How to persuade Democratic governors to opt into Trump’s education tax credit
In today’s newsletter: the politics of the One Big Beautiful Bill’s school-choice provision, the (suddenly) interesting debate over ed reform on the ideological left, and great takes from Rick Hess, Neal McCluskey, and Jeff Nellhaus, among others.
Am I overlooking any notable edu-opinions out there? Let me know by emailing me at SCHOOLED at fordhaminstitute.org.
Sign up to receive this newsletter in your inbox on Tuesday and Friday mornings. SCHOOLED is free, but a few linked articles may be paywalled by other publications.
Some education debates are evergreen, but here’s one that’s a bit more urgent: How to get at least a handful of Democratic governors to opt their states into the big school choice opportunity included within the One Big Beautiful Bill Act?
Today, I’d like to (mostly) set aside the policy debate over private school choice. Let’s talk tactics. Assume you believe that it would be a net positive for low-income and working-class kids in blue cities in blue states—including New York, LA, Philadelphia, and Chicago—to be able to attend Catholic schools and other private schools at public expense. Given the odds against enacting school choice legislation in such locales, this federal opportunity might be the best shot in at least a generation.
The question is how the Trump administration can make it more likely that some blue-state governors take the plunge. The reason the Trump team plays such a key role is that the language in the law itself is rather vague when it comes to key issues around program design—issues that might matter to said Democratic governors. Which in turn means that the Treasury Department, which is charged with implementing the initiative, can settle some questions via regulation. This was at the heart of a really good debate that my colleagues at Education Next hosted earlier this month.
Here’s a fast refresher on key bits of the new tax credit. Starting in January 2027, taxpayers will be able to take a dollar-for-dollar credit worth up to $1,700 on their federal taxes for donating to any eligible scholarship granting organization (SGO). The SGO does not have to be in the same state as the taxpayer, but SGOs do have to be approved by a given state’s governor, who also opts into the program. The SGOs raise money via taxpayer “donations,” and then can turn around and provide scholarships to families making up to 300 percent of the median income of the local metro area. Scholarships can also go toward tutoring and other allowable uses covered by the Coverdell program, including uses by public (and public charter) school students.
So what should the Treasury Department do? (Specifically, a guy named “Steve” at Treasury, who is supposed to come up with the regulations, or so I hear.) Here are the three main options.
Cut off opportunities for governors to specify how the initiative will work in their state. This hardline position, supported by Robert Enlow and Jim Blew, among others, would say that once governors opt in to their state’s participation in the initiative, they have little more to decide. They must (for example) approve any SGO that applies and meets the requirements of the federal law, which are quite minimal.
Bar governors from opting in to the “public school” portion of the initiative without also signing up for the private school choice part. This middle ground (which I prefer) would ensure that “opting in” to the tax credit initiative means opting in wholeheartedly. A Democratic governor shouldn’t be able to block private school scholarships for kids in his or her state while giving public and charter school students access to tutoring assistance and the like. But those governors could tailor the private school provisions to their liking (more on that below).
Offer maximum flexibility. Governors could opt into just the supplemental services provisions if they wanted, not the school scholarship part. And could regulate the SGOs operating in their states, for example by limiting scholarships to just low-income and working-class kids, or make participating schools abide by the state’s human rights laws (i.e., pro-LGBTQ rules), or release test score results at the school level for transparency purposes. My read is that Jorge Elorza supports this option.
I see pros and cons to each and try not to be clouded by my own policy preferences (namely, to limit private school choice to low income and working-class kids, and to ensure testing and accountability is in place).
Some choice advocates think that, even with the hardline option 1, they will be able to move some Democratic governors into the “yes” column (maybe Shapiro and Polis)? After all, it’s “free money” on the table, including for tutoring and such for public and charter school kids, plus private school choice for key constituencies in the Democratic party, including the Black and Hispanic voters who are slipping away from them. Don’t compromise on program design issues, goes the thinking, just focus on putting maximum pressure on the governors. Some will bend. So it’s predicted.
On the flip side, allowing those governors to opt into a lite version of the initiative via flexible option 3, even just for tutoring scholarships, might open the door to more school choice down the line. Once parents get a taste for mini scholarships, they might put pressure on governors to give them access to the whole thing. Maybe?
I like the middle option 2 (yes, that’s on brand for me). It doesn’t feel right to turn what was meant to be a private school choice initiative into just another federal funding stream for public school services, so I’m not enamored with option 3. But I’m not convinced that option 1 will actually result in any Democratic governors saying yes. I worry that it will be too easy for them to say, “I’m not in favor of windfalls for private school families making $400,000 a year” (as could happen in some wealthy metro areas) or “I don’t believe in public funding going to schools that aren’t accountable to the public.” Let’s take those excuses away, says I. And let a Governor Shapiro, for example, embrace private school choice for low-income kids in Pennsylvania.
But what do YOU think? Please weigh in!
Back in the early 1980s, the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY) noticed that “Of a sudden...the GOP has become a party of ideas.” It’s begun to feel a bit that way on education lately, too, at least to me, with the big debates focused around school choice (see above!) and not much happening on education policy on the left. So it’s worth celebrating a big debate that’s emerged on the progressive side of the aisle in recent weeks. First Matt Yglesias wrote a sharp post on sliding NAEP scores (covered in SCHOOLED on September 23). Then, last week, Kelsey Piper took to the buzzy new liberal site The Argument to claim that “illiteracy is a policy choice,” digging into the Mississippi Miracle and quoting reformers including Kareem Weaver, John White, David Steiner, Chad Aldeman, and Karen Vaites. This inspired Obama Administration veteran Jon Lovett of Pod Save America fame to invite Yglesias to chat about NAEP, Mississippi, his and Piper’s articles, and why Democrats have stopped talking about education, which was pretty good, even if they somehow ignored the teachers unions, save for an off-hand remark by Lovett about unions being something “Republicans talk about.” And that, in turn, inspired everyone’s favorite communist, Freddie deBoer, to write a post smacking Piper and Lovett for:
…the attitude at hand here, which is straight out of the mid-2000s ed reform playbook: maximally earnest, dismissive of all complication, self-righteous, supposedly speaking on behalf of THE CHILDREN, admitting no humility or modesty, and animated by the absolute certainty that we can solve our education problems simply by wanting it enough.
deBoer contrasts this with:
…the example of Matt Yglesias, who has long been an ed reform type but who has become much more pragmatic and realistic about the boundaries of the possible in the past decade.... He’s far more reserved about education’s potential for social transformation and also far less likely to assign blame to teachers or schools simplistically.
I like Yglesias, too, and I bet he would strongly disagree with much of deBoer’s post, which claims that ed reform was nothing but a failure and a fraud. That’s not what the evidence shows.
Meanwhile, Robert Pondiscio wishes that more Americans could “read well enough to independently evaluate the kinds of competing claims undergirding the autism debate and myriad other contemporary issues and controversies,” but with so many young adults not even reaching “Basic” on NAEP, that is sadly not the case.
Chad Aldeman asks two interesting questions: “Do good schools stay good and do bad schools stay bad?” Unfortunately, he decides to use data from his home state of Virginia, which famously doesn’t publish growth measures, so all he can do is answer that some schools go from high-scoring to low-scoring, and vice versa, if we look over a long enough period of time. That doesn’t mean they are no longer good or bad; it might be that the populations of the neighborhoods and/or schools changed. Come on, Chad, I thought you were on #TeamGrowth!
In the pages of the Wall Street Journal, center-right phenom Neetu Arnold digs into a Justice Department lawsuit against a “grow your own” educator pipeline program in Providence, Rhode Island, because of its focus on teacher diversity. I get the concern about “race conscious” hiring, but let’s not ignore the benefits of recruiting teachers into high-poverty schools who themselves attended similar schools as kids.
After reading Max Bazerman’s new book, Inside an Academic Scandal, Rick Hess wonders “if social science is a scam.” Sure, there’s value in research studies, including in education policy, but is most of it trustworthy? Valuable? He’s not so sure. Separately, he lauds Linda McMahon for her aggressive efforts to shutter the Department of Education and for supporting charter schools.
Speaking of books, Neal McCluskey reviews Josh Cowen’s screed The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers, and insists (repeatedly) that “school choice is not a conspiracy!”
Finally, all over the country, school choice advocates are urging their states to opt into the One Big Beautiful Bill’s educational choice tax credit initiative. See examples from Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Washington, and Wisconsin.
“There are few things people on both sides of the political aisle agree on nowadays, but one is that ditching phonics-based instruction for reading has been a disaster. Even California is now following Mississippi’s lead by returning to phonics.” —The Editorial Board, The Wall Street Journal
Small reading groups are ubiquitous in American elementary school classrooms but result in significantly less time on task than whole-class instruction can offer. —Mike Schmoker and Timothy Shanahan, Education Week
Some public school districts are fighting back against falling enrollments, rising competition, and record-low confidence in American education. One idea from the superintendent of Scottsdale (AZ) Unified School District: mimic restaurant-industry focus on customer service. —Matt Barnum, The Wall Street Journal
Regarding whether to evaluate schools based on achievement, growth, or both
Checker Finn
Terry Grier and several other contributors to this exchange on SCHOOLED are persuasive. Schools should NOT get composite grades that attempt to combine, average or weight both achievement AND growth. Giving them separate grades furnishes parents, educators, and policy leaders with more useful information, while avoiding endless dispute over how to “weight” the two factors within a composite grade. While we’re at it, in fact, if there are other aspects of a school that would be useful to these audiences—e.g., school climate, promotion/graduation rates, student/teacher absenteeism—and if we have reliable measures for them, it’s OK to give multiple grades. Yes, we risk getting carried away (like California, with its inscrutable, user-hostile, color-coded school “dashboards”), and yes, I understand the appeal of a single, summative grade. But Terry’s right when he says, “Schools should be graded on both growth and achievement—just like how we used to get separate marks for conduct and academics back in the day!” And he’s even more right when he adds that, “It’s disingenuous to give schools a grade of B, when 50 percent of their students cannot read on grade level.”
When using growth as an indicator for making accountability determinations, the question that must be answered is whether the school has been consistent in helping the vast majority of its students make sufficient growth during a particular time period to meet an identified goal (e.g., proficiency in x years).
Without a context in which to determine whether sufficient growth has been made, the use of growth as an indicator will not support credible accountability determinations and will be misleading to families.
Even then, the achievement goal needs to be clearly defined and credible—criterion-referenced, rather than simply better than the average student in a norm group, where the overall performance of students in the norm group is perceived to be weak relative to societal needs.
Me
I get that, though I worry that too often policymakers turn around and set the goals for growth unrealistically high. Which ends up in the same place: demoralizing high-poverty schools, which can get amazing results when it comes to growth and still get a D or F.
We wisely pegged “proficiency” to college and career readiness. But it’s not realistic to think we’re going to get to 100 percent proficiency anytime soon, if ever. Accountability systems that are utopian aren’t doing anyone any favors.
Mike, I mostly agree with you: 100 percent proficiency is a utopian goal for most schools at this time. That said, it could be the goal for currently high-performing schools, with a more attainable goal for low-performing schools. Whatever the approach may be, there must be criteria to understand whether the amount of growth made will lead to meeting a pre-established achievement goal in a reasonable amount of time. Moreover, the criteria should be research-based and thus defensible.
A real-world example of this is when we set the passing standard for the 10th grade MCAS tests in 2001. Passing the tests would be a criterion for high school graduation beginning with the class of 2003. Many on the Board of Education wanted to set the standard at proficiency. The Commissioner (Dave Driscoll) and I argued that proficiency was too high a standard at the time, would not be politically viable, and would undermine the implementation of the requirement. The Board relented and set the standard at one level below proficiency. Although many students were unable to achieve that level by the end of grade 10, after retesting, the vast majority of students were able meet the standard by the end of grade 12. Although Massachusetts no longer requires students to pass MCAS tests as a criterion for graduation (per a recent voter referendum), it’s an example of how schools and students will rise to the occasion to meet a realistic achievement goal in a reasonable period of time.