The Midterms Sent a Clear Message to Governors to Stay Out of the Federal School Voucher Program…Let Us Explain 

By Sharon Krengel 

The midterms are over, and January 1, 2027, is fast approaching. What’s the connection? The new year brings a new, harmful program courtesy of the Trump administration that has spent the past two years feeding public education to the woodchipper: the first ever federal private school voucher program. But the recent midterm results show that citizens across this nation opted to elect public school supporters, not voucher schemers.  

Let’s take Texas for example. Ousted Governor Greg Abbott shoved vouchers down that state’s throat, calling special legislative session after special legislative session and primarying legislators in his own party who wouldn’t get on board. So now Texas sends 83% of its private education vouchers to students who already attended private school, and a slew of families have returned the voucher money, probably because private schools choose their students and can deny admission for any reason. 

But the upshot in Texas is even more telling. On Election Day, Texans refused to give Abbott another term and instead chose an unabashedly pro-public-education, anti-voucher governor to lead them. And Texas wasn’t alone. Indiana tossed out the pro-voucher chair of their state’s House Education Committee. Iowa chose a new governor who wants to rein in that state’s voucher program. And those are just some of the pro-public-education results. 

The lessons from those and other states’ voucher programs are myriad and certainly cause for pause for anybody touting the benefits of the federal voucher program. How many times do we have to read about the budget-busting costs of ever expanding voucher schemes; the waste, fraud and abuse inherent in these programs; the lack of any meaningful accountability; voucher students’ poor academic outcomes; and the funding of discrimination with public money? The ink spilled detailing these harms could turn an Olympic-sized swimming pool black, and yet the positive spin endures and is now being trained on the federal program. 

At Education Law Center, we have worked to protect public education and stop the spread of private school vouchers for many years. We direct the Public Funds Public Schools (PFPS) program, whose name says it all. Through PFPS, we have sued, analyzed and reported on state voucher programs for almost a decade. We spearheaded the 2024 New Jersey campaign against vouchers that resulted in proposed bills being pulled from the State Legislature. We’ve now analyzed, written and presented extensively about the new federal voucher program and collected all of that material, as well as useful resources from other organizations, in an easy to use webpage.  

And yet…even folks who consider themselves public school supporters seem to have been taken in by the dollar signs dangled by the same administration that cut Medicaid and SNAP benefits, cut taxes for billionaires, is trying to destroy the U.S. Department of Education (USED) and its Office for Civil Rights, holds back public school funding that Congress has allocated, and the list goes on (and on and on and on…). 

Here’s the bottom line: the so-called Federal Scholarship Tax Credit will not help public schools. It will hurt them. Repeat that line again – it will hurt them. The law prioritizes private schools that charge tuition, while public schools do not charge for the vast majority of their programs and services. Anybody suggesting they should charge for more services is taking every state’s system of public education down an illegal, immoral and inequitable slippery slope. 

The so-called Scholarship Granting Organizations (SGO) that the law tasks with collecting taxpayer contributions (which are credited at 100% unlike any other charitable giving permitted by the federal government) can hold on to a whopping 10% of that money before divvying up the rest for students. SGOs already in existence in voucher states are raring to go, and national SGOs supported by private equity are poised to vacuum up this money, all while public schools and their supporters face a challenging road to creating their own SGOs. 

Some have suggested that states just put more conditions on the SGOs giving out federal vouchers, requiring them to prioritize low-income and/or public school students or forbidding them from offering vouchers to students attending private schools that discriminate. Vermont actually passed a law saying as much. Five governors, including New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill, sent an October letter to the U.S. Treasury asking for clarification on this. We very much appreciate that these governors are doing their due diligence, but the truth is we already know enough from Treasury and from the law itself – states are not permitted to tell SGOs what to do beyond very minimal federal requirements (e.g., SGOs have to be non-profits, which hardly eliminates the private financial interests noted above). 

So what will happen to public education if governors opt in to the federal voucher program? More students will be incentivized to leave their public schools, leading to lower enrollment and therefore less funding while structural costs remain high. After scrambling to partner with SGOs, school districts will find that tax credit contributions are available in wealthy communities but not in low-income ones, increasing inequity and creating “Title I for rich kids.” The federal treasury will lose billions and billions of taxpayer dollars that should be used to support the public goods we all rely on, including public education, one of the core public institutions underpinning American democracy. 

And what will happen to public education if governors do not opt in to the federal scheme? Absolutely nothing. Large numbers of New Jersey taxpayers won’t send their contributions to out-of-state SGOs because that’s not how charitable giving actually works (well, except among billionaires). Most folks don’t even know about this program, which is also why it’s hard to imagine in-state SGOs reaping tons of money. And school districts won’t be forced into the rat race of trying to partner with like-minded SGOs, coming up with ways to elicit contributions, informing school families about how to request vouchers and for what (after they’ve figured out what that “what” is), and ending up with the piddly sums that won’t fix their budgets (by the way, the federal law doesn’t allow SGOs to provide vouchers directly to public schools to pay for operating costs). 

If you’ve read this far, you’re clearly interested! So here’s what we can do about this ill-conceived, harmful, anti-public-education program with the Trump administration’s fingerprints all over it: let’s repeal the entire program. In fact, there’s a bill in Congress to do just that, and it has 111 co-sponsors in the House and 35 in the Senate, including New Jersey Senators Cory Booker and Andy Kim. 

In summary, this is our message to those governors who have not yet decided to stay out of the federal scheme: look at what voters told us in the midterms! (In fact, voters have been saying the same thing for decades; school voucher ballot measures have never ever passed.) On November 3, voters threw the privatizers out and said: support our public schools; provide public resources to our public schools; and stop ignoring, or worse, trashing the public institutions our communities rely on and truly care about.  

That’s the message worth listening to. Public funds for public schools. It’s that simple. 

Sharon Krengel is Director of Policy, Strategic Partnerships and Communications at ELC. 

Visit ELC’s Public Funds Public Schools federal school vouchers resource hub for links to a wide range of helpful materials from us and many of our partners.

Press Contact:
Sharon Krengel
Director of Policy, Strategic Partnerships and Communications
skrengel@edlawcenter.org
973-624-1815, x240