There’s nothing education wonks love more than slapping the word “innovation” onto an idea. The innovation du jour is Donald Trump’s school-choice tax credit, formally known as the “Educational Choice for Children Act,” which the president signed in July. If you read that title and suspect this is a tax diversion to support families who pay, or want to pay, for private or religious school tuition, you’ve got the idea. 

This federal tax credit benefits donors who give to a 501(c)(3) nonprofit “scholarship granting organization” (SGO). These SGOs must award at least 90 percent of donations in scholarships for “qualified” educational expenses, including tuition, fees, academic tutoring, and special needs services, among other items, at public, private, and religious schools. Governors (or other state-designated authorities) must opt into the program annually as well as approve their state’s SGOs. Children in elementary and secondary grades with family incomes of up to 300 percent of their area’s median household income are eligible recipients. This means that wealthier families living in affluent areas will still benefit. By some estimates, nearly 90 percent of the population will qualify. 

“Red” state governors, especially in states that already have private school choice programs, are likely to opt in. Maybe that’s why all the political chatter has been about whether “blue” state governors should opt in as well. And, boy, has there been chatter. 

The “say yes” crowd has been busy, opining in op-eds, blog posts, and webinars touting the tax credit as an innovative way to help underprivileged kids. Public money for private schools may be deeply unpopular among voters. Nonetheless, the tax credit’s cheerleaders have argued that blue state governors can “mold” the program, targeting funds to low-income public school kids for academic tutoring, for example, or outlawing scholarships for providers who don’t meet anti-discrimination or accountability requirements.  

But any connection between the tax credit and better student achievement is murky. There’s no requirement that schools or affiliated vendors meet any academic outcomes, or even that they measure and report them, only that they provide eligible services. There’s also no incentive for schools or affiliated vendors to innovate. Existing operators with client lists, cash flow, marketing, and established programs will have an enormous advantage. New operators will not only need start-up capital but must assume SGOs serving their area will raise enough money to give scholarships to enough kids in large enough amounts, and that their organization will be the beneficiary of enough of this largesse. And that’s to keep their doors open, not to provide quality.  

An even bigger problem: we have no evidence that governors will be able to mold the program at all. The law grants governors only elemental powers (opt in! approve a list!). It leaves guidance to the Department of the Treasury, which must promulgate regulations before January 1, 2027, when the tax credit goes into effect. In late November, the Treasury and the IRS released a request for comment indicating they have no intention of granting governors broad authority. Treasury will almost certainly require governors to “…include all organizations located in the State that have requested to be designated as an SGO and that meet [the law’s] statutory requirements.” That means governors couldn’t exclude SGOs that fund private school tuition or require anti-discrimination rules. A “take it or leave it” program model now seems inevitable.  

If governors can’t mold the program, can SGOs impose their own restrictions? This too is unclear, but the request for comment states Treasury and the IRS “do not anticipate that the forthcoming proposed regulations would prohibit an SGO from itself imposing additional governing provisions beyond the requirements imposed by [the law]…” This may mean that SGOs could target funds to particular students, such as those below a certain income or attending a certain school type, or specific uses, such as private school tuition or academic tutoring. Even if SGOs are allowed this freedom, it won’t automatically lead to better outcomes for low-income or academically at-risk kids. For every SGO that targets low-income public school kids for tutoring, there will be an SGO—or two or three—that targets kids of all incomes seeking to attend religious or private schools. After all, this program was designed to support non-public schools, which already have donors who might be highly motivated by a tax credit.  

And here is the money problem. SGOs can disburse only as much as they raise, a core difference between tax credit programs and state-funded voucher programs. Since the tax credit is not refundable (meaning donors don’t get money back after filing their taxes), donors are merely redirecting the tax money they would have paid to the federal government to an SGO. Tax credit-seeking donors must believe in the cause promoted by an SGO to find it worthwhile. The law doesn’t allow donations, which are capped at $1,700, to be earmarked for a particular student. However, it is silent on whether donors may earmark their contributions for a specific school, as long as the SGO awards scholarships to “10 or more students who do not all attend the same school.” SGOs in wealthy areas that grant scholarships to schools with existing individual donor bases are much more likely to raise significant cash. 

I understand why public school supporters want to be excited about this tax credit. It could result in billions of dollars for SGOs. But let’s call a spade, a spade. This is a private school choice program that might benefit public school students at the margins—if enough SGOs target them, if they can raise enough money, if they give large scholarships…if, if, if. The tax credit is best understood as a stalking horse for private school choice advocates’ long-term effort to secure direct federal funding. Instead of trying to turn the tax credit into something it’s not, public school supporters should focus on how we’re using—and protecting—the resources we already have to give the 49 million children in America’s public schools a much better education.

The post Trump’s Education Tax Credit Gambit  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

The first weeks of fall at Arlie Boggs Elementary School in rural Eolie, Kentucky, are usually filled with back-to-school routines. New names line the cubbies, and the hallways gleam with a fresh coat of wax. The sounds of a new school year fill the classrooms.

But not this year. Today, Arlie Boggs sits empty. The school, located deep in coal country, was facing enrollment declines, and, in April, its school board voted to shutter it.

Arlie Boggs is not alone. Before the pandemic, about two thousand U.S. public schools were closed yearly. Now, we’re likely to surpass that rate. This year, officials in communities large and small—Eolie, Denver, El Paso, Texas, and Fairbanks, Alaska—shuttered schools. And more closures are coming. School districts are facing unprecedented budget crises, exacerbated by threats to federal funding. Populations are dropping in many places, and policies that expand voucher programs are siphoning off public school students.

So, the St. Louis School Board is considering closing more than half of its 68 public schools in 2026-27. In Texas, the Austin Independent School District recommends closing 13 schools. Norfolk, Virginia, is considering nine closures. In West Virginia, where 53 schools have closed in the past five years, another seven are slated for closure in the coming years. Vermont just passed legislation that could close dozens of schools.

As a researcher studying school closures, I know they can be difficult to oppose. Amid declining enrollments and tight budgets, cutting costs and shuttering buildings seems logical—even responsible.

But not always—and perhaps not even usually.

There’s a wealth of faulty assumptions about what happens after schools close. Research suggests that closing schools doesn’t save much money. It typically doesn’t reduce personnel—a district’s largest line item—and many schools require renovation to accommodate students leaving shuttered facilities. Transportation costs increase, and selling the old school building can be hard. In fact, the president of a rural New England school board that recently decided to shut one of its schools—due to concerns about the cost of its operation—told me that, in the end, the closure would save the district nothing. But the assumed logic of closure was too powerful to counter.

Closing schools also negatively affects students. Many spend more time commuting—sometimes over four hours daily—reducing time for extracurricular activities or family dinners. This travel can be dangerous, especially through neighborhoods with higher crime rates or over risky mountain passes. Absenteeism and behavioral problems tend to rise. Studies indicate short-term declines in achievement test scores. In the long run, school closures can harm college completion, job prospects, and earnings.

Closures hurt communities, too. When a school closes, local jobs are lost, and businesses that depend on a nearby school—such as local diners, banks, and gas stations—may also close. Families move to be closer to their children’s school. Schools are also places where people gather, engage politically, and make memories. It’s no wonder that school closures often face fierce resistance—even hunger strikes.

And then there’s this: school closures can often be discriminatory. Researchers Rachel Greene-Bell and Francis Pearman found that, from 2000 to 2018, majority Black schools were more than three times as likely to close as majority non-Black schools. Other studies show that low-income students and communities are disproportionately affected by closures. The closures may be particularly damaging for rural communities, where losing a school requires parents to choose between long commutes and homeschooling. The burden of school closure, then, is not felt equally.

Despite officials’ rhetoric, school closures aren’t about enrollment, budgets, or academic quality. These closures are the so-called “solution” to problems that policymakers helped create, often over decades: white flight, the privatization of education, and the neglect of our public institutions. And this “solution” only perpetuates the injustice.

Now we find ourselves in a crisis, with budgets that can’t pass and enrollments that won’t recover. At this point, some districts may now have few options but closure. But we can take a fairer, more measured approach. First, we should question the assumptions about closure. Projections of savings need to be thorough, honest, and rigorously examined. All costs associated with closure, including those for the surrounding communities, must be included. Promises regarding academics or extracurriculars—such as improved test scores or expanded opportunities—must be supported by evidence, and have clear methods of accountability. Educational quality should be the goal, not arbitrary enrollment minimums.

School boards and other municipal authorities should engage students and families in complex discussions about the fate of their schools from the start, not after rendering a decision. They should acknowledge the critical economic and social roles that schools play in communities and keep them in the places that need them most. If closure must happen, the burden should be shared equally, regardless of race or income.

Closure isn’t a convenient solution—it’s a nuclear option. It should be the last resort.

Note: For research backing up most claims about closure’s effects, see: https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1233167. Research supporting remaining claims is linked above.

The post Don’t Fall for the School Closure Temptation appeared first on Washington Monthly.

During the 2024 campaign, Donald Trump demeaned institutions of higher education as boondoggle bastions of Marxism and scary “DEI” policies, while touting the value of vocational education to help people get good-paying jobs. Now back in the Oval Office, he has the opportunity to turn his impulses on education into policies. But we’ve seen far more focus on who he wants to punish than who he claims he wants to help. 

Harvard and Columbia have faced the most vicious attacks, including attempts to rescind federal funding, influence faculty hires, and ban admission of international students. Trump recently threatened to revoke Columbia’s accreditation. Beyond those targeted salvos, the pending tax cut and spending reform measure known as the One Big Beautiful Bill includes a stiff tax increase on university endowments, especially for institutions with large endowments.  

Trump’s efforts to help bolster and broaden the working class through vocational education have received less attention, which is understandable because the efforts are meager at best. The need to train workers with the skills necessary to find good-paying jobs is always essential, but the need is even more acute today with artificial intelligence and automation rapidly upending the nature of work. 

President Donald Trump issued an executive order in April titled “Preparing Americans for High-Paying Skilled Trade Jobs of the Future,” signaling a reorientation of education policy. 

The executive order didn’t do much on its own. It directed certain cabinet secretaries to produce by late July a set of “strategies to help the American worker” and “identify alternative credentials and assessments to the 4-year college degree that can be mapped to the specific skill needs of prospective employers.” By late August, the secretaries must detail a “plan to reach and surpass 1 million new active apprentices.” 

Those plans haven’t been released yet, but the Trump administration and congressional Republicans don’t have to wait. They could start investing in more vocational education in the One Big Beautiful Bill. And Trump could show his support for additional investment in his Fiscal Year 2026 budget, which is supposed to inform Congress’s work on the annual spending bills that keep the federal government functioning. 

So why are we seeing far more vocational education cuts than investments? 

A major vocational education component of Trump’s budget is consolidating 11 workforce training programs into a singular Make America Skilled Again [MASA] grant program. However, Paul Fain of The Job newsletter reported that the net result is a $1.64 billion cut, a reduction in workforce training spending of about one-third. “The strong consensus we heard from workforce experts,” Fain wrote, “was that the administration’s proposed budget gashing would overshadow efficiencies or other gains that could be realized even with a very well-executed creation of a MASA system. Most say the big plans sound disingenuous alongside an attempt to cut available federal dollars in half.” 

Trump’s executive order emphasizes support for apprenticeships—on-the-job training programs in the skilled trades that often lead to high-paying jobs—and his budget proposal sets aside 10 percent of his MASA grants for apprenticeships. But the National Skills Coalition, a network of corporations and philanthropic organizations that support “inclusive, high-quality skills training,” is unimpressed: “Even with the 10 percent requirement set aside for apprenticeship, roughly $296.6 million of the proposed MASA budget, that’s only an $11 million increase from current levels while $1.6 billion is cut from other workforce programs. The result: a modest bump in apprenticeship funding, but a much larger drop in overall training access.” Fain further notes, “Even the 10 percent requirement could be below current apprenticeship funding levels.” 

The One Big Beautiful Bill has nothing big for vocational education either, as what is in the bill is less than meets the eye. The House-passed version reforms the Pell Grant program to include a Workforce Pell grant, which can be used for short-term job training programs that can be completed in 150 to 600 hours. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the provision would cost about $300 million over a 10-year period, with 100,000 people receiving $2,200 grants by 2034.  

The basic idea of expanding the Pell Grant program to include short-term job training has broad bipartisan support. But the House bill puts a pittance of funds towards Workforce Pell while taking a sledgehammer to traditional Pell, more than doubling the number of credits students need to qualify for full-time enrollment. CBO projects this will leave more than half of Pell recipients with smaller grants, taking $7 billion out of the program. The Center for American Progress further concludes, “This means that in the 2024-25 academic year, only about 2.5 million of the 6.9 million Pell Grant recipients nationwide would have qualified as full time under the new definition. The other two-thirds, about 4.4 million students, would have their award amount prorated based on the number of credits they were enrolled in, or they would lose their Pell Grants completely….”  

Furthermore, some traditional Pell Grant recipients are already enrolled in short-term vocational programs. The CBO analysis notes that “using information from community colleges and research on postsecondary education, CBO expects that many of the students already receive Pell grants because they are enrolled in short-term programs that are ‘stacked’ within longer-term programs that are eligible for Pell grant funding. As a result, under current law, those students can receive Pell grants even if they do not complete the longer-term program.” Vocational education gains with the creation of Workforce Pell may be negated by losses in traditional Pell. 

Moreover, the House bill establishes weak standards for what job training programs qualify for the Workforce Pell program, which will likely lead to participation by ineffective and shady operators. Back in 2021, the Washington Monthly’s Anne Kim counseled that a strong Workforce Pell program could use the approach found in bipartisan legislation written by Democratic Senator Tim Kaine and then-Republican Senator Rob Portman, whose “bill explicitly excludes for-profits from receiving short-term Pell and limits program eligibility to sectors where workers are in demand.” 

Stephanie Cellini, a George Washington University professor and expert on job programs, “has little faith that workforce Pell’s regulations will do much to discourage unscrupulous providers from benefiting,” according to Inside Higher Ed. “The completion and job-placement thresholds, she said, are ‘easily gameable’ since they’re self-reported.” Michelle Dimino, the Director of Education at the Third Way think tank, concludes, “ignoring for-profit colleges’ historical track record of abuse and aggressive recruiting when granted access to new federal aid puts student and taxpayer investment in jeopardy.” 

The yet-to-pass Senate version of the One Big Beautiful Bill does not include the House’s cuts to traditional Pell Grants but does include the weak Workforce Pell standards. 

The bill will also gut the clean energy tax credit program established in the Biden administration with the Inflation Reduction Act. What does that have to do with vocational education? Because the Inflation Reduction Act included bonus credits for apprenticeships in clean energy projects.  

Separate from the legislative process, the Trump administration also aims to undermine Biden’s semiconductor manufacturing bill, known as the CHIPS Act. Axios reported earlier this month, “the Trump administration is renegotiating some CHIPS Act awards, and some previously approved deals likely won’t survive.” CHIPS also included $200 million for job training and workforce development, so any rollback in CHIPS will also negatively impact vocational education. 

Also, without legislation, the Trump administration is trying to shut down the Job Corps program, which provides job training, housing, food, and health care to about 25,000 poor young people at 99 job centers. A Department of Labor order from last month shutting down the centers was stayed by court order, and Job Corps participants have filed a class action lawsuit. Trump’s Fiscal Year 2026 budget also zeroes out the program.  

Job Corps is widely considered to be a flawed program. Kim, for the Monthly, wrote in 2021, “Government audits have been harsh, documenting mismanagement, safety problems, and persistent failures to place trainees into meaningful jobs … Rather than the young people it purports to serve, the program’s biggest beneficiaries may be a tight-knit coterie of for-profit government contractors who administer the program, some of whom have held on to multimillion-dollar contracts for decades.”  

Kim argued that the Job Corps should be reformed and augmented with more promising initiatives like apprenticeship programs. But Trump’s Labor Department officials are doing nothing of the sort. They’re just trying to shut it down without repurposing the money for other vocational education.  

The totality of what the Trump administration and the Republican Congress are doing with vocational education is not a thoughtful approach to lift the poor and raise living standards for the working class. “The left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing here,” said apprenticeship advocate Ryan Craig after Trump’s budget was published. That’s a charitable assessment, presuming that some hand inside the White House or congressional majority is sincerely interested in expanding job opportunities. If there were, concrete action could be taken right now, with real money in the One Big Beautiful Bill for good-quality workforce training programs or constructive Job Corps reforms.  

Trump understands the crude culture war politics of education. Vocational education is manly and leads to jobs that make real things. Liberal arts degrees are for wimpy trust fund babies who don’t contribute to society and don’t deserve support from taxpayer dollars. So, express support for the former and disparage the latter.  

In reality, we need federal support for all kinds of education. There is more than one way to make a living and more than one educational pathway to success. A zero-sum approach is needlessly myopic. But calling the Republican education agenda “zero-sum” is far too complementary because in their legislation, budget, and executive actions, there is very little addition and an excess of subtraction. 

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