Six hundred seventy-two million dollars. That was the estimated Mega Millions jackpot for last Friday as I was writing this column.
A friend of mine, whenever anyone asked what he'd do with that kind of money, always gave the same answer: "Put it on my bills and see how far it goes."
The difference between my friend and the Indiana legislature is that my friend knew he was being absurd.
Six hundred seventy-four million dollars. I dare you to let that sit in your mind a few seconds. This amount is the dollar figure that the General Assembly will spend for the Indiana Choice Scholarship Program, aka vouchers, for the 2026-27 school year.
With this year's anticipated budget added to the first 14 years of the Choice Scholarship Program, excluding the 2025-26 school year, the amount spent by the State of Indiana to pay for students attending private schools - you may want to sit down - is expected to be $3,330,238,133.71.
Three billion. With a "b." The change after that is a rounding error.
So where does $3 billion go? Follow the money to the schoolhouse door.
Of the 413 schools set to collect their share this year, as best I can tell from going through the list, 360 are distinctly religious, or about 87%. That is a whole lot of public money flowing into private pews.
The legislature hasn't funded school choice. It has funded church school.
When the idea of vouchers was sold to the citizens of Indiana, promises were made and not kept. They were never intended to be any more than soundbites to convince voters that "school choice/parental choice" would be good for Indiana and benefit everyone in the long run.
Fourteen years is a long run. Hear the promises again (and the reality) and decide for yourself.
1) Public schools will get first shot at every child. If the public school delivers and succeeds, no one will seek to exercise this choice.
Nearly as soon as Gov. Mitch Daniels was out of office, the requirement was simply dropped. If you look at the 2024-25 school year, 70% of students attending voucher schools have never attended a public school.
2) The voucher program is not likely to be a very large phenomenon.
The program launched in 2011 with 4,000 students and a $15 million appropriation by the General Assembly. The state Department of Education anticipates that in the 2026-27 school year there will be 100,000 students enrolled in voucher schools, and the cost will exceed $674 million.
3.) The program will be capped at 7,500 children.
A cap is not a suggestion. Unless, apparently, it's Indiana's. Those additional 92,500 students did not just sneak in the front door and accidentally get assigned to classrooms.
A faulty premise has clung to this program since the beginning: that public schools would come out ahead as students left for voucher schools, the savings following them out the door.
Rep. Bob Behning made the case again in 2024, telling the Indianapolis Business Journal that "the program results in a net savings to the entire school funding formula."
The math only works if a voucher replaces a public school seat. But as income ceilings rose and enrollment climbed, fewer of those seats existed in the first place.
A decade later, 7 in 10 voucher dollars never had a public school student to follow. You cannot save money by discounting a family's private school tuition. You can only spend it.
It was never a funding formula. It was a tax benefit for families who'd never planned to leave private school.
And what about that boon to funding for traditional public education?
• Indiana's per-pupil spending ranking fell from 15th in 2005 to 38th in 2022 - a drop of 23 places in 17 years.
• Indiana's teacher salary ranking fell from 27th in 2013 to 38th in 2023.
• School buses that should retire at 12 years are running 15 to 20, because there's no money to replace them.
• The state is sitting on a $706 million tuition reserve and calling public schools unaffordable. Indiana can find three-quarters of a billion dollars to sit on, but not to spend on the schools 93% of its children actually attend.
Hoosiers have been sold a bill of goods. Public schools are not being starved because Indiana cannot afford them. Every one of these numbers came from the state's own paperwork.
Indiana isn't hiding the receipt. It's just betting nobody reads it.
Michael Shaffer, a professor of education at Ball State University, is a Fort Wayne resident.shaffer