A former student of mine lives in Santa Clara County, one of the wealthiest counties in the United States, with a median household income of $205,500 for a family of four. I’m happy his life has worked out so well — his talented wife is an executive at a major tech company, and he runs his own IT business out of his home while caring for their two kids. I don’t know what he and his wife make, and would never ask, but if they were making up to $616,500 a year, the U.S. government would be willing to pay for their kids to attend a private school. Does this sound like a good use of federal dollars?
To Republicans, apparently it does. According to the U.S. Department of Education, starting in January, “Students eligible to enroll in a public elementary or secondary school and from a household with income not greater than 300% of the area’s median gross income qualify for a scholarship through the Education Freedom Tax Credit.”
Under the EFTC, passed last summer as part of President Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” taxpayers can get a $1,700 tax credit for giving money to a Scholarship Granting Organization that will pay the full tuition of children who are already in private school. For others who would like to send their children to private schools, the SGOs will pay their tuition as well.
Andrew Lewis of the Commonwealth Foundation assures us that the EFTC “doesn’t involve any public funds.” Similarly, Brian Jodice of the American Federation for Children calls the EFTC money “private giving.” Yet last year when President Trump pledged to end tax credits for automakers investing in electric vehicles, he denounced these tax credits as “taxpayer handouts.”
The Wall Street Journal lectures Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ), an EFTC opponent, for asserting it will take “money out of public schools and giv[e] to private ones”, explaining the EFTC money is instead a “credit off an individual’s federal tax liability.” Exactly — it’s money that would be paid to the federal government in taxes that is now instead going to pay private school tuition. Kelly says the EFTC’s cost “could reach as high as $50 billion in lost [federal tax] revenue in a single year.”
In Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Accounts, a universal voucher program broadly similar to the EFTC, Kelly explains that “more than half of voucher recipients were already being privately educated…dollars are going to subsidize private tuition for families who were already paying for it.”
The EFTC program also lacks adequate safeguards against wasteful or fraudulent spending, and in similar state programs, there have been many examples of money being diverted for dubious purposes.
Moreover, according to the National Coalition for Public Education, “Private schools that accept vouchers under the federal tax credit voucher program do not provide the same civil rights and protections as public schools, such as those in Titles IV and VI of the Civil Rights Act, Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972, and the Elementary and Secondary Education of 1965 (ESEA).”
I saw an example of this while teaching at a Catholic High School in Los Angeles in the 1990s. Two of my students — a girl and her boyfriend, both sophomores — were expelled after the school learned she had had an abortion, and he had taken her to the clinic. Apparently, the leaders of the school felt that at this difficult time in this girl’s life, ripping her away from her friends, teachers, and school was a small price to pay to make their anti-abortion stance clear. Likewise, with treating this 16-year-old boy like an accomplice to a crime. Under the EFTC, the U.S. government dollars will be directly subsidizing these types of schools.
John Schilling of Defending Education condemns teachers unions for urging governors to reject the EFTC program, and Lewis asks what he calls “an awkward question for the teachers unions to answer: Why do families, when given a choice, increasingly choose to attend non-district schools?”
The answer is simple — private school students and families have much higher educational and socioeconomic levels than those in public schools, and parents understand this is advantageous.
A study of New York City’s public high-school system found parents were more concerned about the perceived quality of a school’s students than the quality of the school itself. Chalkbeat’s Matt Barnum explains, “Families may consider the types of students at a school as a proxy for school success.”
Schilling and conservative critics argue in favor of the EFTC by depicting public schools and their teachers as “failing” based on our standardized test scores, but the students we serve are overwhelmingly low-income, and this inevitably drags down our scores.
To be fair to conservative critics, from the outside, it can be hard to understand just how badly the deck is stacked against many low-income students. For some families, just having a teenager spending their time in school instead of working is a luxury they struggle to afford.
We see teenagers working weeknights until midnight (in contravention of the law) to help their parents pay the rent. Girls, in particular, often bear the burden of caring for younger siblings. Some students do their homework after midnight because it is the only time they can have quiet and privacy in their crowded apartments. Many value the free meals they get at school because their meals at home are irregular.
WITH CULTURE TURNING CONSERVATIVE, NOW IS NOT THE TIME TO ABANDON PUBLIC SCHOOLS
I’ve taught at elite private high schools as well as at my current public school, whose students’ socioeconomic level is among the lowest in the nation, and I would argue that, in many ways, the teachers at my “low-performing” school are, as a whole, more effective than those at the “high-performing” schools. Why? Because we’ve had to adjust to a much tougher teaching environment.
The EFTC will drain public schools of students and the funding that comes with them. It is a major threat to public education.
Glenn Sacks teaches at James Monroe High School in the Los Angeles Unified School District. His columns on education and politics have appeared in many of the largest publications in the United States.