An op-ed on the deliberate dismantling of American public education
There is a particular kind of vandalism that does not look like vandalism. It arrives dressed in the language of choice, flexibility, and freedom. It presents itself as reform. It calls itself compassionate. And while it speaks, it empties the treasury.
The gutting of American public education is that kind of vandalism. Slow, methodical, and wrapped in a flag-draped Bible.
The Numbers Don’t Lie
Let’s begin where ideology ends and arithmetic begins.
President Trump’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2026 calls for slashing the Department of Education by nearly $12 billion, a 15 percent reduction that would collapse 18 targeted K-12 grant programs into a single block grant and cut their combined funding by 70 percent. According to the Center for American Progress, those eliminated programs include funding for English language learners, migrant children, students experiencing homelessness, after-school enrichment, rural education, and school-based mental health services. The students most dependent on federal support—the poorest, the most vulnerable, the least politically organized—are the ones being left behind. (https://www.americanprogress.org/article/public-education-under-threat-4-trump-administration-actions-to-watch-in-the-2025-26-school-year/)
Title I, the crown jewel of federal investment in low-income schools, faces a $4.7 billion cut in the House Republican proposal, stripping roughly $372 per student from Kentucky’s highest-poverty districts alone, as Colorado Public Radio reports; these are not rounding errors. These are teachers not hired, counselors not retained, and children sitting in overcrowded classrooms with outdated textbooks, wondering why no one seems to care. (https://www.cpr.org/2025/10/06/federal-education-budget-what-schools-can-lose/).
Meanwhile, the only K-12 program receiving a funding increase in the Trump budget? Charter schools. Up $60 million to a tidy $500 million.
The message is not subtle.
Florida’s Cautionary Tale
If you want to see the future that voucher advocates are building, look south.
Florida’s experiment with universal school voucher expansion has cost the state $3.9 billion in a single school year, according to the Education Law Center (https://www.wusf.org/education/2025-08-07/vouchers-drain-millions-public-schools-sarasota-floats-idea-change).
In Sarasota County alone, $45 million in taxpayer money has been routed away from public schools for the 2025-26 academic year. The Sarasota school district is projecting a 300-student enrollment decline while simultaneously facing rising costs for health insurance, property insurance, and utilities. Its schools are losing ground and losing money simultaneously, in a race they were never meant to win.
And here is the detail that should stop every voter cold: the majority of families cashing Florida’s vouchers were never in the public school system to begin with. As Norin Dollard of the nonpartisan Florida Policy Institute explained, “It’s people who are already in private schools who are taking advantage of it. And I mean, why wouldn’t they? It’s free money.” (https://www.wusf.org/education/2025-08-07/vouchers-drain-millions-public-schools-sarasota-floats-idea-change)
We are, in other words, taxing working-class families to subsidize the private school tuitions of families who were already choosing private education. This is not reform. It is redistribution from the many to the few, from the public commons to private pockets.
The accounting in Arizona is even more damning. The state’s voucher program has cost 1,346 percent more than originally projected. (https://firstfocus.org/resource/project-2025-would-destabilize-public-education/). Taxpayer dollars earmarked for education have been spent on ski passes, golf equipment, luxury car-driving lessons, kayaks, and Disney tickets. In Florida, the list includes similar absurdities. There is no accountability, no oversight, and no shame.
The Church at the Schoolhouse Door
Draining public schools of funding would be damaging enough on its own. But the movement to redirect that money into explicitly religious institutions represents a constitutional rupture that the Founders spent great effort to prevent.
In 2023, the Oklahoma Statewide Virtual Charter School Board approved St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, which would have been the nation’s first publicly funded religious charter school. The case traveled to the Supreme Court, where justices deadlocked 4-4 in May 2025, leaving in place the Oklahoma Supreme Court’s ruling that such funding would violate both state and federal constitutional prohibitions on government establishment of religion. (https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/22/supreme-court-deadlock-religious-charter-school-00365001)
The deadlock is a reprieve, not a resolution. The question of whether states can be *compelled* to fund religious charter schools remains legally unsettled, and the Supreme Court’s increasingly expansive reading of the Free Exercise Clause, stretching from *Espinoza v. Montana* onward, has made advocacy groups and constitutional scholars genuinely nervous.
As the National Education Association has warned, charter school funding formulas are far more generous than voucher amounts, meaning that a ruling mandating religious charter funding could create a financial drain on public education that makes Florida’s voucher crisis look modest. (https://www.nea.org/nea-today/all-news-articles/will-supreme-court-force-states-fund-religious-charter-schools)
There is a reason the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause was placed first among our constitutional protections. The Founders understood, from hard-won European history, what happens when government becomes the financial arm of religious institutions. Public money funding religious instruction is not religious liberty; it is a religious subsidy. And when one faith’s school qualifies, every faith’s school qualifies. The state becomes the benefactor of every theological tradition that can incorporate, apply, and pass a board vote.
To put it in terms that might frighten the advocates of these programs, Islam is a well-established religious organization rivaling Christianity worldwide in total adherents. Would these ultra-right Christian nationalists be comfortable funding a Madrassa? Their answer, framed in the false contention of our Judeo-Christian basis of government, would be a resounding no, illuminating the fallacy of their argument about choice and freedom.
The promise of the American public school was radical in its simplicity: every child, regardless of birth, wealth, or belief, would have access to a free, common education. That promise is being dismantled plank by plank while we argue about culture wars deliberately manufactured to distract us from the demolition.
No one who advocates for this agenda is honest enough to say what it actually is: a decision to stop investing in the common good. A decision that education is a private commodity, not a public right. A decision that the children of the wealthy deserve support and the children of the poor deserve bootstraps.
Joe Broadmeadow
What Is Actually at Stake
Approximately 90 percent of American children attend public schools, according to multiple federal analyses. (https://www.chn.org/voices/the-dangers-of-federal-school-vouchers-and-its-impact-on-public-education/). These are the children of factory workers and farmhands, of nurses and truck drivers, of immigrants and veterans, of families who have no school choice because no choice is affordable to them. For these families, the public school is not an ideological preference; it is the only institution standing between their children and an education gap that will follow them for the rest of their lives.
When Title I funding collapses, those children lose. When after-school programs vanish, those children lose. When English language instruction is defunded, immigrant children lose, and so does the country that will one day depend on them. When taxpayer dollars flow to private academies and religious schools that face no accountability requirements and no obligation to serve any child who walks through the door, the children with the fewest options are abandoned.
The public-school teacher who stays late to help a struggling reader, the counselor who recognizes a child in crisis, the librarian who becomes the only trusted adult in a difficult home situation, these people exist because public funding makes their positions possible. Strip the funding and you strip the people. Strip the people and the institution hollows out. And a hollowed institution is easy to close.
The Choice We Are Actually Making
No one who advocates for this agenda is honest enough to say what it actually is: a decision to stop investing in the common good. A decision that education is a private commodity, not a public right. A decision that the children of the wealthy deserve support and the children of the poor deserve bootstraps.
School choice sounds democratic. Religious freedom sounds sacred. Flexibility sounds sensible. But when the architecture of those policies consistently routes money away from public schools and toward private and religious institutions that serve narrower, wealthier, and less diverse populations, the rhetoric is simply camouflage.
Jefferson’s vision of an educated citizenry as the bedrock of self-governance was not a romantic flourish. It was a structural argument: democracy cannot function without an informed public, and an informed public cannot exist without universal access to education. The assault on public schooling is, at its core, an assault on democratic participation because an uneducated electorate is a manageable one.
We should say that plainly.
The classroom is not just a room where children learn to read. It is where citizens are made. And we are, at this moment in American history, choosing to close it.
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Bad news!