The looming GOP divide over school vouchers

In announcing the nomination of Linda McMahon, a former professional wrestling executive, to his cabinet, President-elect Donald Trump proclaimed, “As Secretary of Education, Linda will fight tirelessly to expand ‘Choice’ to every State in America, and empower parents to make the best Education decision for families.”

It’s a reference to school vouchers, a priority for Trump, some of his biggest donors, and the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. The plan would allow parents to pay private school tuition or subsidize homeschooling with taxpayer money earmarked for public schools.

But the party’s rural base is far less enamored: Voters in three states this year sent important signals that the answer to parents’ frustration is not universal school vouchers.

In Nebraska, 57% of voters defeated a proposal to give low-income families tax-credit scholarships to pay for private schools. In Kentucky, 65% of voters defeated a proposed state constitutional amendment to divert tax dollars to private schools. And in Colorado, 62% of voters rejected an effort to amend the state’s constitution by adding a “right to school choice.”

For years, as wealthy conservative donors have used culture wars and the pandemic to accelerate the school choice movement, Americans in rural areas have raised the loudest concerns. For them, private schools are scarce and their communities are dependent on state dollars for public education because the property tax base is low. Concerns of rural lawmakers have been so great that they’ve stymied school choice expansion efforts in states like Georgia, Idaho, Virginia and Texas.

Nevertheless, conservative Republicans in D.C. see voucher expansion as an essential step toward imbuing Christian traditions into K-12 education, and the odds of it happening rather quickly in the new administration are actually pretty good, says Josh Cowen, professor of education policy at Michigan State University and an expert on school choice.

The Senate’s Educational Choice for Children Act would federalize a tax credit program that is already in force using state taxes in nearly two dozen states, he said. The bill has “already made it to the House floor. It’s moved farther than [a voucher bill] ever has, and it’s something they can get behind right away to try to deliver a quick win for the chief.”

The program would allow donors to deduct contributions to “scholarship” organizations from their federal taxes. The organizations would send vouchers of up to $5,000 per student to families to use for private school tuition, and families making up to 300% of the area’s median income would be eligible. It’s a carefully crafted workaround that essentially allows parents to bypass the public system without the state directly subsidizing religious schools. The annual costs to taxpayers? Between $5 and $10 billion.

It’s not clear that Republicans can get 50 votes in the Senate or even 218 Republicans in the House to get behind a stand-alone bill. There’s speculation that Congress could write the measure into the next budget reconciliation act — which is expected to be one of the first orders of business for the new Congress — or fold it into next year’s extension of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Both measures require only a simple majority vote to pass.

There are 37 states with some form of school choice policies in force, with 12 states enacting programs that give vouchers to all students without restrictions. Many of these programs have been enacted with few guardrails, and the instability they have caused is measurable: opportunistic private schools have increased tuition, unanticipated costs have ballooned state budgets, hands-off rules have led to wasteful spending, and funding for traditional public schools — which 90% of America’s school children attend — is falling.

Then there’s the data highlighting the raw inequity: Studies show that 65% to 90% of the families that received voucher funds were already sending their children to private schools. That means that families in both rural and urban areas with no access to those schools, or who don’t have the flexibility to use vouchers to homeschool their kids, are subsidizing those who do.

There’s also no guarantee that vouchers create better-educated students. Decades of research show mixed results. And students of diverse ethnicities, disabilities and economic backgrounds receive fewer resources and experience lower educational outcomes when voucher programs exist.

Trump and the conservative donors behind the school-choice movement suggest that in tandem with sending voucher money to states, Congress should abolish the Department of Education. But Trump can’t delete a federal department as if it’s an app on his phone, and no one in either party expects him to get the 60 votes needed to overcome a Senate filibuster. So when announcing McMahon’s appointment, Trump conveniently left that idea out.

Some school choice advocates claim the public is clamoring for voucher programs. It’s true that parents are frustrated by the school closures and educational losses of the COVID pandemic. The Pew Research Center reports that 51% of the country say America’s K-12 schools are heading in the wrong direction. But as the voters in Kentucky, Nebraska and Colorado show, there are plenty of parents — even in solidly Republican states — who don’t think vouchers are the right solution.

When it comes to fixing education, Congress should listen to these voters and reject universal school vouchers. America’s K-12 public school system is fundamental to the nation’s competitive strength. It’s built on the ideal of universal access and equal opportunity. If the federal government nationalizes school vouchers, it would signal the intentional dismantling of the U.S. public education system and destabilize what’s left of a very good thing.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners. Mary Ellen Klas is a politics and policy columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A former capital bureau chief for the Miami Herald, she has covered politics and government for more than three decades.