Should Ghosts Receive School Vouchers?

And more stories from a week in education news

Andy Spears
2 min readJun 26, 2023
Photo by Syarafina Yusof on Unsplash

No matter where you stand on the debate over school vouchers, it seems reasonable to suggest that if a voucher is awarded, that voucher should be for the education of an actual student.

That’s not always the case in North Carolina, however, as a recent story indicates:

Riverside Christian Academy — 16 students enrolled, and 55 vouchers! At $6492 per student, that’s a heck of a windfall. Mitchener University Academy reported an enrollment of 72 and collected 149 vouchers — so about $230,000 of taxpayer money handed over for non-existent students.

Examples like this were plentiful in an analysis of the state’s voucher program that found $2.3 million going to schools for students who seemed not to exist.

Does changing the logo make a difference?

Teach for America seems to think so.

Here’s some analysis on the rebranding of the decades-old program that purports to provide teacher training and needed educators to high poverty schools:

The reality is that TFA, once a potential disruptor of what they saw as an education system that wasn’t working well for all kids, is now just a part of the status quo — a…

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Andy Spears

Writer and policy advocate living in Nashville, TN —Public Policy Ph.D. — writes on education policy, consumer affairs, and more . . .