Public school vouchers drain taxpayer dollars from public schools to fund private, primarily religious schools. Despite the research that shows vouchers don’t improve educational outcomes, we continue to see voucher programs expand across the country. Today, voucher advocates are exploiting the challenges from the pandemic and manufacturing controversies, like the teaching of critical race theory, to push the funding of private schools. Learn about why private school vouchers are bad policy and the current battles to keep public funds in public schools.
Maggie Garrett is the Vice President for Public Policy for Americans United for Separation of Church and State. She has been working on church-state separation issues for more than 20 years and has served as the co-chair of the National Coalition for Public Education (NCPE), a coalition of more than 50 national organizations that opposes private school vouchers, for the last eight years. She is also the chair of the Coalition Against Religious Discrimination (CARD), which is the national coalition that fights against policies that allow religiously affiliated social service organizations to use taxpayer funds to discriminate. She has litigated several high-profile cases on the separation of church and state and now represents Americans United before Congress and the Biden Administration.
Maggie graduated from Hamilton College, cum laude, and graduated with honors from The George Washington Law School, where she was the Production Editor of The George Washington Law Review.
Check out https://americanhumanist.org/actionhq and https://au.org for legislative actions. Here is the Jamie Raskin event link mentioned during the presentation https://oversight.house.gov/legislation/hearings/free-speech-under-attack-part-ii-curriculum-sabotage-and-classroom-censorship.