A school voucher, also called an education voucher, in a voucher system, is a certificate of government funding for students at schools chosen by themselves or their parents. Funding is usually for a particular year, term or semester. In some countries, states or local jurisdictions, the voucher can be used to cover or reimburse home schooling expenses. In some countries, vouchers only exist for tuition at private schools.
Milton Friedman was an American economist and statistician who received the 1976 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his research on consumption analysis, monetary history and theory and the complexity of stabilization policy. With George Stigler and others, Friedman was among the intellectual leaders of the Chicago school of economics, a neoclassical school of economic thought associated with the work of the faculty at the University of Chicago that rejected Keynesianism in favor of monetarism until the mid-1970s, when it turned to new classical macroeconomics heavily based on the concept of rational expectations. Several students and young professors who were recruited or mentored by Friedman at Chicago went on to become leading economists, including Gary Becker, Robert Fogel, Thomas Sowell and Robert Lucas Jr.
"School choice" is a term for pre-college public education options, describing a wide array of programs offering students and their families voluntary alternatives to publicly provided schools, to which students are generally assigned by the location of their family residence. In the United States, the most common—both by number of programs and by number of participating students—school choice programs are scholarship tax credit programs, which allow individuals or corporations to receive tax credits toward their state taxes in exchange for donations made to non-profit organizations that grant private school scholarships. In other cases, a similar subsidy may be provided by the state through a school voucher program.
The Cato Institute is an American libertarian think tank headquartered in Washington, D.C. It was founded as the Charles Koch Foundation in 1974 by Ed Crane, Murray Rothbard, and Charles Koch, chairman of the board and chief executive officer of the conglomerate Koch Industries. In July 1976, the name was changed to the Cato Institute. Cato was established to have a focus on public advocacy, media exposure and societal influence. According to the 2017 Global Go To Think Tank Index Report, Cato is number 15 in the "Top Think Tanks Worldwide" and number 10 in the "Top Think Tanks in the United States".
The Institute for Justice (IJ) is a non-profit libertarian public interest law firm in the United States. It has litigated eight cases before the United States Supreme Court dealing with eminent domain, interstate commerce, public financing for elections, school vouchers, tax credits for private school tuition, civil asset forfeiture, and residency requirements for liquor license. The organization was founded in 1990. As of June 2016, it employed a staff of 95 in Arlington, Virginia and seven offices across the United States. Its 2016 budget was $20 million.
Clint Bolick is an Associate Justice of the Arizona Supreme Court. Previously, he served as Vice President of Litigation at the conservative/libertarian Goldwater Institute. He co-founded the libertarian Institute for Justice, where he was the Vice President and Director of Litigation from 1991 until 2004. He led two cases that went before the Supreme Court of the United States. He has also defended state-based school choice programs in the Supreme Courts of Wisconsin and Ohio.
The Blaine Amendment was a failed amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would have prohibited direct government aid to educational institutions that have a religious affiliation. Most state constitutions already had such provisions, and thirty-eight of the fifty states have clauses that prohibit taxpayer funding of religious entities in their state constitutions. The measures were designed to deny government aid to parochial schools, especially those operated by the Catholic Church in locations with large immigrant populations. The Blaine Amendment emerged from a growing consensus among 19th-century U.S. Protestants that public education must be free from “sectarian” or “denominational” control, while it also reflected nativist tendencies hostile to immigrants. The amendments are generally seen as explicitly anti-Catholic because when they were enacted public schools typically included Protestant prayer, and taught from Protestant bibles, although debates about public funding of sectarian schools predate any significant Catholic immigration to the U.S. Thus, at the time of the Blaine amendments, public schools were not non-sectarian or non-denominational in the modern sense; nor were they completely secular.
Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, 536 U.S. 639 (2002), was a 5-4 decision of the United States Supreme Court that upheld an Ohio program that used school vouchers. The Court decided that the program did not violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment even if the vouchers could be used for private, religious schools.
Centre for Civil Society (CCS) is a non-profit think tank based in New Delhi. The Centre was founded in 1997 by Dr Parth Shah, former Professor of Economics at the University of Michigan. It operates as an independent research and educational organisation.
Jason Bedrick is a former member of the New Hampshire state legislature. He was a Republican representing Windham, New Hampshire. He is currently the Director of Policy at EdChoice and an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute's Center for Educational Freedom, where he was previously a policy analyst. Bedrick holds a Master's in Public Policy from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
Gordon St. Angelo born in Huntingburg, Indiana, USA was a former Democratic Party State Chairman of the state of Indiana and was a prominent politician during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s.
Lisa Graham Keegan is an American education reform advocate and the author of the parenting book Simple Choices.
The Alliance for School Choice is the largest organization in the United States promoting school choice programs. The Alliance for School choice supports the creation and expansion of school voucher, corporate tax credit, and other school choice programs. The organization is headquartered in Washington, DC, is designated as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, and receives its funding through private individual and foundation donations.
Kevin G. Welner is professor of education at the University of Colorado Boulder School of Education, where he chairs the Educational Foundations Policy and Practice program area. He co-founded and is Director of the National Education Policy Center. He has authored or edited 11 books and more than 100 articles and book chapters concerning education policy and law.
Richard Henry Timberlake Jr. was an American economist who was Professor of Economics at the University of Georgia for much of his career. He became a leading advocate of free banking, the belief that money should be issued by private companies, not by a government monopoly. He wrote about the Legal Tender Cases of the U.S. Supreme Court in his book Constitutional Money: A Review of the Supreme Court's Monetary Decisions.
Scholarship tax credit programs of the United States of America, also called tax credit scholarship, education tax credit or tuition tax credit programs, are a form of school choice that allows individuals or corporations to receive a tax credit from state taxes against donations made to non-profit organizations that grant private school scholarships. At the start of the 2014–2015 school year, fourteen states had scholarship tax credit programs.
The State of Indiana school voucher movement known as Indiana Choice Scholarships was created in order to address the failings in the public education system. It is the largest school voucher program in the U.S.
The Pennsylvania school code, section 1327, policy for school choice is, “...to preserve the primary right and obligation of the parent or parents, or person or persons in loco parentis to a child, to choose the education and training for such child.”
School choice in Florida is a suite of state programs that allow families to use public resources to receive education outside of their neighborhood school. Florida's Tax Credit Scholarship (FTC) program is the largest of its kind in the nation and serves more students than all but the state's largest school districts.
Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue, 591 U.S. ___ (2020), was a landmark United States Supreme Court case in which the Court ruled that a state-based scholarship program that provides public funds to allow students to attend private schools cannot discriminate against religious schools under the Free Exercise Clause of the Constitution.
