“School Choice” and the Capitalist War on Public Education
Public education and child labor are intricately connected.
Children are meant to learn, not earn. Free quality public education should be made available to every child no matter their race or socioeconomic status. Our capitalist system, however, cannot function without a permanent underclass of exploited workers. Attacks on public schools are one of the many fronts in the ongoing war of the ruling class to subjugate the masses. Voucher programs, charter schools, and education tax credits are spreading like weeds in both red and blue states, all claiming to increase access to quality education for families who can't afford it. However, a study of existing projects in other states, including Ohio’s own EdChoice Expansion Scholarship Program, shows that these programs drain the budgets of public schools to pay for the education of wealthy families. This serves to widen class divisions, limit access to quality education to a privileged few, and reduce public education to nothing more than job training for working class children.
School Choice in Kentucky
Property taxes make up about 45% of public school funding. Schools in neighborhoods with low property values—rural areas containing mostly farmland and urban areas containing more apartments, rentals, and low-income housing—find themselves frequently underfunded, understaffed, and underperforming. The communities they serve are mostly underprivileged and minorities or the working poor who have little choice in where they live. Neighborhoods with higher property values, such as suburbs filled with single-family homes surrounded by successful businesses, receive more funding and are better able to provide a high quality education to their students. These desirable schools draw in more families, increase the value of the surrounding neighborhoods and contribute to rising property taxes. Instead of increasing funding to urban and rural schools to make up for the shortfall, public education critics continue to lobby for policies that further defund public education.
Republicans in the Kentucky legislature have tried many times to funnel public tax dollars to private religious and charter schools only to be repeatedly thwarted by court rulings or the Governor's veto. While Kentucky’s Democratic governor Andy Beshear acts as a de facto shield against the Republican legislature’s attempts to privatize education, their main obstacle is the Kentucky constitution itself. Adopted in 1891, the Kentucky Constitution forbids the use of tax dollars to fund anything but “common schools,” or public schools. The Kentucky Supreme Court struck down a proposed law in 2022 to create a generous tax credit that would pay for private school tuition; a Franklin County circuit court judge rejected similar charter school legislation in 2023. Both decisions cited the constitution’s ban on using public funds for private schools.
Refusing to accept defeat, the Republicans passed legislation this past February for a Constitutional Amendment, Amendment 2, that would change the language of the constitution to allow the use of public dollars for private or charter schools. This amendment will be presented to voters in November, circumventing the Governor’s veto. Sponsors of the bill have vowed to pour their energy and resources into convincing voters to pass the Amendment. What they will not do is reveal the truth about the impact similar “School Choice” initiatives have had on education systems across the country.
Who Benefits?
The true intentions behind these private school voucher programs and tax credits become obvious when we investigate who they primarily benefit. When the Ohio EdChoice expansion was passed in 2023, it took a program intended for low-income families trapped in “failing public schools” and applied it to all students, regardless of income. This caused a rapid rise in the percentage of white students relative to all other groups. Chad Aldis, Director of Ohio Policy at the pro-voucher Thomas B. Fordham Institute estimated that a “sizable portion” of those students were already attending private school. An investigation by News 5 Cleveland found that of the 6,319 students in multiple northeastern Ohio school districts who received EdChoice vouchers, 4,013, or 63.5%, were never enrolled in the district in the first place, meaning they were already attending private schools.
Republicans in rural districts have become unlikely champions for public schools. Appalachian lawmaker Jay Edwards, a Republican representing Nelsonville, pointed out that most of the state’s private schools are located near major cities in Hamilton, Cuyahoga, and Franklin counties, and rural students would not be able to benefit from the program. He guessed that the majority of new enrollees to the program would come from the upper and middle income brackets: "My prediction is you’re not going to see any uptick from 250% [of the federal poverty level] and below."
The fact is, even with vouchers, low-income families can’t afford to send their children to private schools. Many of these programs don’t include transportation, don’t cover extra program fees above and beyond the cost of tuition, and often don’t even fully cover the cost of the tuition itself. Furthermore, many private schools have responded to the expanded voucher programs in their states by significantly raising their tuition fees. While the majority of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck, their ability to cover these costs is extremely limited.
A voucher program in Kentucky will inevitably fund the tuition of wealthy white families who were already sending their children to private schools at the expense of low-income families that public schools must continue to serve even as their budgets are being drained. Kentucky’s schools are already struggling. The solution is to increase funding to public schools, not run away from the problem and retreat to private and charter schools. Free quality education for all doesn’t serve the interests of the ruling class, for whom the oppression of the masses is required to keep their profit margins high.
Private Education and White Supremacy
Despite efforts to reverse the effects of redlining, the racial segregation of American neighborhoods continues to this day; poor and minority neighborhoods contain fewer private schools compared to wealthier areas. To understand why this is, we need to find the origin of private school vouchers in America.
Diverting public funds to private schools through voucher programs was a direct response by white communities to desegregation. After the Supreme Court’s rulings on Brown v. The Board of Education, white residents of southern states went to great lengths to prevent the integration of their public schools by shutting them down and sending their children to private schools. Voucher programs were established to convince more white families to send their kids to private “segregation academies.” Once these schools were forced to integrate, they only admitted enough black students to keep their tax-exempt status and no more. This white flight from public schools resulted in a higher number of Black students in public schools compared to their percentage of the local population.
Segregation of the education system continues to this day and not only along racial lines. Private schools in general can be more selective about their admissions and are not bound by the same nondiscrimination laws as public schools. Religious schools account for 77% of private schools in Kentucky, 42% of which identify as Catholic and 35% as Christian or Baptist. These schools are allowed to discriminate against LGTBQ+ students in the name of “religious freedom” by refusing to admit them on moral grounds, subjecting them to “counseling” programs that amount to nothing more than conversion therapy, or forcing them to deny their identities by demanding conformity with white, patriarchal religious values.
These same schools reinforce the racism that drove their very formation by adopting racially discriminatory dress code policies, specifically ones that prohibit Black hairstyles. Religious schools that serve majority black communities have faced the same kind of funding issues as public schools, and many have been forced to close across the country. St. Joseph Catholic School in Cincinnati’s West End was a recent victim of this trend.
Special Education
Private religious schools are also exempt from following the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). The IDEA, in particular, gives disabled students access to a Free and Appropriate Public Education (FAPE) in the Least Restrictive Environment (LRE) and instruction by certified special education teachers. These rights follow the student if they are referred to a private school by the public school district. To qualify for vouchers, families have to independently opt to send their children to private schools, requiring them to give up many of those protections. Private schools are only required to provide “equitable services'' that often don't fulfill the student’s right to an accessible education. They lack trained and experienced special education teachers and aides, and often isolate disabled students away from their classmates in restrictive environments to prevent “disruptions.”
Disabled students fare no better in private special education schools. Many of these schools have been found guilty of excessive and harmful disciplinary practices, including prone (face-down) restraint and seclusion. Shrub Oak International School, a private autism school in New York State that operates without any meaningful oversight, was found to have fallen significantly short of its promises that included round-the-clock care, an equestrian stable, and a cutting-edge education for autistic students. Instead, a ProPublica investigation found reports of “unexplained black eyes and bruises on students’ bodies, medication mix-ups, urine-soaked mattresses and deficient staffing.” They also claimed to “help students with intense behavioral challenges” while only employing one certified behavioral therapist for the whole school.
Even with voucher dollars, most disabled students are rejected from private schools for reasons ranging from lack of adequate accommodations to a student’s disciplinary history. If they are accepted into a private school, any required evaluations and assessments are still the financial responsibility of the public school district. As we have shown, these voucher programs drain resources from public schools, limiting a school’s ability to support the disabled students they still serve. It’s sadly ironic that voucher programs which claim to provide assistance for underserved special education students actively harm them.
“Parental Rights” and the Privatization of Public Institutions
We shouldn’t be surprised that the expansion of “school choice” initiatives across the country is happening at the same time as increased attacks on public schools. Both claim to support “parental rights'' and are responses to the dismantling of white supremacist systems. The fight for “parental rights” is responsible for transgender sports and bathroom bans, censorship of books discussing race, gender and sexuality, and attacks on teachers for teaching on those same subjects. Combined with the draining of public school funds through voucher programs, it’s clear that the end goal is the total collapse, or at least severe crippling, of the public education system.
Advocates for school choice and parental rights would have us believe that these are grassroots movements. In reality, these efforts are funded by extreme right wing organizations and think tanks connected to former Trump Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, the Koch Brothers, and the Heritage Foundation. These organizations play on the fears and anxieties of well-meaning parents by spreading baseless accusations of indoctrination and “grooming” by public school teachers who dare to acknowledge the existence of LGBTQ+ people. On more than one occasion, thousands of books were pulled from school libraries based on complaints from only a small handful of people with clear connections to these groups. The Heritage Foundation in particular is the originator of Project 2025, which lays out a plan to fully privatize the education system by expanding school voucher programs and dismantling the Department of Education, among other things.
The worst nightmare of the ruling class is an educated working class. Roger Freeman, advisor to then-Governor Ronald Reagan, made this clear in 1970 when he defended Reagan for shutting down California public college campuses in response to anti-war student protests: “We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat. That's dynamite! We have to be selective on who we allow to go [to college].” He didn’t want working class students getting their hopes up about improving their conditions. It also benefits the ruling capitalist class to gut the public education system, where they receive no meaningful returns on investment, and redirect the funds into for-profit private schools from which they can extract value. Instead of a robust education for all children, the ruling class intends to restrict it to those who can afford to pay for it and teach poor children only what they need to know to be good employees.
“The Children Yearn for the Mines”
It is then no coincidence that most of the states that have established voucher programs have also passed laws to reverse child labor protections. In January 2024 alone, 8 states introduced or took actions on measures to remove child labor protections. When the Foundation for Government Accountability, a Florida-based think tank founded by Betsy DeVos, lobbied for the reversal of child labor protections in various states including Kentucky, it also targeted anti-poverty programs like SNAP and Medicaid, unemployment benefits, and public school funding. Kentucky House Bill 255, which is currently making its way through the legislature, would allow 16- to 17-year old kids to work long hours when school is not in session. It's notable that the sponsor of the bill, Rep. Bill Pratt, owns a landscaping business.
Child labor and public education have been closely linked since at least the late nineteenth century. Before the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1936, it was common for children as young as 10 to work long hours under dangerous conditions in factories and mines. Poor families sent their children to work out of necessity while rich families sent their children to school and saved for their futures. Many attempts were made to draw attention to the issue of child labor and push for legislation. It wasn’t until compulsory education laws were passed that child labor under the age of 14 was drastically reduced. The New York chapter of the National Child Labor Committee discovered that “school authorities are able to do more through their ability to hold children back from work than a whole army of [factory] inspectors.” Compulsory public school was introduced as a way to protect working class children from exploitation.
These white Christian nationalist organizations understand this connection and are attacking public schools to reverse this progress. In the eyes of the wealthy ruling class, only their children deserve opportunities for education and advancement. Such opportunities are wasted on the working class—a population whose main function is to keep the gears of capitalism turning. Providing an education above and beyond the basics required for employment is seen as a net loss for those who insist upon large returns on their investments. If we take into account issues like the school-to-prison pipeline, the defunding of rural schools, and the institutionalization of disabled students, it becomes clear that exploitation, not education, is the highest priority of the capitalist class.
We need to respond to these attacks on public education with a clear defense of the right to education for all children, regardless of their race, economic status, or disability. We must oppose not only these voucher programs, but the organizations and think tanks that support them. Their goal is to strip the poor, working class of the minimal support provided by government welfare programs and force their children into wage slavery for the benefit of wealthy capitalists. Cincinnati Socialists stands against any attempt by the ruling class to reduce or eliminate educational opportunities for working class children and put them to work. No child deserves to spend their childhood toiling away in factories, warehouses, and fast food kitchens. All children deserve to grow up in a world that allows them to play, explore, and flourish. Join the fight against the privatization of Kentucky public education and vote NO on Amendment 2 this November!
Are you an educator or a parent with children in public schools? Let us know what you think about this issue through the People’s Platform!