House Republicans' reconciliation bill, which includes a first-of-its-kind national school voucher program, is now heading to the Senate.
The proposal would use the federal tax code to offer vouchers that students could use to attend private secular or religious schools, even in states where voters have opposed such efforts.
NPR interviewed researchers, advocates (for and against), tax experts, a mother who relies on vouchers and a public school leader who feels threatened by them – a dozen sources in all.
Here's what they say about this federal plan, including the potential risks and benefits.
1. How vouchers, and this federal plan, work
What is a voucher?
"If it funds private school tuition, it's a voucher," says Josh Cowen, a professor at Michigan State University who, after studying vouchers for more than two decades, publicly opposes them.
This federal proposal would reward people who make charitable donations to what are known as Scholarship Granting Organizations (SGOs). Their reward: a dollar-for-dollar tax credit.
"It's about three times as generous as what you're gonna get from donating to a children's hospital or a veteran's group or any other cause," says Carl Davis at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. "It really preferences voucher groups over every other kind of charity."
The SGO would then distribute the donated money in the form of scholarships for students to use on a range of expenses, including private school tuition, books and homeschooling costs.
The bill would cap the tax credit at $5 billion dollars in each of the next four years, through 2029.
The complex plan uses the tax code and SGOs because in smaller, older programs, most voucher students attend religious schools, for which federal law prohibits direct government funding. The Supreme Court appears open, however, to this kind of indirect funding.
Direct or indirect, these are tax dollars the government is choosing to forego.
And the reward for donors doesn't stop at the dollar-for-dollar tax credit. Instead of cash, they could donate stock. Normally, when you sell stock, you have to pay capital gains taxes on any profit you've made. But Davis says donors who give their stock to an SGO wouldn't have to pay capital gains taxes on any increase in the stock's value. And they would still get that tax credit.
Between the tax credit and this capital gains tax avoidance, Davis writes, "contributors would generally find that 'donating' would yield a personal profit for themselves."
Davis estimates, as the bill is currently written, it would facilitate $2.2 billion in capital gains tax avoidance over the next decade.
That's why Hilary Wething, an economist at the liberal-leaning Economic Policy Institute, calls this voucher plan "a tax shelter to the wealthy."
2. Why families choose vouchers
Michelle Salazar, who lives in central Florida, says she used a Florida-based voucher to enroll her young son in a private school because he just wasn't getting the care he needed.
While in a public charter school, she says her then-first-grader could be fidgety and distracting, and his teacher's solution was to separate him from the other children, who sat together at tables, and to put him at a desk, which was covered in black material and placed in a corner.
"It was crazy," Salazar says. "They just didn't know how to deal with him. He struggled. He fell behind in reading."
In second grade, when Salazar's son was diagnosed with dyslexia, in addition to ADHD, she says she made a change. She used a state-provided voucher (Florida has been a leader in the voucher movement) and enrolled him in a new, Christian school for children with special needs.
Her son is now 12, and Salazar says, "He loves it there, and the teachers all love him."
Salazar, a single parent, says she wouldn't be able to afford the school's annual $15,000 tuition if not for the nearly $10,000 state-funded voucher.
Her story illustrates just one of the reasons some families support vouchers.
"It used to be that, when you asked parents, they would say the academic quality of the private schools, teacher quality of the private school, the educational program, those kinds of things," says Patrick Wolf, a voucher researcher at the University of Arkansas.
Today, Wolf says, other priorities, including a fear of bullying, top the list of reasons why parents might choose to use a voucher to enroll their child in a private school.
"[Parents are] concerned that their child is bullied," says Robert Enlow, whose pro-voucher group, EdChoice, surveys families. "They're concerned that their child is in a safe environment or that they're too anxious and stressed… and that's why they're choosing private schools."
3. Private schools can turn students away, public schools can't
Not all students are well-served by vouchers, including many students with disabilities. Unlike public schools, private schools can generally choose who they admit.
"A private school can absolutely say you're not a good fit for this school. Bottom line, period," says Jacqueline Rodriguez, CEO of the National Center for Learning Disabilities.
Private schools are not bound by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), which requires public schools to provide students with disabilities a free, appropriate public education.
The bill itself includes one convoluted sentence that suggests some protection for students with disabilities. But, as written, it would not require a private school to admit a student with a disability, nor is it clear what, if any, government entity would enforce the protections the bill hints at, especially since the bill also prohibits any "government entity… to mandate, direct, or control any aspect of any private or religious elementary or secondary education institution."
This is why Rodriguez says any promise to parents guaranteeing students will enjoy the same rights and protections in private schools "is disingenuous at best and crooked at worst."
Curtis Finch runs the Deer Valley Unified School District in Phoenix, and he says many parents of students with disabilities have been enticed by his state's generous voucher program.
"The pattern that usually happens," Finch says, "is a family hears that there's a special school for Johnny… so they end up getting this voucher, and then they take it over to that [private] school." Finch pauses. "We usually get those kids back."
Often, private schools lack the resources, expertise and trained staff to serve children with complex disabilities and, when these schools realize a student might exceed either their expertise or their budget, they can reject the child or, later, shift them back to the public schools.
And it's not just students with disabilities. Many state-based voucher programs don't require that private schools accept any or all applicants. Schools can reject a student for lots of reasons, including poor grades or a previous record of misbehavior.
Research suggests, even when disadvantaged children are admitted to private schools using vouchers, many end up back in public schools, either because they choose to return or because private schools can send them back, a phenomenon known as "pushout."
Finch says many of the voucher schools in his district cherry-pick students. He says they have a "segregation mentality, of, 'We don't want your kid. He's too special needs. He has too much discipline [issues], doesn't have academic prowess for our school.' You know, fill in the blank."
Enlow at EdChoice says private schools must be able to choose the students they admit and retain, to safeguard their own unique school cultures.
"Not every single school serves every single child, nor should it," Enlow says. "We've found that out in our traditional school system, that it's impossible to have a one-size-fits-all system. And so I don't think we want to force that kind of system on the non-public schools."
In this kind of system, Josh Cowen of Michigan State says, it's voucher schools, not parents, who get to choose.
4. The federal voucher would not be limited to low-income families
Many of the earliest, smaller voucher programs were billed as engines of social mobility and thus made available only to lower-income children, often from low-quality public schools.
"Ultimately, every child, especially from lower-income families, should have access to the school of their choice, and this legislation is the only way to make that happen," Tommy Schultz, CEO of the pro-voucher American Federation for Children, said in a statement celebrating the current federal voucher proposal.
But this federal proposal would not be limited to lower-income students. Far from it.
Under Republicans' plan, vouchers would be available to households earning at or below 300% of a given area's median gross income. So, in an area of the country where the median gross income is $75,000, any child in a household earning less than $225,000 could qualify.
"It's a very generous income threshold" that would allow "most families" in the U.S. to qualify, says Wolf at the University of Arkansas.
By one estimate, 85-90% of students would qualify. That's fine by Robert Enlow at EdChoice.
He says, "People tend to go crazy about the idea of, we're going to fund millionaires' kids," but Enlow argues that's already happening.
Public schools are funded largely through state and local dollars, and wealthier school districts can and often do spend considerably more on their students.
"We seem to be fine with giving millionaires' kids $15,000 to go to traditional public schools in income-segregated communities," Enlow concludes.
Federal money covers only between 6 and 13% of public school budgets, though, and is largely targeted to help lower-income students and children with disabilities.
5. Vouchers often go to students who are already enrolled in private schools
"The vast majority of voucher users were already in private school to begin with," says Cowen of Michigan State. "And that's been true for 18 years of data."
This is a common phenomenon in the research: When a voucher program becomes universal, or near-universal, many of the families who first use it were already paying for private schools.
In fact, after Oklahoma enacted its recent voucher program, state data revealed fewer than 10% of applicants were public school students.
And a 2017 NPR investigation found Indiana's voucher program was spending public dollars on thousands of students who had never attended a public school.
In the case of the federal proposal, "these are wealthy families who already made the choice to attend a private school," says Wething of the Economic Policy Institute, "and now we're just subsidizing their choice."
6. When states offer vouchers, private schools often raise prices
Jennifer Jennings, a professor of sociology and public policy at Princeton University, wanted to find out what happened to private school prices in Iowa after the state began offering vouchers.
She found that for kindergarten, where voucher eligibility was universal, private schools increased their tuition in the program's first year by 21-25%.
In later grades, where eligibility wasn't universal, prices still rose 10-16%.
"What we teach in microeconomics is that if you offer a universal subsidy, you should expect prices to increase," says Jennings.
Her finding echoed a 2016 study, which found tuition hikes in large voucher programs across five states.
More recently, similar fears have surfaced around Arizona's voucher program.
7. Vouchers don't improve student test scores
Now we get into a really contentious part of the vouchers debate: Do students do better academically, on average, when they leave a public school and go to a private school?
In the early days, when voucher programs were small and targeted at lower-income students in low-rated public schools, researchers did find some modestly promising results.
"It's true that in the '90s and in the early 2000s, when I first started working on this as a young data analyst, you did see a handful of voucher systems marginally improving academic performance," says Cowen, who opposes vouchers.
But, Cowen says, as states rolled out larger, less-targeted programs, the benefits faded and in places like Louisiana and Indiana students lost ground when they went to a voucher school.
"You see some of the largest academic declines we've ever seen in a policy setting," Cowen says, on the same scale as learning loss from COVID-19 or Hurricane Katrina.
Unlike Cowen, Wolf, at the University of Arkansas, supports private-school choice efforts because, he says, the bulk of the research backs their effectiveness. He also points out that the troubled Louisiana program is being wound down and replaced.
David Figlio, a voucher researcher at the University of Rochester in New York, sums up their effectiveness this way: "The best studies find zero to negative impacts on test scores among participants."
Why? Cowen suggests, in states with broadly-accessible voucher programs, the private schools that tend to have open slots are either low quality or new and untested. Or both.
Wolf has another theory:
"Private schools just don't emphasize goosing test scores as much as public schools do. Public schools have to, because they're held accountable for test score levels," says Wolf.
One analysis from Wolf and his team found that students who persist in their voucher programs may ultimately make up some of the ground they initially lost and even pull ahead.
8. Voucher students may be more likely to attend and complete college
In spite of those test score drops, the evidence suggests voucher students may be more likely to graduate high school and even college than if they had stayed in their public school.
The Urban Institute recently published a study of an early voucher program in Ohio that had been targeted to students in low-rated schools. With many years having passed since the voucher students were in school, the researchers were able to see that they "were substantially more likely to enroll in college than students who remained in public schools (64 versus 48 percent)" and were more likely to earn a bachelor's degree (23 versus 15%).
Those findings come with a caveat, says David Figlio, who co-authored the study.
"This program was a highly targeted program that bears little resemblance to the statewide, universal vouchers that are being rolled out today. Therefore you need to take these results with a grain of salt."
9. Multiple studies of voucher programs show public schools improving too
Or, as Robert Enlow of EdChoice puts it: "When there's a competitive environment, public schools are getting better and getting better faster."
Wolf agrees: "The studies are consistent in finding that the public schools improve their performance when they face competition."
How much do they improve? Wolf calls the benefits "modest."
Figlio, who has studied smaller, targeted voucher programs in Florida and Ohio, says their positive impact on the public schools "moved the needle a little bit."
To Cowen, "the results are tiny." So small, he argues, the benefit "is not an argument for parent choice. That's an argument for what we need to do to improve public schools."
Sasha Pudelski of The School Superintendents Association (AASA) says focusing on these small, competitive improvements ignores the financial strain vouchers put on public schools.
"Districts are going to lose a few kids in each school potentially and it's not going to seem like that much," says Pudelski, "but it's going to result in service disruptions, teachers and educators being laid off. It's going to lead to fewer programs that people really care about."
When asked what his message would be to the rest of the country, based on his experience with vouchers in Arizona, public school superintendent Curtis Finch doesn't hesitate.
"This is a Trojan horse," he says. "It looks good on the outside, and once you open your gates and let them in, the end is destruction."
Voucher supporters don't dispute this proposal would take students and, ultimately, funding from public schools. They argue, it's time for families to have more control over children's schooling.
"Giving parents the ability to choose the best education for their child makes the [American] Dream possible," Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., said in a statement. Cassidy helped lead the federal voucher effort in the Senate.
According to an analysis of 2022 Census data, nearly 12% of K-12 students in the U.S. attend private schools, while the overwhelming majority, 84%, attend traditional public or charter schools.
Republicans' plan to pour some $20 billion into vouchers is an attempt to shift that balance.
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