Get the Facts About Trump's Terrible School Voucher Scheme
Like most everything else Trump, it's all bad news
In The Public Interest is sharing a fact sheet about Trump’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad school voucher scheme.
Among the facts about the tax credit:
• This is a private school voucher program, championed by Project 2025, Besty DeVos, Senator Ted Cruz and others, designed to funnel public funds into unaccountable K-12 private and religious schools.
• Opt-in states cannot put conditions on the program that would change this fact. States cannot transform this into a program that solely supports public school students.
• Private schools that accept vouchers under the federal tax credit voucher program do not provide the same civil rights and protections as public schools, such as those in Titles IV and VI of the Civil Rights
Act, Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972, and the Elementary and Secondary Education of 1965 (ESEA).
• Students with disabilities will lose many protections and rights if they use a voucher through this program to attend a private school, including those in the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act, and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act.
• Basic academic accountability and reporting requirements such as annual comparable testing for K-12 students, monitoring of high school graduation rates, and oversight for struggling schools are absent from this program.
• Private school voucher programs are rooted in the effort to resist school integration and preserve racial segregation after the Brown v. Board decision. Today, these programs can exacerbate already high levels of de-facto school segregation.
• The official Congressional estimate finds that this program will cost taxpayers $25.9 billion over ten years. Other estimates for this uncapped federal program are as high as $51 billion annually. Thesetaxpayer funds could all be directly put into public schools if Congress repealed the voucher program and reinvested these funds.
• This program requires taxpayers in rural areas to foot the bill for a program that is largely inaccessible to them, as rural areas have little, if any, access to private schools.
• With extremely high-income eligibility – about $500,000 annually for a family of four in the DC-metro area alone – this program will underwrite private school for wealthy families.
• There are no meaningful protections for waste fraud and abuse, despite the fact that state universal voucher programs have lost track of hundreds of millions of dollars, and paid for espresso machines, and tickets to Disney World.
• The program privileges contributions to private school vouchers over charitable causes. It allows taxpayers to shift up to $1,700 of their tax obligation to SGOs and get a full refund via a tax credit in return.
• Over 160 national, state, and local education, civil rights, disability rights, and religious freedom organizations have called on Congress to repeal the federal voucher program.
The Fact Sheet was developed by the National Coalition for Public Education (NCPE).
For more information on the federal tax credit private school voucher program’s many harms, please visit the National Coalition for Public Education’s website and the Public Funds Public Schools Project.
