For more than half a century after Milton Friedman proposed using taxpayer money to support students in private schools, the libertarian economist’s idea went almost nowhere. Republican presidents, including Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, pushed vouchers—which help parents enroll their children in schools of their choice, including private and religious schools, at taxpayer expense—as a way to liberate poor children from failing big-city school districts. Those efforts led to voucher initiatives in a smattering of districts, such as Cleveland, Milwaukee, and Washington, D.C. But in state after state, support for public schools—which take all comers and have historically played a crucial role in cultivating students’ common identity as Americans—was just too broad-based and too strong to get voucherlike programs approved on a larger scale.
In the past several years, though, voucher advocates have switched strategies to take advantage of the country’s ever-deepening political polarization. In 2022, the Heritage Foundation urged the voucher movement “to embrace the culture war” as a way of promoting school choice. As evidence of progressive overreach, the conservative think tank has pointed to “racial essentialism for third graders” and decried the presence in some school libraries of Gender Queer, a graphic novel that “features a picture of oral sex being performed on a sex toy.”
Conservative leaders in many state capitals have emulated Heritage’s tactics, and the tactical shift has helped persuade lawmakers to expand the supply of school vouchers. Amy Sinclair, the president of the Iowa state Senate, told an interviewer in 2023 that during the coronavirus pandemic, “many parents became aware of anti-American and explicit materials in their child’s classrooms and began to demand choice.” “There’s no reason why any students should have a woke agenda pushed on them,” Texas Governor Greg Abbott declared a month later at a rally for private-school-choice legislation. The following year, his Arkansas counterpart, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, promoted her school-choice efforts by declaring on X, “We need kids learning math, reading, and science—not woke nonsense.” Since the pandemic, voucherlike programs have proliferated, and they are now open to even the richest students. In 2021, no states had universal programs supporting private education with public dollars; by 2025, 18 did. The number of students using publicly funded private-school-choice programs has tripled since the 2018–19 school year.
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The problem for traditional public schools is that some districts have left themselves open to the political critique that Heritage has been promoting: Many school systems have become identified with progressive causes and have neglected their role as a unifying force in American society. Out of a sincere concern for social justice, they have embraced ideas about diversity, inclusion, and anti-racism that, when applied in practice, prove off-putting even for some liberals.
Sixty-eight percent of American adults agreed with the 2023 U.S. Supreme Court decision striking down racial preferences in higher education. But many educators have flocked toward the books of Ibram X. Kendi—whose approach toward “anti-racism” insists that “the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination”—and related ideas emanating from education schools. In a 2025 poll, 58 percent of high-school students said that their teachers “often” or “almost daily” told them to be “actively anti-racist”; more than a third said that teachers frequently told them the United States is a fundamentally racist nation. New York City public schools trained administrators and principals using materials claiming that “objectivity,” thinking “in a linear way,” and “worship of the written word” are white ideas.
To the extent that these efforts help the drive for privatization, they are producing a terrible outcome, both for public education and for society as a whole. Strong public-school systems require support from across the political spectrum. To shore up that support, they need to take a more neutral ideological posture and reclaim their traditional role in cultivating a universal vision of American citizenship.
The timing of the new voucher laws couldn’t be worse for public schools, which are already losing millions of students. This fall, an estimated 3.2 million fewer students will attend public schools than in 2019. That’s in part because Americans are having fewer children, but attrition to private schools even without vouchers is a factor as well. Overall, private-school enrollment in America increased by 28 percent from the period prior to the pandemic to 2024.
A 2025 Tulane University study of voucher programs in 11 states found that the “lion’s share” of those taking advantage were already in private school, but the authors believed that this would likely change over time. “Vouchers have already increased private school enrollment in participating states by 3-4%” compared with non-voucher states, they noted, and one of the Tulane researchers, Douglas Harris, said that the shift was likely the “tip of the iceberg.” Arizona made a voucherlike program universal in 2022. State data show that only 21 percent of participants in the program in the 2023 fiscal year had switched from public schools; by 2025, that proportion had increased to 56 percent.
The trend toward private schools is likely to accelerate. Under Donald Trump, a Republican Congress passed a new federal tax credit that subsidizes private educational services, including tutoring and private-school tuition, for students from families that make up to 300 percent of the local median gross income—a standard that includes more than 90 percent of the K–12 population. Individuals who donate up to $1,700 to a nonprofit scholarship-granting organization receive a dollar-for-dollar credit on their federal tax returns—costing them nothing. SGOs then provide aid for students.
The law, which takes effect in January, could generate $24 billion or more in spending, supporters estimate. The new credit could exceed the $18 billion the federal government invests in Title I, the biggest federal program for public K–12 education. Public-school students who use private tutors may share in benefits, but the bulk of the money will likely support private schools. “This is a private school choice program that might benefit public school students at the margins,” my Progressive Policy Institute colleague Rachel Canter has argued.
The legendary 20th-century teachers’-union leader Albert Shanker, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, recognized that support for public schools hinged on their ability to bring the country together. If schools focus on differences rather than on the commonalities that define students as Americans, he argued, “there will be no reason for taxpayers to continue supporting them.” Public schools long promoted American identity through civics instruction that emphasized the benefits of the country’s liberal democracy, and through U.S-history curricula that leaned heavily—sometimes too heavily—on the successes of American democracy.
But civics education has been eroding for decades, and in many districts, history lessons have swung too far in a condemnatory direction. As educators have become more attuned to racial injustice, most recently with the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, they have embraced ideas pushed in education schools that racism and white supremacy are the defining features of America. The National Education Association—the country’s largest teachers’ union and a major force in Democratic politics—got caught up in the ideological ferment on the left and promoted the much-disputed “1619 Project,” which puts slavery at the center of U.S. history and has elicited serious factual objections from prominent historians. These developments carry political risks for public schools: Polling from the American Enterprise Institute shows that 77 percent of adults think that teaching kids that “the U.S. is a fundamentally good country” is “important” or “absolutely essential.” But today, four in 10 Gen Z Americans believe that the Founders were villains rather than heroes.
Public educators’ First Amendment rights are not absolute in the classrooms they oversee. Even if their legal right to press their personal views during the school day were undisputed, the educational value of doing so is debatable, and school systems should be cautious about seeming to take sides on political matters.
One recent legal dispute involved a Progress Pride flag that a high-school teacher on Long Island had put up in her classroom; it was twice the size of the American flag. Some of the views implied by the Pride flag are barely controversial anymore, at least in blue states. A large majority of Americans, including me, support same-sex marriage and laws prohibiting discrimination against gay and trans people.
Even so, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, in an opinion written by a Joe Biden appointee who is a lesbian, sensibly backed the school district’s position that only the American flag and the New York State flag should be flown in its classrooms. LGBTQ kids deserve reassurance that they are welcome. But a Pride flag is also a political statement, just as a Trump flag or a Blue Lives Matter flag is. Teachers are authority figures, and ideological restraint on their part helps protect public education’s legitimacy before a polarized electorate.
At the same time, teaching students what being an American means should be a central goal. This does not mean that schools should teach only an upbeat version of American history. Students need an honest accounting of that history, which includes the subjugation of Black people, women, and gay Americans. But as the Albert Shanker Institute has argued, students should also learn how “the genius of democracy” allows for self-correction. Only because the Constitution guarantees free speech and assembly rights could average citizens partake in successful movements to advance civil rights for Black Americans, women, and gay people. Americans across the political divide are likely to support a middle path. Nine in 10 Democrats want kids to see the Declaration of Independence and Constitution in a positive light, and eight in 10 Republicans want students to learn about slavery and segregation.
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Schools should also teach more students what it’s like to live in nondemocratic societies. Just as Americans who travel abroad come to more fully appreciate aspects of American culture they took for granted, curricula that touch on life in Iran, Russia, and China will also illuminate what makes the United States different. All students should know what naturalized U.S. citizens and the children of immigrants—two groups that express comparatively higher levels of patriotism—recognize: the difference between American society and societies with less freedom and opportunity.
Upholding a common vision of citizenship is essential for the nation’s well-being, and only public schools can do this job. For all their faults, they are more likely than private schools—three-quarters of which are affiliated with a specific religion—to provide the adhesion necessary in a country made up of many races and creeds. The Stanford political scientist Terry Moe, a voucher supporter, has found that Americans have a “public school ideology”—that is, they like the idea of institutions that take all comers and teach young people what they have in common as Americans. That’s why voter referendums supporting public money for private schools have typically failed.
Voucher advocates’ recent attempts to exploit the culture wars could change all of this—and, if so, could further divide Americans. Public schools can be the answer to the polarization and atomization that so threaten our common life, but only if they fully resume their historic role in binding our multicultural democracy together.
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