The Strange Bedfellows Fighting School Vouchers

But while voucher proponents point to the growing list of states joining what they call the ​“education freedom” club as evidence of their cause’s momentum, such cheerleading ignores a growing revolt from the Right. For years now, the loudest opposition to school privatization has come from public school advocates and teachers’ unions, arguing that vouchers steal tax dollars from local public schools, ultimately bleeding public education dry. They’ve often been joined by rural Republicans who represent small towns where public schools are among the largest employers. They see vouchers as an existential threat, not just to their local schools, but to the survival of their very communities. 

The movement opposing vouchers has now changed. Today, resistance to school voucher programs is also coming from a patchwork coalition of conservative groups and activists — including many who have long disparaged public schools as ​“government schools” — that has emerged to block what they now characterize as ​“government school choice.”

Lead-pipe tactics

When the Tennessee legislature reconvened in January, Republican Gov. Bill Lee made clear that enacting an expansive private school voucher program was his top priority. The Education Freedom Act, which comes with a nearly half-billion-dollar price tag, starts relatively small, providing vouchers worth roughly $7,000 to some 20,000 students, half of whom must meet income limits. But in year two, those income limits will come off, meaning that even wealthy parents whose kids already attend private school will be eligible for the new state subsidy. The program is all but certain to balloon as a result.

A similar proposal was stymied last year, after opponents across the political spectrum rallied to defeat it, but the 2025 session likely looked more promising to Lee. Some of the legislature’s fiercest voucher opponents were dispatched in 2024, after national advocacy groups poured money into Republican primaries to take them out. This time around, Lee and his pro-voucher forces were willing to go to extraordinary lengths to ensure the bill’s passage. 

Lee convened a special session of the legislature, meaning that controversial bills, typically debated for days and weeks, sailed through committees in hours. Meanwhile, deep-pocketed groups including the American Federation for Children and Club for Growth blanketed the airwaves and social media with pro-voucher messaging and threats to primary legislative holdouts. 

For conservative activist Kelly Jackson, creator of the Tennessee news site TruthWire News and a legislative advocate with the influential grassroots group Tennessee Stands, such heavy-handed maneuvering raised an obvious question. If Tennesseans really were clamoring to spend public tax dollars on private religious education, as Lee and his allies kept insisting, why were such ​“lead-pipe tactics,” plus millions in dark money funding, necessary? 

“If you talk to conservatives, they don’t want vouchers. Universal school choice is not a conservative value,” insists Jackson, before posing a riddle: ​“What do we call something that you can’t afford but the government gives you money [for]?” Answer: ​“It’s a subsidy.” (That view comes up repeatedly among critics on the Right, who deride vouchers as ​“handouts,” ​“giveaways” or, as one activist put it, ​“government cheese.”)

Tennessee’s voucher program passed, over the loud objections of Tennessee Stands and other conservative groups, and the defection of several GOP legislators, including one who called the program a non-conservative ​“scam.” Programs in other states haven’t fared as well. In January, a bill that would have established a universal voucher program in South Dakota was brought down by an unwieldy coalition of public education supporters, the Chamber of Commerce, home schooling groups and Young America’s Foundation (formerly Young Americans for Freedom), which viewed the proposed program as too restrictive.

If such bedfellows seem unlikely, welcome to the roiling politics of school choice.

Seeing red

For decades, school choice was marketed as a civil rights cause aimed at helping minority students trapped in low-performing urban schools. Advocates typically proposed small programs targeting specific student populations including students with special needs, foster children and students on Native American reservations. While true believers in the cause always aspired to vouchers-for-all, this piecemeal strategy proved highly effective at winning bipartisan support. 

Then came the pandemic and the school culture wars, which voucher proponents seized upon as an opportunity. As conservative activist Chris Rufo explained in a 2022 speech, ​“To get to universal school choice, you really need to operate from a premise of universal public school distrust.”

Voucher proponents also shifted course on who they courted as supporters, as ​“school choice evangelist” Corey DeAngelis outlines in his recent book, The Parent Revolution, abandoning efforts to attract Democrats and instead targeting GOP holdouts in red states. From then on, school choice became a litmus test issue for Republicans. Legislators who failed to support vouchers would be replaced.

Over the past few years this strategy has been wildly successful, knocking out Republican resistance in state after state. But as a recent study of public opposition to vouchers concluded, ​“overcoming legislative roadblocks” turns out to have been the easy part. ​“No similar mechanism exists for overcoming opposition among the mass public.” 

In November, voters in Kentucky and Nebraska decisively rejected school voucher ballot measures, while Coloradans thwarted a proposed amendment that would have enshrined the right to school choice in the state constitution. In Kentucky, voters from every single county rejected a similar amendment to the state constitution that would have allowed public dollars to fund private religious education, ​“despite an ad campaign aimed at convincing voters that Donald Trump wanted them to vote yes.” Indeed, some of Trump’s staunchest supporters were the most emphatic in saying ​“no” to school vouchers. Nearly nine out of 10 voters in Monroe County, which borders Tennessee, supported Trump while rejecting the voucher amendment by 70.5%. In Robertson County, voters cast more than 80% of their votes for Trump, nearly the same margin by which they opposed school vouchers.

Voters in these states joined a tradition, now 50 years long, of rejecting vouchers when given the chance. And in doing so they made clear that today’s rapid spread of ​“education freedom,” particularly across the South, hasn’t been driven by voters but by state legislatures in concert with powerful national advocacy groups and billionaires for whom vouchers are a near obsession.

In Texas, for example, Gov. Greg Abbott, who’s made vouchers his signature cause, spent nearly $12 million to challenge members of his own party, much of it provided by a single billionaire: hedge funder Jeff Yass, a major bankroller of the anti-tax lobby group Club for Growth. During last spring’s primary elections, Abbott succeeded in knocking out seven fellow Republicans who’d opposed vouchers. 

Voucher proponents characterized Abbott’s success as a ​“political earthquake.” But the astonishing amount of money devoted to a cause of questionable popularity, not to mention the outsized role being played by a handful of pro-voucher billionaires, has also stoked deep suspicion on the Right.

Cue backlash

“I’ve never seen this level of grassroots conservative energy around an issue before in my life,” says Suzanne Bellsnyder, a lifelong Republican who spent years working in state politics. A passionate voice for rural Texas, Bellsnyder, who lives 90 miles north of Amarillo, in the Texas Panhandle, is in many ways a familiar anti-voucher voice. She fears that just as rural communities have lost businesses, hospitals, even roads, their schools are now threatened, meaning that the viability of towns like hers hangs in the balance. ​“Without public education, rural Texas is ​‘toast.’”

It’s an argument that rural Texans have been making for years, but the coalition she’s now an active part of is something new in Texas politics.

“We are a group of conservatives who’ve come together and built an effort to try to stop this,” says Bellsnyder. An ardent supporter of her local public schools, Bellsnyder now finds herself allied with fellow conservative activists who don’t believe in public education at all. ​“I wouldn’t be with these people on anything else, but we’re all together in this fight.”

The ballooning conservative effort to stop vouchers in Texas includes crusaders for limited government, like the Grayson County Conservatives, which bills itself as ​“the most conservative Republican group in Grayson County…dedicated to getting the crony, corrupt RINOs (Republicans In Name Only) out of Grayson and Austin!” In their view, school choice is not about freeing students from the grasp of the state but extending the state’s reach into private schools, akin to Obamacare but for education. There are also homeschoolers who fear new regulations as the state extends both cash and oversight to a sphere of education that currently operates with little of either. A growing group of parent activists, meanwhile, are convinced that Abbott’s brand of school choice represents the final phase of a United Nations-led takeover of the schools. Then there are the Trump-supporting populists who see Abbott’s voucher program as yet another instance of ​“globalism” in action, a plot by a cabal of billionaire oligarchs seeking to cash in on the state’s students. 

Beyond an opposition to the bills currently snaking their way through the state legislature, these activists share a sense that something nefarious is afoot in the Lone Star state — that their elected officials have been ​“bought” and now work not for the people but for wealthy elites.

“Currently donors & powerful politicians are working overtime bullying elected officials over SB2,” Hollie Plemons posted on X (formerly Twitter) recently, referring to a voucher measure then working its way through the Texas Senate. (The proposal subsequently passed the state Senate is currently in the Texas House of Representatives.) ​“Y’all, this is TERRIFYING! This is not how a representative form of government should work.”

That so many of the loudest critics of vouchers are Abbott’s conservative allies appears to have blindsided the governor. In recent weeks, his attacks have turned sharply personal. Bellsnyder, whom Abbott accused of ​“lecturing” him, says that such antics are proof that the anti-voucher activists are having an impact. ​“The governor and his people are polling constantly. This tells me that they see the numbers and don’t like what they see.”

The latest poll from Texas bears her out. The statewide survey showed bipartisan opposition to Abbott’s voucher plan among every major demographic. Despite the millions of dollars spent and a now multi-year campaign to bring vouchers to the state, the issue has yet to achieve a decisive majority, even among base Republican voters. 

Political fault lines

In the first months of the second Trump administration, amid an endless tide of executive orders rolling back not just the Biden years but much of the 20^th century, it’s easy to view the Right as an unstoppable force. And yet the complicated politics of school vouchers are indicative of the fragile nature of the conservative coalition. Vouchers, long the passion project of libertarians, appeal to both the Christian Nationalist wing of the movement and a rising block of neo-segregationists, making increasingly open appeals for white supremacist laws. But in the age of MAGA populism, this billionaire-backed policy priority is becoming a tougher sell to the Republican grassroots.

In Tennessee, activist Kelly Jackson sees the recent showdown over vouchers as the latest installment of a longer running battle between the party establishment and an insurgent grassroots conservative movement consisting of groups like Tennessee Stands, which emerged in response to pandemic restrictions. 

“The folks running the show are the crony Republicans,” says Jackson, citing Gov. Lee and his well-heeled allies, including the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity (which she dismisses as ​“Americans for Fake Prosperity”). ​“They’re not loyal to principles but rather power and self-seeking agendas. As we’ve been gaining support, we’ve become the bane of their existence.” 

Jackson strongly identifies as a MAGA populist — she even went to Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, to ​“show up” for Trump, a fact she trumpets in her X bio. But while she remains a loyal Trump supporter, she is troubled by his vocal support for vouchers as well as a series of controversial choices he’s made concerning the education department, including nominating a former Tennessee education commissioner, widely loathed on the Right for allegedly dismissing culture war issues, as second in command at the DOE.

If these objections highlight a potential vulnerability for the GOP, they also reveal the highly fragile nature of the anti-voucher coalition. In states that have seen unlikely bedfellows ally in order to try to block vouchers, public education advocates are now demanding more accountability and oversight — the very ​“strings” that led many conservative activists to oppose vouchers in the first place.

While the anti-voucher coalition may prove difficult, or even impossible to sustain, opposition to vouchers among GOP voters could still undermine support for Trump. Texas teacher Brett Guillory, a three-time Trump voter, once felt so strongly that the 2020 election was stolen that he considered challenging his congressman, Dan Crenshaw, for voting to certify the election. Guillory has now soured on Trump and cites vouchers as the primary reason.

“I am now convinced that Trump is just another rich guy that the wealthy want in that spot so that they can stay wealthy,” says Guillory. ​“And to me vouchers are the clearest indication of that.”

A case in point for Guillory: Trump’s proposal for a federal voucher plan, which incentivizes the wealthy and corporations to give to voucher programs in exchange for unheard-of tax breaks, what some experts are calling ​“the quintessential definition of a tax shelter.”

“It’s about money hoarding, pure and simple,” says Guillory. ​“These people don’t say ​‘how can I make your life better’ but ​‘how can I use you as a means to an end?’”

A vocal part of Texas’ anti-voucher conservative coalition, Guillory says that the impact of what he characterizes as ​“the little guy fighting the giants” reflects the growing popular antipathy towards billionaires. ​“Government works by having billionaires buy politicians, and when you find all of that out, mad isn’t the word.” 

These days, Guillory is doing his part to educate his friends and family, not just about why vouchers are an ​“elite scam,” but that Trump himself is a fraud. 

His efforts seem to be working. Guillory’s parents, whom he describes as the sort of hard-core Trump supporters who display side-by-side images of Jesus and the president on their living room wall, are also retired teachers. They’re fearful that Abbott’s voucher plan, which Trump backs, will threaten their pensions. 

“They would probably still vote for Trump but right now they’d do it holding their noses,” says Guillory. ​“Compared to driving to the voting booth singing a Trump song, that’s huge.”