The program was started as a way to give children from poor and lower-middle-class families a chance to leave public schools they felt were failing their kids. As my colleague Emma Brown explained in this story, it didn’t quite work out that way. For example:

Five years after the program was established, more than half of the state’s voucher recipients have never attended Indiana public schools, meaning that taxpayers are now covering private and religious school tuition for children whose parents had previously footed that bill. Many vouchers also are going to wealthier families, those earning up to $90,000 for a household of four.

Here is a piece by someone who has had direct experience with the program — and with working with (or, rather, against) Pence on education issues. She is Glenda Ritz, who was elected in 2012 by Indiana voters to become the state’s superintendent of public instruction as the only Democrat holding statewide office in the conservative state.

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Ritz upset the incumbent, a Republican named Tony Bennett who was a leader of the corporate school reform movement, and she had campaigned against many of Bennett’s key policies, including vouchers. She, in fact, won more votes than Pence did in that election.

Pence didn’t take to that kindly and tried to undermine the power of the position she had won. He created a new education agency in Indiana to help further his own education agenda, with its own dedicated funding from state agencies but later moved to dissolve it even as he sought to have Ritz removed as chair of the state Board of Education. He successfully pushed a 2015 change in state law to make the chair of the state board not the democratically elected state education superintendent but rather a person chosen by members. Board members are largely chosen by the governor, and at that time they had been picked by Pence himself. Pence said it only made sense to have the chair of the board chosen by the board — not voters. Ritz, a veteran educator, lost her bid for reelection last year to an educator who supports vouchers.

By Glenda Ritz

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We did not hear much about education during the presidential campaign. But one thing that President-elect Donald Trump made clear in the months leading up to his election was that he would spend billions of dollars on vouchers for private schools rather than investing in public education.

On Jan. 17, Trump’s pick for education secretary, Betsy DeVos, a longtime champion of “school choice” policies and voucher programs, faces the Senate during her confirmation hearing. She will be one step closer to making Trump’s school choice agenda a reality.

While “school choice” might make for a good sound bite, the details of school choice and voucher programs are far less appealing. Trump’s plan will gut our public education system in an attempt to privatize and deregulate the education of millions of American children. I’ve already witnessed it in Indiana.

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Over the last four years, I have seen firsthand how the school choice ideology hurts our public schools and our students. As Indiana’s superintendent of public instruction during Vice President-elect Mike Pence’s tenure as governor, I spent my term fighting for public education. While my goal was to build a high-quality, equitable public education system, Pence sought to privatize education whenever and wherever possible under the auspices of “school choice.”

Indiana’s school choice program started under a prior governor as a small pilot, tailored to poor families that did not believe public schools were providing their children with an adequate education. Gov. Pence, however, escalated this program into a de facto entitlement for middle-upper-class families, pulling millions of dollars from our poorest schools so that these more affluent families could subsidize a private school education for their kids. Betsy DeVos wants to expand these voucher programs to as many states as possible.

Pence likes to claim that Indiana has the largest voucher program in the country. What he does not like to admit is that in five years of this program, Indiana’s taxpayers have sent more than $345 million to religious schools with little to no state oversight or regulation. These taxpayer dollars would have otherwise funded public education in our state.

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Even worse, these private schools are now admitting that most of their voucher students would have gone to private schools anyway. After all, it is the private schools that are doing the real choosing, picking their favorite students while leaving out others. More than half of Indiana’s voucher recipients — from the inception of the program through 2016 — have never been enrolled in the state’s public school system. In Wisconsin, a state with a voucher program similar to Indiana’s, the numbers are similar: 75 percent of students participating in Wisconsin’s voucher program in its first year were already attending private school. These vouchers continue to siphon vital funding from rural and urban public schools that desperately need it.

Finally, according to a recent, first-of-its-kind study of Indianapolis choice schools by the University of Notre Dame, there are no measurable academic benefits for students using vouchers. At some schools, the study showed student academic losses in math. Meanwhile, Indiana has yet to evaluate its school choice program to determine potential impacts on public schools regarding funding, student diversity and student achievement.

Betsy DeVos has a long history of lobbying for vouchers. As the head of the organization All Children Matter, she used her money and influence to help defeat 17 incumbents who opposed school vouchers and secure the successful election of four pro-voucher governors. DeVos also chaired the American Federation for Children, which has lobbied Congress and presidential candidates to allow Title I money to flow to private schools through vouchers. If confirmed to lead the Department of Education, she will take her support of private-school vouchers to the national level in an unprecedented way.