Guess which state spends the most public funds on private and religious school education. (Hint: Betsy DeVos has a house there.)
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos just announced she is backing Senate legislation that would create the first federally funded school tax credit, so it seems like a good time to see which states spend public money to send kids to private and religious schools — and how much.
To be clear, the new legislation has virtually no chance of passing Congress; Democrats now control the House and most of them wouldn’t support it. A similar idea couldn’t muster enough enthusiasm a few years ago when Republicans controlled the House and the Senate.
And it is worth noting that DeVos opposes federal involvement in education — she once said “government sucks” — and she believes that choice programs, like all education, are best at the state and local level. She couldn’t, of course, oppose a federal choice program. But she isn’t likely to appreciate federal restrictions that would necessarily be attached to the money.
Tax credits are just one of the programs that fall under the branch of the “school choice” movement that seeks to use public money to send children to private and religious schools — even when those schools can legally discriminate against LBGTQ students and other groups of students. There are, however, differences in how the programs work throughout the country, structured according to the laws of each state.
The issue is central to the national education debate. Supporters say families should have options for their children. Opponents say it is unconstitutional to use public funds for religious education and that these programs drain resources from public school districts that educate most of America’s children. The Supreme Court is expected to soon get a case that addresses the constitutionality of voucher programs.
Under tax credit scholarship programs, donors take tax deductions for contributions they make to a state-sanctioned entity that distributes those contributions to qualified students who then use the money for private and religious schools.
There are, according to the pro-choice nonprofit group EdChoice, 23 tax-credit scholarship programs in 18 states: Alabama, Arizona (4), Florida (2), Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Montana, New Hampshire, Nevada, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania (2), Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota and Virginia.
EdChoice is an Indiana-based nonprofit with a mission to privatize the public education system through a universal voucher system. (You can learn about its philosophy in this 1995 op-ed written for The Washington Post by Milton Friedman, who funded the predecessor organization that is now EdChoice. The headline: “Public Schools: Make Them Private.”) CONTINUE READING: Guess which state spends the most public funds on private and religious school education. (Hint: Betsy DeVos has a house there.) - The Washington Post
