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A growing number of red states have expanded their school voucher programs in recent years, a trend that is likely to only spike further amid a push led by President Donald Trump’s administration to return education “back to the states.”

Conservative education activists have long lauded such programs as a way to give greater control to parents and families. But public education advocates warn that the expansion of these voucher programs presents further risk to the broader school system as it faces peril from Trump’s dismantling of the Department of Education.

“Many states came into this administration with a track record of trying to privatize education, and I think they see this move to dismantle and defund the Department of Ed and President Trump’s support of school privatization as a green light to be more expansive in their approach moving forward,” said Hilary Wething, an economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute who closely studies the impact of voucher programs on public education.

Just last week, Texas enacted a statewide private school voucher program, becoming the 16th state to offer some form of a universal school choice program. In private school voucher programs, families can receive a certain amount of public money to use toward private K-12 school tuition or school supplies. In some states, such programs have previously come with limitations, including narrow eligibility, such as private schools that can accommodate families with children who have special needs or families that are below certain income levels.

Proponents of the program in Texas and others like it dub it a “universal voucher” program because it has no restrictions on who is eligible. Under the program, any family in the state may receive about $10,000 to pay for their children’s K-12 private school education. Texas’ program will launch in the 2026-27 school year.

Statewide voucher programs are far from a new phenomenon. But they have exploded in recent years amid a growing political effort by conservatives at the local, state and federal levels to boost “school choice” — the notion that parents should have far more options than only their neighborhood public schools.

Sixteen states offer at least one voucher program that has universal eligibility, while another 14 offer voucher programs with eligibility requirements, according to the Education Law Center, a public education advocacy group that is critical of voucher programs.

At least three states, Texas, Idaho and Tennessee, have enacted their universal programs this year, while in another eight states, attempts by conservative lawmakers to create new voucher programs or expand existing ones stalled or failed, according to the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union.

“Even though this is not a new explosion of voucher laws, this year continues the explosion of vouchers … and even though the USDOE [dismantling] isn’t necessarily the one driving force, it’s definitely connected,” said Jessica Levin, the litigation director at the Education Law Center, which is assisting with lawsuits challenging Trump’s moves to dismantle the Department of Education. “The bottom line is that this is a concerted strategy on the part of those who want to defund and dismantle public schools and privatize public education.”

The most prominent argument made by critics of voucher programs is that they take public money that would have otherwise been allocated to help fund public schools and deliver it to private schools.

Private schools, they note, do not face most of the accountability requirements that public schools do under federal laws. For example, private schools retain the ability to refuse admission to students, are not required to provide individualized education plans to children with learning disabilities and are not required under law to provide disabled students or students facing disciplinary measures certain protections or due process rights.

At the same time, funding formulas for public schools are predominantly based on enrollment numbers. So, as students flee public schools — even if in just small numbers — overall funding decreases.

“The students who remain in public schools lose resources,” Levin said, while “voucher students lose rights.”

Meanwhile, Levin explained, voucher-driven pupil departures from public school means “you’re now concentrating higher-need, higher-cost kids in public schools that now have less funding.”

Those situations are now compounded by Trump’s moves to wind down the Education Department, which experts have said will further upend civil rights enforcement in schools as well as the distribution of billions of dollars to help impoverished and disabled students.

U.S. Department of Education spokesperson Savannah Newhouse said in an email to NBC News that “President Trump and Secretary [Linda] McMahon believe that our nation’s students will thrive when parents are given the freedom to choose a school setting that best fits their child’s academic needs.”

Newhouse added that the administration “will provide states with best practices on how they can expand educational opportunities and empower local leaders to implement customized policy that will benefit their communities the most.”

While some states have had voucher-like programs allowing families to use public money for parochial education dating back more than 100 years, modern voucher programs have been around for about 30 years, having launched in large part in the 1990s amid a grassroots conservative movement to increase options for parents unhappy with their local public schools.

But the Covid-19 pandemic emerged as a flashpoint for conservative education activists, who utilized widespread anger among parents unhappy with school closings and remote learning as a launchpad for new and expanded voucher programs across the nation.

School voucher proponents say the programs maximize choice for parents, who can use the funds to subsidize the cost of expensive private schools, which, they argue, deliver better outcomes for students. Supporters have also touted the programs as offering a market-based approach that helps promote the best schools and have argued that they have the potential to benefit low-income families or families with uniquely few options for public school.

Tommy Schultz, the CEO of the American Federation for Children, a conservative group that advocates for school voucher programs, told Fox News this week that universal voucher programs like the one enacted in Texas give parents “education freedom.”

He praised a similar program that Florida expanded in 2023, claiming it had caused the state’s public schools to “have gotten better.” Schultz denied that Texas’ program, or ones like it, would result in fewer resources for public schools, calling that “the same argument for 30 years” by public education advocates.

Andrew Mahaleris, a spokesperson for Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, said in an email that the Republican “made education freedom a priority because no one knows the needs of their child better than a parent.”

“When it comes to education, parents matter, and families deserve the ability to choose the best education opportunities for their children,” Mahaleris added. “The Governor signing school choice into law is an unprecedented victory for Texas families, students, and the future of our great state.”

But critics point to examples showing that universal school voucher programs are disproportionately used by wealthy families whose children are already enrolled in private schools, or that children in rural areas with few schools have limited options to put the money to use. They also point to studies that refute the claim that private schools deliver better outcomes for students.

In addition, enrollment in private schools, even with a voucher to help cover the cost, can still be prohibitively expensive for low-income families, they said.

Wething, of the EPI, said analyses have shown that between 60% and 90% of students who take advantage of universal-eligibility voucher programs across the U.S. were already enrolled in private school when they participated in the programs.

She warned of the harms she said programs like the one in Texas posed.

“As soon as you get rid of income limits or carveouts for, say, only low-income families or only students with disabilities, you basically open the gates for students who are already attending private school, or who already have enough income to attend private school, to now use state funding to subsidize their private school,” she said. “It’s kind of the next step in what we think of as this voucher evolution.”

In the eyes of many LGBTQ Catholics, the late Pope Francis created a “seismic shift” toward acceptance. Now, as the world welcomes the newly elected Pope Leo XIV, these lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer faithful say they hope he will continue to move in the same direction.

Marianne Duddy-Burke, executive director of the LGBTQ Catholic advocacy group DignityUSA, was in Rome on Thursday when Cardinal Robert Prevost, a 69-year-old Chicago native who holds both U.S. and Peruvian citizenship, became the new pontiff.

“I was actually quite excited to see that Cardinal Prevost had been elected as Pope Leo XIV and thrilled that he took the name of a pope rooted in social justice. I think what a clear signal to a hurting world that that’s where his energy is going to be focused,” she told NBC News in an interview Friday. “I also found a lot of hope in his remarks from the balcony … where he talked about God’s all-inclusive love without any condition, and where he talked about being a church for all of God’s people.”

Jason Steidl Jack, a gay Catholic and an assistant teaching professor of religious studies at St. Joseph’s University, New York, described his reaction to the election of Pope Leo, the first-ever American to lead the Holy See, as “cautiously optimistic.”

“I do see him continuing Pope Francis’ legacy, especially of dialogue and synodality,” Steidl Jack said, describing synodality as “this idea of journeying together” and “listening to one another.” However, he said the new pope’s election “doesn’t assuage all of the fears that I have as an LGBTQ Catholic.”

“The church’s teaching, even under Pope Francis, remains incredibly homophobic, and the church goes on inventing new ways of being transphobic as it really avoids learning about trans people and their experiences,” he said, adding, however, that the new pontiff seems “open to dialogue and inclusion” given his remarks on Thursday.

Chicago resident Greg Krajewski said he’s been a practicing Catholic his whole life and sings at his local parish every Sunday. However, he said, as a gay man, he’s “careful who I talk to and how I present myself.”

“There’s a few things in his opening speech that he gave that really give me a lot of hope,” he said of Leo. “The first thing is he said a couple of times, ‘God loves us without limits or conditions.’ I think this is a really big indication that even if he himself maybe has more reservations about the LGBTQ issues in the church, he is open to those discussions. He is open to bringing us in.”

Track record on LGBTQ issues

Leo’s past comments on LGBTQ issues are limited, though several LGBTQ Catholics expressed concern about remarks he reportedly made in an address to church leaders over a decade ago. During the 2012 Synod of Bishops, then-Father Prevost reportedly lamented the challenges presented to the Catholic Church due to sympathetic media portrayals of “alternative families.”

“Note, for example, how alternative families comprised of homosexual partners and their adopted children are so benignly and sympathetically portrayed on television programs and in cinema,” he told a group of bishops at the time, according to the Catholic News Service. “The sympathy for anti-Christian lifestyle choices that the mass media fosters is so brilliantly and artfully engrained in the viewing public that when people hear the Christian message, it often inevitably seems ideological and emotionally cruel by contrast to the ostensible humaneness of the anti-Christian perspective.”

Francis DeBernardo, the executive director of New Ways Ministry, which works to foster LGBTQ inclusion in the Catholic Church, called the remarks “disappointing.”

“We pray that in the 13 years that have passed, 12 of which were under the papacy of Pope Francis, that his heart and mind have developed more progressively on LGBTQ+ issues, and we will take a wait-and-see attitude to see if that has happened,” DeBernardo said in a statement.

Steidl Jack said Leo seemed to have a “culture warrior mentality” on same-sex marriage and LGBTQ representation in pop culture back in 2012, but he expressed hope that the new pope’s views have changed since then.

“A lot of the world has changed since 2012 — even Pope Francis changed a great deal over the course of his pontificate,” he said. “So I hope that Pope Leo has been listening to LGBTQ Catholics. I hope he’s been paying attention and growing, just as Pope Francis did, just as the rest of the world has been.”

Views on LGBTQ issues have shifted dramatically over the past decade, including the views of practicing Catholics. For example, the Pew Research Center’s 2023-24 Religious Landscape Study, which found 19% of U.S. adults identify as Catholics, found 70% of Catholics favor allowing same-sex couples to marry, up from 57% in 2014.

Michael O’Loughlin, the executive director of Outreach, an LGBTQ Catholic organization, was in Rome for the announcement of the new pope. He said the 2012 comments were disappointing but that he was keeping an open mind.

“I’m willing to look at his wider message, which was one of peace and standing up for the marginalized,” he said. “The fact that he switched to Spanish to address his former community in Peru I thought was a nice sign that he’s a man of the people.”

After 2012, the future pope’s subsequent remarks on LGBTQ issues are sparse.

In 2017, when he was bishop of Chiclayo, Peru, and spokesman of the Peruvian Episcopal Conference, he appeared to speak out against “gender ideology,” a term some people use to refer to transgender identities, telling local media that this ideology “seeks to eliminate biological differences between men and women.”

Then, in 2024, a year after Pope Francis formally approved allowing Catholic priests to bless same-sex couples, then-Cardinal Prevost said the subsequent pushback from bishops in Africa highlighted the need to give more doctrinal authority to local bishops, according to CBCPNews, the news service of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines.

“The bishops in the episcopal conferences of Africa were basically saying that here in Africa, our whole cultural reality is very different. … It wasn’t rejecting the teaching authority of Rome, it was saying that our cultural situation is such that the application of this document is just not going to work,” Prevost said at the time, according to CBCPNews. “You have to remember there are still places in Africa that apply the death penalty, for example, for people who are living in a homosexual relationship. … So, we’re in very different worlds.”

Hopes for the future

When asked what she’d like to see from Leo’s papacy, Duddy-Burke said she hopes he can serve a “trusted moral voice.”

“The world is so broken at the moment in so many places — you know, this rise of nationalism, the increased xenophobia, so many wars that are very vicious happening around the world — I just hope that he can become a very clear and trusted moral voice in the world, and some of that means dealing with the inequities and failings within our own church as well,” she said.

Steidl Jack said he hopes Leo listens to Catholics with differing viewpoints.

“One of the gifts of Pope Francis’ papacy was that he encouraged church leaders to go outside of the church, to listen to people outside of the hierarchy, and that’s really what Pope Leo needs to do, especially regarding same-sex relationships and transgender experience,” he said.

DeBernardo, of New Ways Ministry, said in his statement that he hopes Leo continues to build upon the foundation that Francis laid out.

“Pope Francis opened the door to a new approach to LGBTQ+ people,” he said. “Pope Leo must now guide the church through that door.”

The conduct of a former Massachusetts state trooper who was fired over his handling of the Karen Read murder investigation took centerstage at her retrial this week as defense lawyers spent hours grilling the ex-officer’s supervisor.

Massachusetts State Police Sgt. Yuri Bukhenik acknowledged that he was also disciplined over misconduct allegations linked to Michael Proctor, the case agent who managed the investigation into the death of Boston police officer John O’Keefe. But the supervisor testified that the former trooper handled the probe with “honor and integrity.”

“I believe human beings all have biases,” Bukhenik said in a courtroom southeast of Boston. “Especially in this case, they did not affect the outcome of the investigation.”

Proctor, who was fired after Read’s defense team raised allegations of misconduct at her widely watched first trial, has not testified at her retrial. It is not clear if he will.

Read, 45, is charged with second-degree murder, motor vehicle manslaughter while driving under the influence and leaving the scene of a collision causing death.

The first trial, which spanned nine weeks and five days of jury deliberations, ended when the panel could not reach a unanimous verdict. This week marked the third in her retrial.

Prosecutors have alleged that Read was furious over her deteriorating relationship when she drunkenly backed her Lexus SUV into O’Keefe, her boyfriend of two years, and left him for dead outside the suburban home of a now-retired Boston police sergeant, Brian Albert.

O’Keefe, 46, was found unresponsive in Albert’s yard shortly after 6 a.m. Jan. 29, 2022. He was later pronounced dead. The medical examiner attributed his cause of death to hypothermia and blunt force trauma to the head.

Read has asserted her innocence. Her lawyers have claimed that she is the victim of a conspiracy — O’Keefe was likely beaten inside Albert’s home, bitten by the family’s German Shepherd and dragged outside, they have said — and a cover-up that sought to frame her in his death.

The defense lawyers have accused Proctor of manipulating evidence and conducting a biased investigation. He was dishonorably discharged in March after a review by state police officials found that he violated agency rules when he sent derogatory messages about Read to friends, family and others, and when he shared sensitive and confidential details about the case with non-law enforcement personnel.

At trial, Proctor acknowledged that his comments were “unprofessional” and “dehumanized” Read, but he said they did not affect the integrity of the investigation into O’Keefe’s death. Proctor has not commented on his termination, but his family said the decision to fire him “unfairly exploits and scapegoats one of their own, a trooper with a 12-year unblemished record.”

Bukhenik was among those who Proctor texted. While searching Read’s phone seven months after O’Keefe’s death, Proctor texted a group thread about one of Read’s lawyers, David Yannetti, and refered to Read with offensive language and said: “No nudes so far.”

In other messages that did not include Bukhenik, Proctor said he hoped Read died by suicide and he made disparaging comments about her medical condition. Read was diagnosed with Chron’s disease.

Bukhenik testified that he was working on an airport traffic detail when the message arrived on his Apple watch. Though Bukhenik responded with a thumbs-up emoji, he said, he did not look at the messages at the time.

Bukhenik was later disciplined over the accuracy of Proctor’s performance evaluation, he testified, and for failing to adequately supervise him. He lost five vacation days, he said, and remains a homicide investigator with the Massachusetts State Police.

Under questioning from defense lawyer Alan Jackson, Bukhenik said that while Proctor managed the investigation, he did not believe the former trooper played a major role because he was only one of several troopers assigned to the case and was not responsible for 51 percent or more of the work.

Asked if he believed Proctor’s involvement in the case tainted the investigation, Bukhenik said he did not.

“The investigation was done with honor and integrity and the evidence pointed in one direction,” he said.

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