose to prominence. When our nation decided segregation was inherently un-American, a large number of white parents opposed sending their children to school with black children. The push toward privatization was fueled by their bigotry. Proponents argued the government should simply provide money and allow parents the right to choose between private schools that were racially segregated or integrated.

Today, the terms have been sanitized and stripped of their racial connotations, but those who deploy them still appeal to the right to discriminate. Today, it’s stated that parents have the right to keep their kids away from those with different religious beliefs. Or the right to go to a school that won’t allow families of gay parents to enroll. The “acceptable” targets of discrimination have changed, but the movement is still fueled by it.

Furthermore, while the concept of school choice has been normalized, it remains a bizarre approach to a public good. Imagine if a legislator proposed providing funding to neighborhood watch groups by taking it away from local law enforcement. Or paying for some citizens’ fitness club memberships with tax dollars previously designated for public parks. Or stripping the budgets of fire departments to pay for companies to install fire suppression systems.

In education, as with all other public goods, private citizens should obviously have the right to select alternative or auxiliary goods at their own expense. That’s a far cry from allowing them to demand that everyone else pay for those alternatives.

Your Opinion Doesn’t Matter

You may read this article and be incensed by our state spending billions of dollars on Choice vouchers. Or you may disagree entirely and hope for the total destruction of public education. In the end, it matters little. As a body, our legislature cares most about the input of those who invested in getting them elected and those are the voices they’ll listen to.

When the state initially adopted Choice vouchers, 94% of Hoosiers opposed them. They were sold as opening doors to families in poverty, improving academic outcomes and creating savings for taxpayers. All of those claims have turned out to be false. But until citizens are willing to cast their votes for those who would put an end to this wasteful, unsuccessful program, our legislators will vote as moneyed lobbyists tell them to. And to do so, they’ll cut an extra billion dollars from your schools, libraries, roads, health programs and police and fire departments.

**Our organization does not consider charters or so-called “innovation schools” to be public schools, though they are called that in state law. Charters and “innovation schools” do not share the following accountability requirements with public school districts: 1) to serve all students within a given geographic area, 2) to be governed by a democratically elected local board (“innovation schools” are outsourced within districts, while charters appoint their own boards), and 3) to follow the full body of state education law, including teacher certification requirements and financial reporting requirements.

Additional sources:  

Tuition information is taken from private school websites using The Internet Archive, https://archive.org/. For the sake of privacy, names of the schools are not listed.  

Mary Beth Schneider, “House Okays Private School Vouchers,” Indianapolis Star, May 31, 2011.  

Scott Elliott, “Survey: Hoosiers say schools are failing,” Indianapolis Star, January 11, 2011.

“Republicans Push for School Choice,” Indianapolis Star,  September 10, 2010.

“What Hoosiers Think About Education,” Indianapolis Star, February 9, 2011. 

“How Choice Vouchers Impact Tuition Rates—Presentation Summary,” created March 15, 2025, https://docs.google.com/document/d/1rJ3dHh0VoDLBDatAeuZsRnNB1FyNOxaY/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=108566989005153871811&rtpof=true&sd=true. 

Jim May is one of our newest board members at ICPE. To learn more about Jim and read his work, you can visit www.carmelschoolsdad.com/about