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.

This article is from a cover package of essays entitled Ten New Ideas for the Democratic Party to Help the Working Class, and Itself. Find the full series here.

The subject of K–12 education barely came up during the 2024 presidential campaign. But it’s likely to be a big issue in Washington soon if, as many observers expect, the Trump administration and congressional Republicans push for federal legislation to allow families to use tax dollars that would have gone to their public schools to pay for private schools. It’s a terrible policy idea on the merits—in addition to weakening public schools by draining away their funding, such “privatization” programs mostly benefit the affluent, and there is a lack of evidence that they improve student performance. But a GOP effort to privatize public education could be a golden political opportunity for Democrats if they fight it hard and propose a better plan to improve the nation’s schools—a plan that, as of now, they don’t have. 

Allowing public tax dollars to flow to private schools has been a dream of conservatives for decades. Scores of states and cities set up such programs, typically using private school vouchers, in the 1990s and 2000s. But these were often small scale and targeted to low-income families. Betsy DeVos, the education secretary in Trump’s first term, included provisions in her budget requests that would have allowed families regardless of income to use public money for private schools. Democrats in Congress shot down those proposals. But in the past few years, eight GOP-controlled states have launched what conservatives euphemistically call “universal choice” programs that are open to even the wealthiest families. And, not surprisingly, affluent families have so far disproportionately taken advantage of them.

Just because education privatization is growing, however, doesn’t mean it’s popular. In fact, it’s deeply unpopular, including with many Republican voters who live in small towns and rural areas where the local public schools are treasured civic institutions and private school options are sparse. The November elections made that clear. A ballot measure in Colorado over a state constitutional amendment that would have merely opened the door to private school programs in the future went down to defeat roughly 51 to 49 percent thanks to tepid support in rural counties. In Nebraska, a less urban state than Colorado, 57 percent of voters chose to partially repeal a state-funded private school scholarship program. And in heavily rural Kentucky, 65 percent of voters rejected a proposed constitutional amendment that would have given every student in the state the right to use public money to attend private schools.

With that record in mind, you would think Trump would hesitate to push universal choice programs at the federal level. Prudence, however, has not been his defining characteristic. Rather, he offered praise of universal choice in the rare occasions when he talked about the issue during the campaign. The idea was also endorsed by the Heritage Foundation’s controversial Project 2025 and by its rival transition organization, the America First Policy Institute, which was chaired by Linda McMahon, Trump’s current pick to be secretary of education. Despite the risks, the temptation to privatize a vast part of the public sector will be hard for Trump to resist, if history is any guide.

George W. Bush didn’t talk much about privatizing Social Security during the 2004 campaign, either. Yet once he was reelected, he grabbed the third rail of politics with both hands by pushing for the creation of individual retirement accounts using Social Security funds. The result was an epic failure. The more the public learned about his plan, the less they liked it. Minority Senate leader Harry Reid and minority House leader Nancy Pelosi whipped their caucuses into unified opposition and refused to negotiate with the Republicans. GOP leaders retreated, and the measure never came up for a vote. Bush’s approval ratings fell and never recovered.

Democrats should treat any plan to privatize public education the same way. But they will be missing an opportunity to help the working-class voters they most need to win back if they offer no alternative agenda for improving America’s public schools. And right now, the party generally lacks any such plan beyond “Pay teachers more” and similar items on the wish lists of teachers’ unions. 

The inequities in education spending and quality that have long diminished the life chances of poor and working-class kids are still there, even if we don’t talk about them as much as we did in the 1990s and 2000s. The federal reforms of that era—higher academic standards, test-based accountability mandates, and support for charter schools—helped boost some metrics of learning but proved divisive and lost political support. What Democrats need are new reform ideas that would be popular with voters, measurably improve student outcomes, unite the Democratic caucus, and possibly win some support across the aisle. 

One such idea is tutoring. Affluent parents have long known the value of paying private tutors to boost their kids’ academic success. But over the past three years, the federal government funded a vast, nationwide experiment to provide that benefit to millions of poor and working-class students. The American Rescue Plan, the mammoth $1.9 trillion COVID-relief measure that President Joe Biden signed in March 2021, contained an estimated $7.5 billion in funds that public schools used for online tutoring programs to help students during the pandemic. Not all the tutoring efforts panned out. But as Thomas Toch and Liz Cohen wrote in these pages last summer,

Schools that implemented “high-impact” tutoring—where students work in small groups during the school day with the same tutor in 30-minute sessions three times a week over several months—have been strikingly successful. Those programs are producing an average of more than four months of additional learning in elementary literacy and nearly 10 months of additional learning in secondary school math, says Susanna Loeb, a Stanford education economist who leads a highly regarded tutoring research center. “The effects we see for high-impact tutoring are larger than what we see for most other education interventions, including class-size reduction, extended day, and technology support for students,” Loeb says.

Federal money for this giant experiment in school reform is running out. But its success has prompted governors in both blue states (New Jersey and Oregon) and red ones (Tennessee and Florida) to pledge funding to continue tutoring programs. 

Despite this bipartisan enthusiasm at the state level, Republicans in Washington have shown little interest in continuing to fund a tutoring program that blossomed under Joe Biden. But there are other evidence-based education reforms that they might find more politically satisfying. For instance, in recent years, education experts have increasingly signed on to a “science of reading” consensus that the best way to teach young children to read prioritizes phonics, a traditional approach that conservatives have long championed but that got sidetracked for decades in favor of the whole language system and other methods. Democrats could give Republicans a chance to spike the ball by agreeing to support a new grant program to states and districts that embraces the new science of reading. 

Even in the minority, Democrats have the ability to develop and publicize ideas like these that have real potential to improve the quality of the schools that average Americans send their kids to. And once the war over privatizing schools is fought and won, they might be in a position to turn those ideas into policy.  

The post Tutorize, Don’t Privatize, Public Schools appeared first on Washington Monthly.

The school choice movement has had stunning political success over the past thirty years. Charter schools and voucher programs, mere ideas when Ronald Reagan took office, are now major features of the public education landscape—today, all 50 states offer some mechanism for enrolling children in schools outside their neighborhoods.

Still, the choice movement has unfolded largely at the margins of American public education. That isn’t to say that school choice is a fringe issue. Anyone attuned to education policy debates knows that isn’t the case. But the charter sector comprises only a fraction of total public school enrollments, and voucher programs remain relatively uncommon. In large part, this is because the mainstream school choice movement recognizes that choice, alone, is not enough to ensure better outcomes. As a substantial body of research confirms, the impact of charter schools and voucher programs on student learning is not consistently positive, and often it’s quite negative. Certainly, there are positive stories to tell in particular cities or particular charter networks, but on the whole, it’s hard to argue that the school choice movement has been driven by demonstrably encouraging results. Consequently, most school choice advocates have been content to win small victories—adding charter schools or voucher programs into the existing education system.

Donald Trump’s appointment of Betsy DeVos as secretary of education changed that. For DeVos, choice isn’t a desirable feature, or even a necessary prerequisite for successful school outcomes. Instead, she sees choice as a sufficient condition. Guaranteeing every child a great education, in other words, requires only a robust free market in which parents can make choices and government stays out of the way.

This vision has been most bluntly outlined through a series of analogies that DeVos has drawn in public events. Speaking recently at Harvard, for instance, she advocated for school choice by discussing the challenge of finding lunch near her office in Washington, D.C. “Near the Department of Education, there aren’t many restaurants,” she observed. “But you know what—food trucks started lining the streets to provide options.” In other words, a monopoly became a competitive marketplace and, as hungry staffers flocked to nearby food trucks, the overall food improved for everyone. Even local restaurants, DeVos noted, “have added food trucks to their businesses to better meet customer’s needs.” The moral of the story: everyone wins in a system where people can choose.

This was not an off-the-cuff remark. DeVos was delivering a prepared speech at a high-profile event, and it echoed previous comments of hers. In March, for instance, DeVos said that “the entrenched status quo” in public education “has resisted models that empower individuals.” Government, she argued, should shift its funding from schools to students, allowing families to make choices in a free market.

This is an extreme interpretation of school choice, in which charter schools and voucher programs are mechanisms for tearing apart the public education system and replacing it with a choice-based marketplace. So, previous arguments against expanding school choice—arguments largely focused on what choice will do to the existing system—are largely irrelevant. After all, DeVos has no interest in the public education system. As she put it: “This isn’t about school ‘systems.’ This is about individual students, parents, and families. Schools are at the service of students, not the other way around.”

Perhaps, then, it is time to highlight a different set of critiques, which accept the premise of education as a marketplace and schools as consumer goods. Progressives may feel uncomfortable with the exercise, since it fundamentally conflicts with the idea of education as a public good. But what it reveals is that, for a free market devotee, DeVos maintains a relatively unsophisticated view of how markets actually function. The flaws in her vision aren’t just a matter of politics; they are a matter of fact.

Start with the fact that school quality cannot be evaluated through a single experience—the way a food truck can be. Products that can be evaluated this way are referred to by economists as “experience goods.” How much do I like this grilled cheese? Give me one minute and I’ll tell you. Education, on the other hand, is largely invisible and reveals its efficacy over time, making it a “credence good”—more like a surgical procedure than a sandwich. It can often take several months just to get a sense of a new school. In fact, some of us who are decades out of school are still sorting through our thoughts about how much we learned, how positive the social experience was, and whether we benefited in the ways we might have wished.

Scholars are also quick to point out that education is far more complex than most of the goods we shop for. As David Cohen has argued, education is a socially-supported process for cultivating human improvement—an ambitious and multifaceted enterprise that takes place over many years. This grand scope presents a measurement challenge, because it is impossible to distinguish the changes in a person due to schooling from the changes due to other factors—a problem that economists describe in terms of “attribution.” With simple products like food, attribution is easy: the taste of a sandwich can be attributed to its maker. But in complex goods like education, it can be much more difficult. To whom can we attribute a child’s love of reading? Her parents, who read to her nightly? Her preschool teachers, who emphasized phonemic awareness? Her local library, which stocks interesting new titles? Her book-loving friends? Her school?

A third difficulty facing DeVos’s choice-based model of education is what economists call a “principal-agent problem.” Such a problem occurs when one person (the agent) has the power to decide on behalf of another person (the principal) who will bear the impact of that decision. In a choice-based model, parents are the agents, acting on behalf of the child. Yet it is important to recall that parents do not spend their days inside schools—they rely on children for second-hand information about the value of the education they’re receiving—what economists call a problem of information asymmetry. And, in sharing what they know, young people might be compromised by a conflict of interest. Recall, for instance, that great schools can sometimes feel like a grind, and that weak schools can sometimes be wonderfully social places. Alternatively, young people might simply not be able to adequately describe the many different components of school quality. No wonder, then, that the classic parent question “how was your day today?” is usually met with a one word answer: “Fine.”

All of this makes families extremely vulnerable to marketing. Unable to tell the true quality of a school without actually sending their children there, parents rely on word-of-mouth, reputation, and proxy measures. Schools of choice—like charter schools and private schools—are well aware of this, and can spend thousands of dollars per student on unregulated advertising campaigns. But even if parents ignore marketing, they still can be taken in by unimportant factors like the gleam of a school’s computer lab or the language used to describe its teaching philosophy. Such factors may seem important, but a school can be stocked with new technology and short on creative teaching, and educators can talk endlessly about “project-based learning” or “student-centered pedagogy” without actually engaging in it.

To complicate matters, there is the fact that education is a positional good. While some of the fruits of education are absolute—students either know how to read or do not—its usefulness in promoting social status is completely relative. As a result, parents can be drawn into anxious competition against each other for comparative advantage, and in the process may overlook the issue of school quality entirely. To make matters worse, this competitive approach ensures that however many winners the system produces, there will be far more losers, even if quality is the same across all schools.

Finally, there is the issue of a ticking clock. If a parent is unsatisfied with a school, he or she might choose another one in the educational marketplace envisioned by Betsy DeVos. But how many times might a parent do this? Whereas, say, a Department of Education staffer might try a different food truck each day with no obvious negative consequences, children cannot change schools on such a regular basis. School calendars and enrollment policies complicate matters, certainly. Yet the bigger issue is social adjustment for a child entering a new school community. There may be benefits to switching schools, but there are also real costs.

Choice is something Americans value, and research in consumer psychology reveals that people are more attached to the things they have willingly opted into. Choice can also allow people to seek out the best fit—something that in education has for too long been undervalued. In a system with greater choice, more schools can pursue unique missions that appeal to different kinds of students. But, choice, is in no way a panacea. And introducing it in a constructive way would require careful policy planning to avoid segregation, more comprehensive information about school quality, and a slew of other supports. Still, there is reason to think that carefully managed school choice might play a positive role in the future of American public education.

But this is not what Betsy DeVos is promoting when she talks about the future of school choice. In the future she envisions, there is no education system. Instead, there is a choice-based marketplace in which the only role of government is to empower families to choose. Yet we must ask: How empowering is it to make a choice when you have incomplete information? How empowering is it to think you’ve made a good decision, only to find out that you haven’t?

Betsy DeVos may be portrayed by critics as an ill-informed billionaire naïf. True, her knowledge of the public education system is incomplete, and she has revealed her ignorance on more than one occasion. But it must be remembered that DeVos is a hardnosed adherent to free market ideology. When she compares schools to food trucks, she isn’t committing a gaffe—she is communicating her dogma to non-believers. Thus, as DeVos continues to make her appeal, we have a duty to take her seriously and to think critically about what she’s selling. A choice is coming, and the future of public education hangs in the balance.

The post Betsy DeVos Doesn’t Understand How Markets Really Work appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Ben Mathis-Lilley of Slate had an appropriate response to the statement the Trump administration released from Education Secretary of Betsy DeVos after their meeting with leaders of Historically Black Colleges and Universities yesterday. But, first, let’s look at the press release:

So, that statement is bonkers.

…this official 2017 federal government press release celebrates legal segregation (!!!) on the grounds that the Jim Crow education system gave black students “more options,” as if there was a robust competition between HBCUs and white universities for their patronage. (When black Mississippian James Meredith chose the “option” of enrolling at the University of Mississippi in 1962, a massive white mob formed on the campus; two people were shot to death and hundreds injured in the ensuing battle/riot, during which federal marshals came under heavy gunfire, requiring the ultimate intervention of 20,000 U.S. soldiers and thousands more National Guardsmen.)

It actually starts out in a defensible way. It’s true that HBCU’s arose because blacks were underserved and did not have equal access to (higher) education.  One (sort of) accurate way of putting this is that black leaders saw “that the system wasn’t working” and that they “took it upon themselves to provide the solution.”

After that point, however, DeVos’s statement goes off the rails, catches fire and explodes.

HBCUs didn’t provide more choices. They provided a choice.

In 1862, the Federal government’s Morrill Act provided for land grant colleges in each state. Some educational institutions in the North or West were open to blacks before the Civil War. But 17 states, mostly in the South, had segregated systems and generally excluded black students from their land grant colleges. In response, Congress passed the second Morrill Act of 1890, also known as the Agricultural College Act of 1890, requiring states to establish a separate land grant college for blacks if blacks were being excluded from the existing land grant college. Many of the HBCUs were founded by states to satisfy the Second Morrill Act. These land grant schools continue to receive annual federal funding for their research, extension and outreach activities.

As you can see, it took more than “taking it upon themselves” to get HBCUs up and rolling. It took hard work from organizers and the allies in Congress they created. But that’s just a quibble. The real sin is in suggesting that HBCUs somehow justify DeVos’s educational ideology on school choice, school voucher programs, and charter schools. The HBCUs are not “pioneers of school choice” unless you mean a great student could choose between Howard and Morehouse.

But, look on the bright side, at least she didn’t say, as Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal did last November, “The irony of some of the groups who are opposing doing something to help these minority children is beyond my logic. If you want to advance the state of colored people, start with their children.”

Of course, Deal meant that you could help children by passing an amendment to the state Constitution that would allow for-profit charter schools to take over for failing public ones.

As you might expect, the NAACP opposed it. On Election Day, so did the voters.

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