The late Sen. Everett Dirksen of my own state of Illinois is reputed to have complained about ballooning federal spending, saying, “A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon, you’re talking real money.” It was funny 75 years ago. Today, it’s not even entirely true anymore.
Last week, the House Ways and Means Committee unveiled and then passed the details of the “big beautiful bill,” the tax portion of the president’s legislative agenda. The plan is for it to go through the budget reconciliation process to avoid being susceptible to the Senate filibuster.
Here in Illinois, we were grateful to see that the Ways and Means Committee considered and approved language that would create a federal tax credit scholarship program. Taxpayers can give up to 10% of their adjusted gross income for scholarships to private schools and get a 100% federal tax credit. This program, called the Educational Choice for Children Act, effectively means you can send a portion of your taxes to Washington, or you can send it to help children go to private schools.
In states such as mine, where the legislature and the governor conspired to kill a state tax credit scholarship that was helping mostly poor children get out of failing public schools and into higher-performing private schools, the federal program is going to mean salvation for a lot of families. Before the Illinois program was killed off, we were helping some 15,000 poor children have hope for a better life.
But as grateful as we are that the federal government is creating this program, we were disappointed that the Ways and Means Committee language reduced the overall program from $10 billion per year for 10 years to $5 billion per year for four years. Now, Dirksen would likely have told you that $20 billion over four years is a lot of money. And, in the 1960s, it was.
Today, however, the state of Illinois spends $44 billion per year on public education. The cost per student is around $24,000 per year. Nationally, according to the Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics, we spend almost $1 trillion annually on public primary and secondary education, with an average per-pupil expenditure of around $18,000. Of that trillion, around $130 billion comes from the federal government. The $10 billion we were asking for, much of which will rescue poor children from government-subsidized failure, is pretty small by comparison. And, remember, it’s not a federal expenditure. It’s a credit given to taxpayers who fund scholarships.
I understand what some red state conservatives may be thinking: Why should Texas and Florida and Indiana and Idaho bail out bad decisions made by politicians in Illinois and California? If the fact that taxpayers in red states will also benefit from the federal program proves unconvincing, I’d like to posit an alternative reason: because the federal program will help us grow a movement for school choice.
LET’S ADVANCE SCHOOL CHOICE IN THE ONE BIG, BEAUTIFUL BILL
We need to show skeptical voters in red and blue states that school choice does what we say it will do. In red states, those voters live in rural areas where there aren’t many choices (yet) for their children to take advantage of. In blue states, we have those rural areas, too, but we also have suburban and urban voters who need more convincing. The success stories we’ll be able to tell thanks to the ECCA will help us build a coalition to hasten universal school choice for every student.
I’m grateful to the House Ways and Means Committee for including ECCA in the budget bill. Now, I urge the Senate to put it back at $10 billion per year for 10 years. Help us grow a revolutionary movement for universal school choice everywhere.
Jonathan Greenberg is the CEO of Empower Illinois, a scholarship-granting organization and advocate of school choice.