How To Avoid School Choice Accountability
After Betsy DeVos’s last round of Congressional obfuscation testimony, many folks are asking the same question as EdWeek ― “When Do Voucher Programs Allow Private Schools To Discriminate Against Students?” DeVos answered variations on the question with repetitions of one answer:
Schools that receive federal funds must follow federal law, period.
I don’t have a direct line to DeVos’s brain, so I can’t discern for certain what she’s thinking, but I do know a way to keep funneling tax dollars to voucher programs and let those voucher schools discriminate in any and all ways they wish to, all without violating the above quote.
In Pennsylvania, we call them Educational Improvement Tax Credits, and they work like this (beware: oversimplification in the service of clarity dead ahead). My corporation has a tax bill of $1,000 in taxes that would ordinarily go to public education. But instead of sending the taxes to the state capital, I send $900 to Nifty Educational Privatey Organization. I get credit for paying $900 of my taxes, and those dollars go straight to NEPO, a group that distributes “scholarships” (aka “vouchers”) to students who want to attend private schools. Meanwhile, the local public school system receives $900 fewer taxpayer dollars.
But notice― the $900 from GreeneCorps never touched the government’s hands, so technically, those are not “government” funds.
In Arizona this dodge is called a “tax credit voucher” program, and it has provided new How To Avoid School Choice Accountability | HuffPost:
