“People are realizing the sky hasn’t fallen and it’s OK,” said Robert Enlow, president and CEO of the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice in Indianapolis.
Not all states are as welcoming, even some with Republicans in charge of the statehouse. Measures failed in Mississippi, Texas, and Montana. Georgia lawmakers this spring voted down a bill that would have expanded the state’s voucher program, which covers special needs students, to include military families and children in foster care.
In Georgia, even conservative state lawmakers said they worried about expanding any state programs in a year when $1 billion in spending had to be slashed.
And in Indiana, where any child in a family of four earning less than $60,000 a year will get a voucher, educators and clergy are suing to have the law blocked.
Before this year, school voucher and scholarship tax credit programs were operating in 12 states and Washington, D.C., serving nearly 200,000 children, according to the Alliance for School Choice.
Teachers’ groups say voucher programs only divert money away from cash-starved public school districts. And critics question the wisdom of spending taxpayer dollars on private schools, which don’t have to report test scores or student achievement data.
“The reason that vouchers had subsided as a point of advocacy is because they don’t work,” said Randi Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teachers. “The real issue is how do we ensure all public schools are great schools and safe schools?”
The country’s first modern voucher program opened in Milwaukee in 1990. Florida launched one of the country’s first statewide voucher programs in 1999, which serves special needs students.
Ohio, Utah, Louisiana and Georgia followed. In some states, when lawmakers met opposition in creating an outright voucher program, they established the tax credits.
There was a lag in recent years in the number of bills introduced in states, but as the economy worsened and states had to cut hundreds of millions in spending, voucher advocates jumped at the chance to shepherd languishing bills through the legislative process.
Cunningham predicted that next year could see even more states pass voucher and tax credit legislation.
“A lot of times you see states introduce bills, but it takes time to work out language to gain enough support,” Cunningham said.
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