Former Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden said he is opposed to school vouchers for children to attend Catholic and other private schools. Some believe this may hurt lower income families who will not have a choice on where their children attend school. 

“When we divert public funds to private schools, we undermine the entire public education system. We’ve got to prioritize investing in our public schools, so every kid in America gets a fair shot. That’s why I oppose vouchers,” Biden wrote in a tweet as reported by Civatas Institute.

Mike McShane, director of national research for EDChoice, said in an email to the Catholic Tribune that providing vouchers allows children more options.

“I think that supporting vouchers is a better way to ensure that every kid in America gets a fair shot,” McShane said. “Too many children are not well served by traditional public schools and should have more options.”

McShane added, “It would appear that he [Biden] agrees with this given that he sent his own kids to private school.”

Biden himself attended a private Catholic grammar school and an elite Catholic high school, He and his son, Hunter, both attended Archmere Catholic Academy in Wilmington, Del., the Washington Examiner reported.

While Biden opposes charter schools and vouchers, other candidates failing to earn the Democratic presidential nomination went even further than he did.

“To his credit, he did not go as far as other candidates in the Democratic primary went to trying to demonize for-profit charter schools,” McShane said.

McShane said the federal government does not provide a lot of funding to charter schools, “so his support or opposition ultimately doesn’t amount to much.”

“And, in general, there is a crazy amount of hypocrisy when it comes to for-profit entities in public education. School districts and charter schools contract with tons of for-profit providers to provide any number of services, why contracting with a for-profit company to manage a charter school is beyond the pale is absurd to me,” McShane said.

Meanwhile, Trump, who is not Catholic, has supported private religious schools. In 2019, Trump proposed a $5 billion plan to fund private religious institutions and give parents, not the state, the choice of where they send their children to school. He also touted school choice in his 2020 State of the Union address, the Washington Post reported.

Trump recently had a "constructive meeting" with Catholic educators in which one woman indicated Catholic schools spend on average $6,000 per child compared to the government rate of $12,000 per student. The national savings to taxpayers would be $24 billion, Catholic World reported.