No doubt various Trump administration policies have created thorny issues for Gov. JB Pritzker to deal with.
The governor has to cope with the fiscal and human impact of President Donald Trump’s decision to cut billions in federal funding for core programs like or the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, and Medicaid that support vulnerable populations, as well as the fallout from Trump’s episodic refusals to fund previously approved grants for state and local agencies and nonprofits.
Then there’s the thorny issue that’s landed on Pritzker’s desk, courtesy of the Trump administration, involving K-12 education, in the form of the Educational Choice for Children Act.
As its name implies, the act uses public taxpayer dollars to subsidize a family’s decision to send their kids to private school. Instead of directly issuing vouchers, the act creates a federal tax credit, capped at $3,400 for married couples filing jointly, who make donations to “scholarship granting organizations.” These scholarship-granting organizations, in turn, grant scholarships to eligible students that can cover everything from private school tuition to tutoring classes.
To be eligible to receive a scholarship-granting organization’s scholarship, a student can live in a family with yearly earnings that reach 300% of the median gross area income. In the Chicago area, that would include a household of four making $359,700 per year, which means the program isn’t about helping poor folks.
Indeed, experts at the Education Trust are concerned that rather than create opportunities for economically disadvantaged kids, the Educational Choice for Children Act, will instead unnecessarily waste public dollars on paying tuition costs for wealthier kids already enrolled in private schools.
Even though it’s a federal program, states have to opt in for their residents to be eligible to claim the tax credit. Essentially, the question facing Pritzker isn’t whether parents should have the right to send their kids to a private school. Of course, they should.
Subsidizing school choice
The real question is whether public taxpayer dollars should subsidize the choice to do so. If the premise is that taxpayer dollars should only subsidize activities that generate a public good, the data shows the answer is a resounding no.
Over the last two decades, various states across the country have implemented school choice programs using everything from vouchers to tax credits. These school-choice initiatives were initially justified as a way to enhance student achievement. But they haven’t.
Indeed, over the last 10 years, as various school choice measures were scaled up from small, targeted initiatives to large, statewide programs, every study that evaluated the efficacy of these choice programs, including those done by choice advocates, has found negative impacts on achievement for students overall.
Chris Lubienski, a Ph.D. in education, who, among other things, serves as director of the Center for Evaluation & Education Policy at Indiana University, and is a fellow at the National Center for Education Policy, said there’s simply no policy basis for using public dollars to subsidize school choice.
According to Lubienski, “I’m struck by how this scales up an approach that’s not only shown to be ineffective, but to actually harm kids. Every statewide voucher program that’s been evaluated in the last decade has been found to result in large relative declines in learning for kids using the program.”
Poor and rural communities lose
To be clear, Lubienski isn’t the only independent, credible authority who questions the efficacy of the Educational Choice for Children Act,. The Brookings Institution found that the legislation lacks appropriate quality control measures and transparency, and will likely redirect funding from poor and rural communities to affluent areas.
The Education Trust agrees with Brookings and laments that the act will lead to more inequity — because private schools can discriminate when admitting students — and it noted that a review of Wisconsin’s voucher programs found that about 15% of participating schools had admissions policies or statements that openly discriminate against students with disabilities.
Meanwhile, the cost of funding the program is projected to hit $134 billion in lost federal tax revenue over the next decade. At a minimum, that will worsen the burgeoning federal deficit, but in all likelihood will also lead to spending cuts to programs that do support low-income families.
I mean, just look at the over $900 billion in cuts Republicans in Congress just authorized in Medicaid services over the next decade, to cover just some of the projected revenue loss from the huge tax cuts that primarily benefit the wealthy and big businesses that were the focal point of the One Big Beautiful Bill.
Subsidizing individual decisions that do not generate a public good or service — even legitimate ones well within the rights of, in this case, the parents making them — is an inappropriate use of public money.
Worse, all the evidence indicates the Educational Choice for Children Act is more likely to impede rather than improve student achievement, just to subsidize rich kids attending private schools. Which means this issue really isn’t thorny after all. Gov. Pritzker should just say no.
Ralph Martire is executive director of the Center for Tax and Budget Accountability, a nonpartisan fiscal policy think tank, and the Arthur Rubloff Professor of Public Policy at Roosevelt University.