The intrusion of religion into public schools has made headlines and court cases for decades, from not-quite-mandatory pre-game prayers getting a nod from the U.S. Supreme Court, to Lifewise Academy’s recent push to integrate Bible studies into the public school day.
But some religious education crusaders have opened up a new frontier for the 21st century, abandoning the capture of public schools in favor of simply capturing public school dollars. They have been creative and dogged in deploying a variety of ways to transfer public money to faith-based schools. And they’ve been remarkably successful.
Vouchers are currently the most common way public funds are diverted to religious schools. They are public funds families can use toward tuition at private schools, and that has included religious schools of all stripes. During the 2021 school year, 77 percent of private school students attended a religiously affiliated school, the largest share of which were Catholic schools—35 percent of all private school enrollment.
School vouchers aren’t popular. Voters rejected vouchers in Colorado, Kentucky, and Nebraska last November, and some state legislatures whose makeup would seem to favor vouchers were unable to expand their programs. But despite that, more state legislatures are creating voucher programs, reaching more families in more geographies: 29 states, plus the District of Columbia, currently offer vouchers.
Under Donald Trump’s first administration, they found a patron saint in billionaire Betsy DeVos, Trump’s anti-public education Secretary of Education. Trump II will see the most aggressive effort yet to spread voucher options, including a federal bill, the Education Choice for Children Act (ECCA), that would use $10 billion in tax credits to fund scholarships so families could attend private schools.
Once considered an education life raft for families fleeing struggling school districts, voucher programs have moved public funds toward an increasingly affluent constituency. In some programs, eligibility is no longer linked with income, making them virtually (and sometimes actually) universal. Studies show the programs fund the education of children who were already enrolled, or planning to be, in private schools.
They are a wealth transfer from taxpayers to the already-comfortable: a March 2025 report from nonpartisan research staff of the Ohio General Assembly shows that nearly 20 percent of state spending on private school vouchers go to families at the state’s top income bracket, costing the state just shy of $1 billion. Voucher expansions have blown holes in budgets from Arizona to Florida. And much of that money is landing in private religious schools.
Of the states The Washington Post analyzed last year, the overwhelming majority of vouchers went to religious schools: 98 percent for Indiana, 96 percent for Wisconsin, 91 percent for Ohio, and 82 percent for Florida. While the voucher mechanisms vary state to state, religious schools are by far the biggest benefactor of all voucher programs.
Religious schools can also benefit from a variety of additional publicly funded programs. A New York Times analysis from 2022 found that New York’s Hasidic boys’ schools received more than $375 million in the year before the pandemic. That includes accessing $50 million from the government for childcare, even though the schools simply claim the end of the regular school day as childcare, and $30 million because they count older students as pursuing higher education degrees in religious studies.
Last summer, in an alarming move, the Ohio General Assembly passed legislation to provide $4 million directly to fund the construction and expansion of 10 private schools, including eight religious schools. Two of the eight religious schools receiving public funds to build or improve their facilities are in the district of Ohio Senate President Matt Huffman, according to Cleveland.com.
“This is new, dangerous ground, funding new voucher schools,” education scholar Josh Cowen told ProPublica. Most observers agree similar legislation is likely to be duplicated in other states.
Even more recently, a potential new pipeline for diverting even more public funds to private and religious schools might be put in place, if an Oklahoma Catholic school gets its way. In January of this year, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear two cases that will decide if Oklahoma can open a faith-based charter school called St. Isidore. Charter schools are publicly funded, privately operated schools. Governing magazine reports that, if affirmed, “the school would be the nation’s first faith-based charter—a sea change in education law, expanding the boundaries of government aid to faith-based schools.” The United States Solicitor General’s Office, a dozen states, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, and the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America have filed amicus briefs supporting the school’s position.
Besides the obvious violation of the U.S Constitution (and at least Ohio’s state constitution), as In the Public Interest has outlined, religious schools can—and do— discriminate widely. They can expel students for being pregnant or gay (or, of course, both); they can bar women from leadership roles; they can reject members of the LGBTQ+ and even Latter Day Saints communities and those students requiring special education, among other things. They are not held to the same standards, nor require the same credentials, nor subject to the same scrutiny as public schools, which have the obligation to educate all.
The only public thing these schools have is the public’s money. But that’s not the way they see it.
“Many families are surprised to learn about the options and come to realize a private, Christian education can be a reality!” touts the website of the Arizona Lutheran Academy in Phoenix. “It is rewarding to walk families through the tuition assistance process and see how God provides in ways that some never knew existed.”
Of course, nearly $2 million in public funds didn’t hurt.