Here is the cleverest trick in the school-choice playbook: persuade people that a tax bill is a charity drive.
Under the new federal program, a taxpayer can give up to $1,700 to a scholarship-granting organization and cut their federal income tax by exactly $1,700. The donor gives up nothing. Not a dollar. The Treasury absorbs the whole cost, and the donor gets to decide where public money goes. Call it philanthropy if you like, but it is a spending program with no appropriation, no public vote and no accountability, and the people who direct the money are the ones with enough tax liability to use it. Treasury's estimate of nearly $26 billion flowing through the program by 2030 is a measure of how much public revenue is being privatized.
So it is dispiriting to watch Democratic governors treat the opt-in decision as a shrewd bit of pragmatism. Jared Polis is the loudest example, and his pitch is not foolish on its face. Tutoring, summer programs and laptops for kids who lack them are good things. Supporters say public-school students deserve a piece of the pie. If red states take the money anyway, why should a blue state's kids be left out?
Because the program's design answers that question, and the answer is no. Jessica Levin of the Education Law Center points to the obvious problem: private schools have the alumni networks, parent donors and development offices to attract this money. A struggling public school in a poor district has none of that. Scholarship organizations also have wide discretion over who gets what, and nothing guarantees that a dollar goes to the child who needs it most. Then there is Georgetown's Marguerite Roza, who notes that districts might have to charge fees for tutoring or enrichment just to tap the funds, since basic instruction is free by law. Think about that. A program sold as help for public schools could teach them to put a price tag on services that families once took for granted. That inverts the premise of public education.
The defenders' best argument is that families are drowning now and can't wait for an ideal system. I take that seriously. But a program that works only when public schools start charging, or when wealthy donors choose to be generous toward them, is not a rescue. It is a reallocation of who holds the power. Kids in under-resourced schools become supplicants to a charitable marketplace in which the better-connected institutions have a head start.
The larger offense is what this does to the idea of a common obligation. For generations, Americans agreed that the public pays for public schools and answers for the results through elected boards and open budgets. A tax-credit scholarship system quietly replaces that with a private, donor-driven channel that has little transparency and answers to nobody in particular. The money leaves the public ledger and shows up in a private one.
Democrats who feel pulled toward opting in should ask who wrote the rules. This is Republican architecture, built to expand private-school funding and wrapped in language about "all students" so that a few Democratic governors will bless it. Their signatures are the product being sold. Once they supply that bipartisan cover, the program becomes much harder to roll back, and the next version will be larger.
If a governor still opts in, the price should be steep and public: strict limits on how much can go to private tuition, income targeting that is actually enforced, civil-rights protections that follow every dollar, real data on who receives what, and a requirement that districts can use the money without charging families. If those guarantees can't be had, the answer is no. A governor who takes the deal on the other side's terms is not being pragmatic. He is helping to defund the institution he is supposed to defend.
How it may affect me
If you live in a state whose governor opts in, you could direct up to $1,700 of your federal tax bill to a scholarship organization at no cost to you. Whether your local public school benefits depends on which organizations operate in your state and how they allocate money. Check your governor's decision and the organizations' spending rules before assuming it helps neighborhood schools.
