Opponents raise alarm over school vouchers in GOP budget bill
Opponents of school vouchers are raising concerns as House Republicans attempt to push through federal legislation in their 'big, beautiful bill' advancing President Trump's agenda.
If successful, the Educational Choice for Children Act (ECCA) will create scholarships parents can use to send their students to private schools, available in all 50 states.
Those opposed fear the damage the measure could do to public schools and disadvantaged students.
School choice advocates were giddy after finding out ECCA was put into the reconciliation package, knowing it means the legislation would only have to be passed by a simple majority of members in the House and the Senate, both of which are controlled by Republicans.
The National Education Association, the largest teachers' union in the country, immediately reached out to representatives.
'We oppose creating a $20 billion tax credit voucher scheme and allowing 529 accounts to be used for home schooling,' Marc Egan, the director of government relations for the union, wrote in a letter to the House Ways and Means Committee.
Opponents list several concerns with the bill, including the weakening of public schools, especially in rural areas where other options are not available, and the lack of federal regulations on private schools or homeschooling.
Those concerns are what slowed down the school choice movement in Texas, which only recently passed its own bill to adopt education savings accounts (ESAs) after years of opposition from rural Republicans.
ESAs are accounts given to parents from the government with a certain amount of money to cover private school or homeschooling costs. In Texas, the program will cost $1 billion in its first year.
'Voucher schemes are transparent attempts to diminish parental choice by syphoning money away from public schools to pay for tax cuts for billionaires. The research shows that vouchers hurt student achievement, go 70 percent to families with kids already in private school, and that private schools then increase tuition in response,' said Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers.
The ECCA would create a federal tax credit for individuals who donate to groups that provide school choice scholarships to students. The scholarships would be available for students from families with incomes up to 300 percent of their area's median gross income.
One of the biggest concerns for opponents is the lack of restrictions over to what type of schools these scholarships could go. Private schools are not upheld to the same federal regulations, making them immune to investigations by the Education Department if concerns of discrimination are raised.
While the school choice movement says their goal is to create competition in education, the measure could result in wildly different classroom experiences for students.
'I don't understand, if this bill passes and is signed into law, why only certain schools in a community have to be accountable to their local communities because they're being supported with tax dollars,' said David Schuler, executive director of the School Superintendents Association.
'You could have two schools a block away, one a private school with voucher dollars, another public school without voucher dollars, both being supported by those either local or national taxpayers, and one with no accountability measures,' Schuler added.
The school choice movement had seen multiple successes since the pandemic, but it has also repeatedly fallen short in blue and even some red states. More than a dozen states have rejected school choice measures, most recently in November, when ballot measures failed in Kentucky, Colorado and Nebraska.
Advocates describe the ECCA as a natural next step.
'As with the Civil Rights Act of two generations ago, Congress needs to step in and bypass that opposition to education freedom where it exists in states,' Peter Murphy, senior advisor of Invest in Education coalition, previously told The Hill.
But the success of the ECCA in reconciliation is not assured as congressional Republicans are deeply fractured over the sweeping package, with some wanting deeper cuts to government spending while moderates fear the impact on federal benefits such as Medicaid.
With Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) facing razor-thin margins in the lower chamber, hard-liners such as GOP Reps. Chip Roy (Texas) and Ralph Norman (S.C.) have already said they are planning to vote against the bill.
And even if the legislation does survive the House, Senate Republicans are already voicing their own doubts, too.
While concerns of how ECCA will affect students are top of mind for critics, the legislation's dollar-for-dollar tax credit is also under criticism as it will give these scholarship programs a leg up over tax credits for other nonprofits.
'It really becomes a financial tax donation, right?' said Schuler.
'And I think it's going to hit other nonprofits. It's going to hit their revenue significantly. And I just, again, I hope other nonprofits think about that, and I hope our legislators think about' that, he added.
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