Having worked in school finance in a prior life, I can tell you the biggest problem with money getting redirected to these schools is that they can deny students. So public schools lose funding and have to absorb all of the expensive SPED students.
When Arizona passed the legislation that allowed for private school vouchers, the program was projected to cost $65 million in 2024 and $125 million in 2025. But the most recent estimates put that cost at a staggering $940 million per year, more than 1,000 percent of the initial estimate.
The Christofascists won’t be satisfied until every school is a 100% Christian-run, 100% taxpayer-funded, stone-age-war-god-ideology fascist brainwashing center.
Don’t overlook how much of these schools are hotbeds of graft and corruption. Its quaint to insist this is a religious problem, but it overlooks how much boils down to simple profiteering.
If you actually scratch the surface of a lot of the Christian-pastiche college campuses - your Liberty Us and Bob Jones’s - you find campuses that exist to squeeze their student bodies for every last red cent. Yeah, the education is full of climate change denialism, young earth creationism, and phrenology. But even that skirts around how much of it just a big ole MLM, designed to incentivize recruitment and evangelization over any actual education. Like a job at Vector Marketing or Amway, 90% of what you’re doing is finding other people to rope into your bad decisions.
