by Alec MacGillis

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On a Thursday morning last May, about a hundred people gathered in the atrium of the Ohio Capitol building to join in Christian worship. The “Prayer at the Statehouse” was organized by an advocacy group called the Center for Christian Virtue, whose growing influence was symbolized by its new headquarters, directly across from the capitol. It was also manifest in the officials who came to take part in the event: three state legislators and the ambitious lieutenant governor, Jon Husted.

After some prayer and singing, the center’s Christian Engagement Ambassador introduced Husted, asking him to “share with us about faith and intersecting faith with government.” Husted, a youthful 57-year-old, spoke intently about the prayer meetings that he leads in the governor’s office each month. “We bring appointed officials and elected officials together to talk about our faith in our work, in our service, and how it can strengthen us and make us better,” he said. The power of prayer, Husted suggested, could even supply political victories: “When we do that, great things happen — like advancing school choice so that every child in Ohio has a chance to go to the school of their choice.” The audience started applauding before he finished his sentence.

The center had played a key role in bringing about one of the most dramatic expansions of private school vouchers in the country, making it possible for all Ohio families — even the richest among them — to receive public money to pay for their children’s tuition. In the mid-1990s, Ohio became the second state to offer vouchers, but in those days they were available only in Cleveland and were billed as a way for disadvantaged children to escape struggling schools. Now the benefits extend to more than 150,000 students across the state, costing taxpayers nearly $1 billion, the vast majority of which goes to the Catholic and evangelical institutions that dominate the private school landscape there.

What happened in Ohio was a stark illustration of a development that has often gone unnoticed, perhaps because it is largely taking place away from blue state media hubs. In the past few years, school vouchers have become universal in a dozen states, including Florida, Arizona and North Carolina. Proponents are pushing to add Texas, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and others — and, with Donald Trump returning to the White House, they will likely have federal support.

The risks of universal vouchers are quickly coming to light. An initiative that was promoted for years as a civil ­rights cause — helping poor kids in troubled schools — is threatening to become a nationwide money grab. Many private schools are raising tuition rates to take advantage of the new funding, and new schools are being founded to capitalize on it. With private schools urging all their students’ families to apply, the money is flowing mostly to parents who are already able to afford tuition and to kids who are already enrolled in private schools. When vouchers do draw students away from public districts, they threaten to exacerbate declining enrollment, forcing underpopulated schools to close. More immediately, the cost of the programs is soaring, putting pressure on public school finances even as private schools prosper. In Arizona, voucher expenditures are hundreds of millions of dollars more than predicted, leaving an enormous shortfall in the state budget. States that provide funds to families for homeschooling or education-related expenses are contending with reports that the money is being used to cover such unusual purchases as kayaks, video game consoles and horseback-­riding lessons.

The voucher movement has been aided by a handful of billionaire advocates; it was also enabled, during the pandemic, by the backlash to extended school closures. (Private schools often reopened considerably faster than public schools.) Yet much of the public, even in conservative states, remains ambivalent about vouchers: Voters in Nebraska and Kentucky just rejected them in ballot referendums.

How, then, has the movement managed to triumph? The campaign in Ohio provides an object lesson — a model that voucher advocates have deployed elsewhere. Its details are recorded in a trove of private correspondence, much of it previously unpublished, that the movement’s leaders in Ohio sent to one another. The letters reveal a strategy to start with targeted programs that placed needy kids in parochial schools, then fight to expand the benefits to far richer families — a decadeslong effort by a network of politicians, church officials and activists, all united by a conviction that the separation of church and state is illegitimate. As one of the movement’s progenitors put it, “Government does a lousy job of substituting for religion.”

In the early 1990s, Ohio’s Catholic bishops faced a problem. For more than a century, religious education had been deeply entrenched in the state; in Cleveland, the parochial system was one of the largest in the country. For decades, though, the Church’s urban schools had been losing students to suburban flight. To keep up enrollment, many were admitting more Black students, often from non-­Catholic families. But these families typically could not afford to pay much, which put a strain on church budgets.

Catholic leaders elsewhere faced the same challenge, but Ohio’s bishops had an advantage. The new Republican governor, George Voinovich, was a devout Catholic who went to Mass multiple times a week, an expression of a faith that was inherited from his Slovenian American mother and deepened by the loss of his 9-year-old daughter, who was struck by a van that ran a red light. An unpretentious Midwesterner who loved fishing in Lake Erie, Voinovich had worked his way up from state legislator to mayor of Cleveland before becoming governor in 1991.

In office, Voinovich corresponded frequently with the state’s most prominent bishops, in Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati. Their letters, which are collected in Voinovich’s papers at Ohio University, show a close and collaborative relationship. The bishops wrote to thank Voinovich for the regular donations that he and his wife made to the church, which ranged as high as $2,000. They traded get-well wishes and condolence notes. “The last two times I’ve seen you you looked a little tired,” Voinovich once wrote to Anthony Pilla, the bishop of Cleveland. “Please take care of yourself.”

Most of all, they strategized about increasing state funding for Catholic schools. As a legislator, Voinovich had worked to launch a set of programs that helped private schools pay for administration, special education, transportation and other services. His support for these expenditures, which by the early ’90s amounted to more than $100 million, stood in contrast with his aggressive efforts to cut the rest of the budget. At one point, he banned peanuts and other snacks from official state flights. Legislators passed around a story about seeing him pluck a penny out of a urinal.

But Voinovich saw spending on parochial schools as fundamentally different, driven by his belief in the value of a Catholic upbringing. “If we could reconstitute the family and get everyone into Church, about 60% of the problems we are confronted with would go away,” he wrote to James Griffin, the bishop of Columbus. “I can assure you that the money you spend to deal with all the problems confronting the community is much better spent than the way government would spend it.”

Soon after Voinovich became governor, he and the bishops began discussing another way to fund Catholic schools: vouchers. The notion of publicly funded subsidies for private schools wasn’t totally new. After courts ordered school integration in the South, in the 1950s, some municipalities helped finance “segregation academies” for white students. At around the same time, the economist Milton Friedman argued that education should be subject to market forces, in part by paying parents to send their children to a school of their choosing. But no city or state had funded a true voucher initiative.

For the state government, there was an obvious risk to funding Catholic schools; the Ohio Constitution says that “no preference shall be given, by law, to any religious society.” Voinovich and his aides worried not only about political repercussions but also about the potential for legal challenges from groups like the ACLU. In April 1991, Voinovich intimated to Pilla that he was recruiting proxies who could obscure their alliance. “We are quietly lining up ‘heavy hitters’ in the business community and are trying to identify someone in the legislature who would be willing to become our advocate,” he wrote.

Voinovich had an ideal partner in David Brennan, a well-connected local businessman. A towering presence at 6-feet-5 (not counting his customary cowboy hat), Brennan had attended Catholic school in Akron before earning degrees in accounting and law, and made a fortune forming corporations for doctors seeking tax benefits. When Voinovich ran for governor, Brennan was a major fundraiser for the campaign. Now he started cultivating allies, donating heavily to a Republican from the Cincinnati suburbs who was a promising sponsor of voucher legislation, as reported by the Akron Beacon Journal, which

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