SHOW ME THE MONEY: STATE EDUCATION BUDGETS ARE UP — SO WHY ARE SCHOOLS GOING BROKE?

FY 2026–27 brought a wave of headline-grabbing education spending increases. The fine print tells a different story.

Every budget season follows the same liturgical calendar. Governors stand at podiums and invoke children. Press releases trumpet "record investments." Per-pupil allowances get bumped — 2.5 percent here, 3 percent there — and advocates are expected to nod along, grateful for whatever crumbs survive the appropriations process. This year is no different. Several states have finalized their FY 2026–27 education spending packages, complete with increases to foundation allowances and adjustments to weighted funding formulas for at-risk and English-language learning students. The headlines are warm. The math, less so.

Let's start where the money actually lives.

The Nominal Game

Michigan is perhaps the most instructive case study in how a budget increase can be simultaneously real and illusory. Governor Gretchen Whitmer's FY 2026–27 package, now enacted by the Legislature, raises the foundation allowance by 2.5 percent — from roughly $10,050 to $10,300 per pupil. The conferees also restructured weighted funding for at-risk and bilingual education into a unified weighted foundation allowance, with stated intent to ramp up weights over a 15-year schedule.

On paper: progress. Michigan is spending more on its highest-need students, and it's codifying that commitment in formula rather than leaving it to annual discretion.

In practice: 2.5 percent is also, roughly, the trailing rate of general inflation. Which means the foundation allowance has held steady in real terms — not grown. After years of underfunding that followed the 2011 austerity era, Michigan schools are essentially treading water at a more comfortable depth. The 15-year phase-in schedule for weighted formula increases, meanwhile, is a promissory note signed in disappearing ink. Fifteen years is four to five election cycles. The legislature that enacted the formula will not be the legislature that funds the final ramp.

New York's FY 2026–27 school aid picture is similarly mixed. Formula-based aids grow by roughly 3.56 percent, reaching just over $38.5 billion — a real increase, yes, but one that arrives after years in which Foundation Aid was chronically underfunded and districts ran structural deficits against phantom promised revenue. The state's reorganization of pre-K funding into a unified UPK Aid stream at a minimum of $10,000 per eligible four-year-old is genuinely meaningful. But in a state where New York City teachers' pension obligations and health care costs compound annually at rates that dwarf any COLA adjustment, a 3.5 percent formula bump keeps the treadmill moving, not the runner ahead.

Colorado's framework is worth flagging as a structural outlier — its school finance formula is constitutionally required to increase by at least inflation annually. Which sounds like a floor with teeth. Except that Amendment 23, passed by voters in 2000, spent its first decade being effectively suspended by legislators using creative accounting, and the base per-pupil figure for FY 2025–26 remains at $8,692 — below what it would be had the constitutional mandate been faithfully applied through the recession years. History has a way of compounding.

California: The Inflation-Adjusted Emperor Has No Clothes

Nowhere is the gap between headline and reality starker than in California, where the Newsom administration has spent years touting "all-time high" education spending — and where that claim is technically true in exactly the way a trick question is technically answerable.

The state's own Legislative Analyst Office has noted that the Governor's FY 2026–27 budget would bring Proposition 98 funding to $20,512 per student — an all-time high in unadjusted dollars, yes, but approximately $300 per student below the previous peak once you adjust for inflation. The nominal number goes up every year. The real number has been playing catch-up since the 2008 crash and still hasn't gotten there.

Dan Walters put it bluntly in a February column in CalMatters: Newsom's proposed budget would spend $88.7 billion on K–12 students — a 61 percent increase since he took office. Adjusted for 29 percent inflation over that same period, the real gain is cut roughly in half. Sixty-one percent sounds like a revolution. Thirty-something percent, above a low baseline following years of cuts, sounds more like what it is: maintenance, not investment.

California's Local Control Funding Formula — the equity-focused mechanism enacted in 2013 — was designed to direct higher per-pupil allocations to districts with the greatest concentrations of English learners, low-income students, and foster youth. The supplemental and concentration grants built into the formula were supposed to be transformational. And for some districts, they have been. But a March 2026 commentary in EdSource documented what happens when an equity-focused formula operates inside a structurally underfunded system: the districts with the lowest base grants — often those serving the most affluent families, where local parcel taxes and philanthropy backstop state allocations — are falling further behind the statewide weighted median. Over 215 districts now receive nearly $2,300 less per student in LCFF funding than the statewide weighted median. Equity formulas don't work when the base is too low. You can't redistribute adequacy you don't have.

Meanwhile, the LCFF's statutory COLA for FY 2026–27 is estimated at 2.41 percent — less than inflation in the preceding year, applied to a base that already lags its peak in real-dollar terms.

The LAUSD Object Lesson

You want to know what "record education funding" looks like on the ground? Drive around Los Angeles Unified.

LAUSD is staring down a projected deficit of $877 million for FY 2026–27 — and an accelerating structural shortfall that one forecast has reaching $3.6 billion by 2028–29. The district's board voted earlier this year to issue potential layoff notices to 3,200 employees, with roughly 650 expected to materialize in the near term. More cuts are coming: school consolidations, the elimination of funding through the Student Equity Needs Index, gutting of the Black Student Achievement Plan, an estimated 6,000 eventual layoffs that would represent more than 10 percent of the total workforce.

This is happening while California is, officially, spending more on education than ever before in history.

LAUSD's CFO has traced the crisis to two structural dynamics: decades of enrollment decline (enrollment has dropped from a peak of 746,831 in 2002 to roughly 389,000 this year), and the expiration of one-time federal pandemic relief funds that temporarily papered over the underlying math. Both explanations are accurate. Neither is complete. The third leg of this stool is that California funds schools primarily through average daily attendance — meaning every student who leaves the district (to a charter, to a private school, to another district, to another state) takes their funding allocation with them. In a declining-enrollment environment, that mechanism functions as a revenue doom loop: fewer students means less money, but the fixed costs of maintaining a large urban district — facilities, pensions, special education mandates, transportation — don't decline at the same rate.

Eight California district superintendents, including LAUSD's Alberto Carvalho, signed an open letter this year calling the state's funding model structurally unsustainable. "When nearly every school system in California is facing the same challenges," the letter read, "it is clear that the issue is not isolated decision-making, but the sustainability of the funding model itself."

That's not an accusation of bad governance. It's a structural indictment.

The Weighted Formula Sleight of Hand

One more thing deserves scrutiny: the celebration of adjusted weighted funding formulas for at-risk and ELL students, which features prominently in the FY 2026–27 press releases of multiple states.

Weighted formulas are not bad policy. Correctly designed and faithfully funded, they are among the most defensible mechanisms for directing resources toward students with documented additional needs. California's LCFF supplemental grants, Michigan's new weighted foundation allowance, and comparable provisions elsewhere are, in principle, the right approach.

But there are two ways a weighted formula can fail. The first is when the weights are too small — when an ELL student generates a 10 percent add-on rather than the 35 to 75 percent that Michigan's own legislation identifies as an eventual target (via a 15-year phase-in). The second is when the base to which the weight is applied is itself inadequate. Multiply an insufficient base by a modest weight and you have redistributed the problem, not solved it.

In California's case, a 2026 PPIC analysis found that shifting to enrollment-based funding (rather than attendance-based) would deliver the districts with the highest concentrations of at-risk students about $100 more per pupil — a less-than-one-percent improvement. All that structural debate, all that modeling, for a margin of rounding error.

What "Record Funding" Actually Requires

None of this is an argument for pessimism about public education finance. It is an argument for precision — for demanding that "record investment" claims come with an inflation-adjusted footnote, a structural-cost analysis, and an honest reckoning with the gap between formula enactment and classroom reality.

The baseline lesson of every budget season since at least the Reagan era is this: when a politician tells you education funding has never been higher, check the deflator. When they tell you weighted formula adjustments will close equity gaps, ask about the phase-in schedule and who gets to enforce it in year twelve. When they announce record per-pupil spending, ask what's happening to the second-largest school district in the country while those records are being set.

The children in LAUSD classrooms are not abstract budget line items. The 3,200 layoff notices sent out in February are not accounting footnotes. They are the consequence of treating nominal increases as real ones, of celebrating the headline and ignoring the math beneath it.

Show them the money. Adjusted for inflation. Fully funded. On time.

Big Education Ape covers LAUSD politics, California education policy, and national education reform. Sources: Michigan Senate Fiscal Agency (FY 2026–27 School Aid), Michigan Education Association budget overview, California LAO Publications 5110 and 5178, CalMatters/Dan Walters commentary (Feb. 2026), EdSource "raise the base" commentary (March 2026), PPIC school funding analysis (May 2026), LAist/EdSource/The 74 LAUSD budget coverage (2025–2026).

Sources & Links

"Show Me the Money: State Education Budgets Are Up — So Why Are Schools Going Broke?"

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Michigan

1. FY 2026–27 School Aid Budget — Michigan Senate Fiscal Agency (Conference Report) https://sfa.senate.michigan.gov/departments/highlightsheet/hik12_web.pdf
2. Overview of FY27 Whitmer Budget Recommendations — Michigan Education Association https://mea.org/overview-of-fy27-whitmer-budget-recommendations/
3. FY 2026–27 School Aid Summary: As Passed by the House — Michigan House Fiscal Agency https://www.house.mi.gov/hfa/PDF/Summaries/26h5630h1_SchAid_Summary_Hse_Passed.pdf
4. FY 2026–27 School Aid: As Reported by House Subcommittee — Michigan House Fiscal Agency https://www.house.mi.gov/hfa/PDF/Summaries/26h5628h1_SchAid_Summary_As_Reported_by_Hse_Subcmte.pdf

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New York

5. Description of FY 2026–27 New York State Executive Budget Recommendations for School Aid — NYS Division of the Budget https://www.budget.ny.gov/pubs/archive/fy27/ex/local/school/2627schoolaid.pdf

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Colorado

6. Staff Budget Briefing FY 2026–27: Education — Colorado General Assembly https://content.leg.colorado.gov/sites/default/files/fy2026-27_edubrf2.pdf

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California — State Budget & Formula

7. The 2026–27 Budget: Proposition 98 Guarantee and K–12 Spending Plan — California LAO https://lao.ca.gov/Publications/Report/5110
8. The 2026–27 Budget: Update on Local Control Funding Formula Costs — California LAO https://lao.ca.gov/Publications/Report/5178
9. The 2026–27 Budget: Fiscal Outlook for Schools and Community Colleges — California LAO https://lao.ca.gov/Publications/Report/5093
10. Assessing a Shift to Enrollment-Based School Funding — California LAO https://lao.ca.gov/Publications/Report/5100
11. The 2026–27 Education Budget, Explained — ED100 https://ed100.org/blog/budget-26-27
12. Financing California's Public Schools — PPIC https://www.ppic.org/publication/financing-californias-public-schools/
13. Updating California's School Funding Formula: Assessing Alternatives and Trade-Offs — PPIC https://www.ppic.org/publication/updating-californias-school-funding-formula-assessing-alternatives-and-trade-offs/
14. California's Education Funding Level Rises Compared to Other States — EdSource https://edsource.org/2026/california-education-funding-rise/757381
15. It's Time to Raise Base Funding for California Schools (commentary) — EdSource https://edsource.org/2026/raise-base-funding-california/752243
16. California School Systems Face Red Ink Despite Boosts in Education Spending (Dan Walters) — CalMatters https://calmatters.org/commentary/2026/02/california-school-systems-education-spending/

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LAUSD

17. LAUSD Will Vote on Layoffs Amid Budget Challenges, Declining Enrollment — EdSource https://edsource.org/2026/lausd-budget-deficit-layoffs/751079
18. LAUSD Approves Reduction in Force That Could Affect 3,200 Employees — EdSource https://edsource.org/2026/los-angeles-unified-votes-to-lay-off-3200-employees-due-to-budget-deficit/751490
19. LAUSD Could Face Layoffs, Furloughs and School Consolidation Amid Projected Shortfall — EdSource https://edsource.org/2026/lausd-financial-crisis-looms/763170
20. Inside LAUSD's Budget Crisis: Why Thousands Could Face Layoff Notices — LA Magazine https://lamag.com/education/inside-lausds-budget-crisis-why-thousands-could-face-layoff-notices/
21. LAUSD to Send 3,200 Layoff Notices as District Faces $877M Budget Deficit — FOX 11 Los Angeles https://www.foxla.com/news/lausd-layoffs-2026
22. Why LAUSD Says Layoffs May Be Coming Even With a Large Reserve https://wheninyourstate.com/california/why-lausd-says-layoffs-may-be-coming-even-with-a-large-reserve/
23. Layoffs, Cuts and Closures Are Coming to LAUSD Schools — The 74 https://www.the74million.org/article/layoffs-cuts-and-closures-are-coming-to-lausd-schools-as-district-confronts-budget-shortfalls/
24. LAUSD Board Finalizes Hundreds of Job Cuts, Previews Future Reductions — LAist https://laist.com/news/education/lausd-reduction-in-force-vote-may-2026-budget-preview
25. LAUSD Layoffs 2026: 657 Jobs Cut — LayoffHedge https://layoffhedge.com/company/lausd

 

WHAT'S WRONG WITH FEDERAL SCHOOL VOUCHERS? LET ME COUNT THE WAYS

A well-sourced field guide to America's most expensive education experiment — prepared for the Network for Public Education 2026 National Conference, Conroe, Texas (Greater Houston), September 26–27, 2026

Imagine someone hands you a coupon for a free steak dinner — but the restaurant is 40 miles away, requires a tuxedo you can't afford, and has already raised its prices by 25% the moment it heard you were coming. That, in a nutshell, is the federal school voucher promise to low-income families. Welcome to the show.

ACT I: The Grand Illusion — What Vouchers Claim to Be

The pitch is seductive: "Give every family the freedom to choose the best school for their child!" It sounds like apple pie, Little League, and the American Dream rolled into one shiny policy package.

The reality, documented exhaustively by the Network for Public Education, is considerably less cinematic.

Federal private school vouchers — now turbocharged by dollar-for-dollar tuition tax credits of up to $1,700 annually funneled through Scholarship Granting Organizations (SGOs) — were sold as an escape hatch for low-income kids trapped in struggling schools. Instead, the data tells a different story:

• 60–70%+ of voucher funds in universal programs (Arizona, Iowa, Florida) go to students already enrolled in private schools or homeschooled before the program launched.
• In Indiana, only 3% of voucher recipients were actually leaving the state's worst schools.
• In Wisconsin, more than 86% of voucher recipients in 2016–17 were already attending private school before the voucher arrived.

In other words, the "escape hatch for the poor" is functioning primarily as a rebate program for the already-escaped. The kids who needed the ladder most are still standing at the bottom.

ACT II: The Money — Where It Goes, How Fast It Disappears, and Who Pays

Here's where the comedy of errors becomes a fiscal thriller.

The Budget Explosion Nobody Planned For

State after state has discovered that "universal" vouchers and basic arithmetic are mortal enemies:

State	Projected Cost	Actual Cost	The Oops Factor
Arizona	~$65 million	$700 million+	10x overrun; state budget deficit followed
New Hampshire	~$130,000	$25+ million	Nearly 200x overrun
Iowa	~$128 million (Year 1)	$340 million+ (ongoing)	Costs more than doubled with universal access
Florida	Modest expansion	~$4 billion annually	Now the largest voucher program in U.S. history

Arizona — the canary in the coal mine — watched its ESA program balloon from $120 million to over $1 billion, contributing to a multi-hundred-million-dollar state budget deficit. Highway funds got trimmed. Water infrastructure got squeezed. All so that families who were already paying private school tuition could get a state check.

The Fixed-Cost Trap 🪤

When a public school district loses 5% of its students to vouchers, its state funding drops by roughly 5%. But the heating bill doesn't drop 5%. The bus routes don't shrink 5%. The special education staff doesn't disappear 5%. The building doesn't teleport 5% of itself into a storage unit.

Fixed costs remain stubbornly, expensively fixed — forcing local school boards into a grim menu of options: school closures, property tax hikes, and the elimination of arts, music, and extracurriculars. The kids who stayed in public school pay the price for the kids who left.

The Private Tuition Price Trick 🎩

Here's a magic trick voucher advocates rarely mention: the moment a state announces a $7,000–$7,800 per-student voucher, private schools across the state consult their calculators and raise tuition.

• Iowa: Private schools raised kindergarten tuition by 21–25% immediately after ESA eligibility took effect. Preschool — ineligible for ESAs — saw no comparable increase. Coincidence? The data says otherwise.
• Arizona: Nearly half of surveyed private schools raised tuition by 10% or more; several hiked rates by 20–30%, adding $2,000–$4,200+ to annual bills.
• Florida: Schools previously charging below $7,800 raised prices to meet or exceed the full voucher amount, using the state subsidy as a new price floor.

The result? The voucher that was supposed to open doors for low-income families is largely absorbed by the very institutions it was meant to fund — leaving the out-of-pocket gap for struggling families roughly where it started, while wealthier families pocket a tidy state subsidy they never needed.

ACT III: Civil Rights — The Part Nobody Likes to Talk About at Ribbon-Cuttings

Public schools must educate every child within their boundaries — regardless of disability, religion, language, gender identity, or academic history. That's not a preference. It's federal law.

Private schools receiving voucher funds? Not so much.

The Accountability Void

Unlike public schools, private voucher-receiving institutions are generally exempt from:

• IDEA (Individuals with Disabilities Education Act)
• Protections for LGBTQ+ students
• Requirements for English Language Learners
• Mandatory standardized testing or state academic reporting
• Financial auditing with meaningful teeth

Pennsylvania's own voucher track record report found programs with no "meaningful educational or financial accountability" — meaning the state has essentially no reliable way to know whether these programs work, whether the money is spent appropriately, or whether students are learning anything at all.

The History Nobody Wants to Remember

Modern voucher programs share an uncomfortable family tree with post-Brown v. Board of Education "massive resistance" policies, in which southern states provided tuition grants to white students to attend private "segregation academies" rather than integrate public schools.

Civil rights attorneys and historians — including those featured in NPE's panel Exposing The Harms of Federal Private School Vouchers — have documented these echoes in detail. The demographic data from states with expanded universal vouchers reinforces the concern: as programs go universal, participation skews whiter and wealthier, while Black families are statistically less likely to use vouchers or sustain private school enrollment.

In Indiana, as the voucher program grew from 3,911 students (2011) to 36,290 (2019), the share of Black participants dropped from 24.1% to 12%, while white participation rose. That is not a program delivering equity. That is a program delivering the appearance of equity while practicing something else entirely.

ACT IV: Student Outcomes — The Part the Brochure Skips

Voucher advocates promise that market competition will force public schools to improve and that private schools will deliver superior academic results. The research, however, has been delivering a different memo for years — and it keeps getting returned unopened.

What the Studies Actually Found

• Indiana: Students using vouchers saw math scores decline — an average student at the 50th percentile dropped to the 44th percentile after one year in private school.
• Louisiana: Voucher students experienced lower scores in math, reading, science, and social studies. Their likelihood of a failing score increased by 24 to 50 percent.
• Washington, D.C.: The voucher program produced a statistically significant negative impact on math achievement. Students and parents reported no significant increase in satisfaction with their school experience.
• Ohio, Louisiana, Indiana, D.C. (combined): Four independent studies using different research designs all found negative results in math and reading, with no evidence of long-term gains in graduation or college-going rates.

To summarize: the programs cost more than projected, serve primarily families who didn't need them, drain resources from the schools that serve everyone else, exempt participating schools from civil rights protections, and produce worse academic outcomes for the students who use them.

Other than that, things are going great.

ACT V: The Rural Joke Nobody's Laughing At

Iowa offers a particularly sharp illustration of voucher geography. Over 40% of Iowa counties have no accredited private school within their borders. Yet rural tax dollars flow into the statewide voucher fund — effectively subsidizing private tuition for urban and suburban families in Des Moines and Iowa City, while rural public schools lose per-pupil funding and have nowhere for their families to spend a voucher even if they wanted to.

It is, in the most literal sense, a wealth transfer from rural communities to urban private institutions — dressed up as "parental freedom."

WHERE TO GO FROM HERE: Houston, September 26–27, 2026

The good news — and there genuinely is some — is that courts are beginning to push back. Voucher programs have recently been declared unconstitutional in Montana, Utah, and Ohio, with active legal challenges underway in Tennessee, Wyoming, Florida, and Missouri.

The NPE 2026 National Conference in Conroe, Texas (Greater Houston area) is where advocates, educators, attorneys, and parents will gather to map the path forward. The agenda is packed:

• "Beating Vouchers in Court" — lessons from recent constitutional wins, featuring Derek Black, Jessica Levin, Fred Jones Jr., and Sharon Krengel
• "A View from the Trenches" — Florida school board members and an Arizona teacher on what universal ESAs have actually done to their communities
• "Christian Nationalism: The Public School Battleground" — unpacking the ideological infrastructure behind defunding public education
• "Artificial Intelligence in Schools" — featuring AFT President Randi Weingarten on cognitive development, privacy, and mental health risks
• "Subsidizing Silicon While Schools Struggle" — corporate tax breaks, data center subsidies, and the billions drained from public education

📍 Location: Hyatt Regency Conroe, 1001 Grand Central Pkwy, Conroe, TX 77304 📅 Dates: Saturday–Sunday, September 26–27, 2026 | 8:00 AM – 3:00 PM ✉️ Contact: info@networkforpubliceducation.org

The Bottom Line

Federal school vouchers, as currently designed and universally expanded, are not a ladder for the poor. They are a subsidy for the already-comfortable, a budget grenade for public school districts, a civil rights rollback dressed in the language of freedom, and — based on the academic evidence — a net negative for the students they claim to champion.

The voucher promise says: "We're giving your tax dollars back to you." What it doesn't mention is that it's giving everyone else's tax dollars to private institutions with no accountability, no civil rights obligations, and a very efficient pricing algorithm.

The Network for Public Education has been counting the ways. Come to Houston in September — and help count what comes next.

Sources: Network for Public Education research reports; NPE 2026 National Conference Schedule; state fiscal analyses from Arizona, Florida, and Iowa; academic studies from Indiana, Louisiana, Ohio, and Washington, D.C. Register and learn more at networkforpubliceducation.org

Sources & Links — Federal School Vouchers: What's Wrong & Why It Matters

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🏛️ Network for Public Education (NPE) — Core Research & Reports

1. Do School Vouchers Help Kids in Struggling Schools? (NPE Research Brief) 👉 https://networkforpubliceducation.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Do-school-vouchers-help-kids-in-struggling-schools.pdf

2. Do School Vouchers Help Kids in Struggling Schools? (Earlier Edition) 👉 https://networkforpubliceducation.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Do-school-vouchers-help-kids-in-struggling-schools%C6%92.pdf

3. Do Charter Schools and School Vouchers Hurt Public Schools? (NPE Research Brief) 👉 https://networkforpubliceducation.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Do-charter-schools-and-school-vouchers-hurt-public-schools-.pdf

4. Report: PA Track Record on Private School Vouchers Finds Still No Accountability (NPE Voucher Scandals) 👉 https://networkforpubliceducation.org/voucher_scandals/report-pa-track-record-on-private-school-vouchers-finds-still-no-accountability/

5. 2026 NPE Report Card — All 50 States Evaluated on Privatization (NPE, 2026) 👉 https://networkforpubliceducation.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/2026-NPE-Report-Card.pdf

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🎥 NPE Video Panels & Presentations

6. Exposing The Harms of Federal Private School Vouchers (NPE Panel — Civil Rights Attorneys & Policy Experts) 👉 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WruVUZ7DZOM

7. NPE Video Resource — Vouchers & Public Education (NPE Supplemental Panel) 👉 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpA_9R_-qqk

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📅 NPE 2026 National Conference — Houston, Texas

8. 2026 NPE National Conference — Official Event Page 📍 Hyatt Regency Conroe | 1001 Grand Central Pkwy, Conroe, TX 77304 📅 September 26–27, 2026 | 8:00 AM – 3:00 PM ✉️ info@networkforpubliceducation.org 👉 https://networkforpubliceducation.org/2026-national-conference/

9. 2026 NPE Conference Full Schedule (Web Version — PDF) 👉 https://networkforpubliceducation.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Web-Version-Conference-Schedule-2026-Sheet1.pdf

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🔬 Independent Research & Policy Analysis

10. Public Funds Public Schools: 2024 Year in Review (Education Law Center — co-authored with Idaho Center for Fiscal Policy) Covers how voucher costs balloon and harm rural communities. 👉 https://edlawcenter.org/public-funds-public-schools-2024-year-in-review/

11. Keep Public Funds in Public Schools (The Education Trust, 2025) Documents academic performance declines for voucher-switching students. 👉 https://edtrust.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Public-Funds-V3.pdf

12. Research on Voucher Academic Outcomes (Pennsylvania Federation of Professional Staff — aggregated independent studies) Covers Indiana, Louisiana, Ohio, and D.C. outcome data. 👉 https://pfps.org/research/

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🌐 NPE General Resources

13. NPE Official Website — Mission, Reports & Blog 👉 https://networkforpubliceducation.org

14. NPE Voucher Scandals Tracker 👉 https://networkforpubliceducation.org/voucher_scandals/

15. NPE Grassroots Education Network — Join the Movement 👉 https://actionnetwork.org/forms/join-npes-grassroots-education-network/

16. NPE Contact & General Inquiries 📬 info@networkforpubliceducation.org | ☎️ (646) 678-4477 👉 https://networkforpubliceducation.org/contact-us/

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📌 Quick Reference Summary Table

#	Source	Type	Link
1	NPE — Vouchers Help Kids? (2021)	Research Brief	Link
2	NPE — Vouchers Help Kids? (2019)	Research Brief	Link
3	NPE — Vouchers Hurt Public Schools?	Research Brief	Link
4	NPE — PA Voucher Accountability Report	Scandal Tracker	Link
5	NPE 2026 Report Card	National Report	Link
6	Exposing Harms of Federal Vouchers	Video Panel	Link
7	NPE Supplemental Panel	Video	Link
8	2026 NPE Conference Page	Event	Link
9	2026 Conference Schedule PDF	Event Schedule	Link
10	Public Funds Public Schools 2024	Policy Report	Link
11	Keep Public Funds in Public Schools	Ed Trust 2025	Link
12	Voucher Academic Outcomes Research	PFPS Aggregated	Link

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All links verified as of August 2026. For the most current NPE research, visit networkforpubliceducation.org.