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Opinion | Facts point to need for federal voucher opt-out
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I built my career studying public education in Michigan. Nothing scares me more for its future than vouchers.
For 30 years, some Michigan lawmakers have pushed the agenda of school choice and privatization, including allowing unlimited charter schools to divert fewer public dollars across more districts. Our state already has the most publicly funded for-profit charters in the US — one-third of which close within five years.
Now, the federal government wants to double down on educational privatization by pushing a more radical idea on states: federal education vouchers.
The governor should opt Michigan out of the voucher scheme buried in the federal law known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act of 2025. Michigan’s students, families, and educators need strong public schools to power the state’s economy — not another debunked political experiment.
I care deeply about public education in Michigan. Having grown up in the UP as the son of two educators, I earned a Ph.D. in education policy studying school choice, closure and education finance. I’m married to an educator, and my oldest child starts public school this fall.
Years ago, I learned about academic theorists making bold predictions for the possibilities of privately run, publicly funded charter schools and vouchers to create competition and push all institutions to better serve students and families.
Those ideas fueled a political movement that sold charters — and now vouchers — as the one-size-fits-all solution to problems facing schools across the nation. However, those academic theories unraveled when they collided with the real world.
Since the 1990s, Michigan — as the testing ground for charter schools in the nation — has proved school choice is no silver bullet. Charter schools have changed the educational landscape in Michigan, just not for the better. Since their inception in the state, charter schools have:
Where are the net benefits of all this disruption? Nowhere to be found in the data.
Now, advocates of educational privatization want to run a new, more extreme, experiment on our students by pushing vouchers from the federal level — an idea that Michigan voters have repeatedly rejected and the state constitution prohibits.
Instead, Michigan needs stable, rational policy that supports students and educators. At the very least, education policy should aim to promote the public good, not balkanize our institutions and segregate our students.
Public education provides opportunity for all students in every corner of the state, regardless of religion, race, creed or status. Our public schools are how we raise our children and make a nation together.
Our leaders are entrusted to act as stewards of the common good. They must answer that call and not consign another generation of our state’s young people to an educational experiment already proven wrong.
The governor and all future governors should decline vouchers in Michigan.
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