One of the big questions regarding the Federal Scholarship Tax Credit—the voucher-like provision in President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill that launches in January—is whether it could become a cash cow for public schools. The answer matters to the debate about whether blue states should opt into the initiative, given that most Democrats continue to oppose public funding for private schools.
Nobody doubts that the tax credit can support tutoring scholarships for public school students. Deborah Gist, for example, recently explained to Tom Toch how her new organization, the Future School Fund, plans to help districts and charters raise tax credit dollars for tutoring and summer-school programs for their students. The controversy is whether this could become a funding stream for a much wider basket of expenses in the public sector.
This is not a new question for us at SCHOOLED, as it’s a topic we’ve covered several times in the past. But other media outlets have turned their attention to this debate in recent weeks, especially as Marguerite Roza has made the rounds to make the case for “activities scholarships” (my term) that could unlock billions of dollars for public schools. Here’s how she and her colleague Maggie Cicco describe the idea:
Our proposal: Districts set a fixed fee for access to a bundle of services. Imagine the district offers an $800 “K12-plus plan” that provides access to stuff like field trips, tutoring, homework help, assemblies, clubs or other services not required in the state’s definition of required public education. Every student signs up, but none—save for the wealthiest families—actually pay. Instead, a state-approved scholarship-granting organization sends the money from the withheld taxes to the district in the form of scholarships awarded for all the kiddos.
To make this work at scale, employers are key. Major employers (think school districts, universities, hospitals, Walmart, Amazon) could invite employees to participate via a $1,700 payroll deduction to an SGO. Employees could pick their SGO and indicate which district would benefit, and since their contribution would immediately be offset by a corresponding dollar-for-dollar reduction in federal withholding, there would be no net change in their take-home pay.
I don’t personally have a strong opinion about the merits of this approach—unlike some school choice supporters, including Marty Lueken, Alex Wolf, and Leslie Hiner, who worry that it could “inadvertently slow the growth of a more pluralistic provider market if its infrastructure becomes dominated by established school systems.” Or anti-reformer Peter Greene, who frets that something like this could undermine the “public mission” of public schools.
But I am doubtful that it’s in line with the intent of the law. Here’s what I wrote about Marguerite’s idea two weeks ago:
It’s clever, though I’m not sure it’s really in the spirit of what the law was trying to do. Then again, if districts try this, would the feds move to stop them? Would anyone else have legal standing to sue? If the answer to those two questions is “probably not,” then expect to see this approach somewhere in America soon.
Marty, Alex, and Leslie have similar concerns:
No scholarships are awarded to schools. Scholarships must be given directly to students, whose parents have the authority to receive and apply those funds for the benefit of the student’s education. Educational choice empowers families to choose education providers who must answer to them, not the other way around.
That point about scholarships seems important, given it’s the Federal Scholarship Tax Credit! And Marguerite’s plan turns the notion of scholarships on its head. But she says I’m overthinking it, conflating the intentions of lawmakers with the words they actually inscribed in statute:
Mike doesn’t think FSTC was “intended” for school districts.
Turns out, “intent” is irrelevant when the language is clear.
In the late 80s, I spent a New Year’s Eve in a bar in Idaho. It was 1:15 am, after last call for beer, so someone in my group ordered a round of tequila shots. (Wait, what?) The language of a new law inadvertently allowed for a later cutoff time for hard liquor sales than for beer. LOL.
I’m sure that wasn’t what most Idaho lawmakers “intended,” but the law was ruled legit, and put into practice until revised a year later.
Intentional or not, the last-minute wrangling over the FSTC language made room for SGOs to cover district fees. Where districts come up with a permissible fee (under their state’s rules for public education), SGOs can cover it. That means tax credit dollars can be sent to the district for any student who accepts that scholarship.
None of this means money will automatically flow to districts. Districts that want it will have to go after it. Some may choose not to. But it’s not illegal.
That’s a pretty good response! And if the Treasury Department allows it, I don’t see a court stopping it.
But what do you think? Do you see promise in Marguerite’s notion of how this could play out for public schools? And for those of you on the left who oppose private school choice, is this a compelling enough reason for blue states to opt in? Let me know by leaving your thoughts in the comments section, emailing me at SCHOOLED@fordhaminstitute.org, or simply responding to this newsletter.
Primary season is almost over, but the ideas primary is in full swing. At least that’s the case on the Democratic side of the aisle when it comes to education policy.
The big question for Team Blue is whether to embrace education reform, including school choice—and not with respect to the FSTC. In The New Republic, Jennifer Berkshire expresses skepticism, calling for Dems to promote “mom populism” instead, including full-throated support for traditional public schools. (And much else: Berkshire also wants Democrats to back teachers unions and career pathways and push back against ed-tech and reform-minded centrists like Rahm Emanuel.) She uses Texas gubernatorial candidate Gina Hinojosa as an exemplar in the fight against “privatization”:
Hinojosa believes her message that Texas public schools won’t survive another four years of Abbott can galvanize voters across the political spectrum. “For Texans, public schools are crucial to our identity,” Hinojosa told me. “They’re in our state constitution, they’re the largest employers in our rural communities, they represent ‘Friday night lights.’ That they are in crisis is a big deal.”
…Hinojosa’s critique goes far beyond budget cuts and declining test scores. Schools are the centerpiece of what she argues has been an organized effort by Abbott and the GOP to rig the system against the state’s kids, especially those in working-class families like those she grew up with in Brownsville. Call it “mom populism”—an appeal that centers a full-throated rejection of school privatization and presents the GOP’s increasingly aggressive interventions into local school districts as “corruption schemes” intended to benefit big donors, especially the right-wing oilmen who hold such sway here. By systematically weakening public schools, Hinojosa argues, Abbott and his cronies are undermining the American Dream.
Hinojosa is still the underdog in Texas, but Berkshire identifies races where a pro-public schools message helped Democrats win:
Opposition to school vouchers turns out to have been a consistent, and underappreciated, ingredient in recent special elections in which Democrats have flipped Statehouse seats in Florida, Iowa, New Hampshire, and Georgia. In North Texas, Taylor Rehmet made his objection to funding private religious schools with taxpayer money a centerpiece of his campaign. “We shouldn’t be sending public dollars to private schools with no oversight,” said Rehmet, a position that he said resonated with voters across party lines.
But Milwaukee reform advocate Colleston Morgan offers a very recent counterpoint: the Wisconsin gubernatorial primary, in which David Crowley defeated Democratic Socialist Francesca Hong. He writes:
Policy mattered in this race—and parent choice was one of the few areas where real differences emerged. Francesca Hong ran on ending the [Milwaukee voucher program] within four years, echoing ideologically driven special interests and advocacy groups pushing that line statewide. It didn’t work. Kelda Roys, who staked out a phased sunset position and carried the teachers union endorsement, didn’t break through either.
David Crowley’s positions on school choice—while not perfectly aligned with CFC’s priorities—were both more pragmatic and fell closer to where not just the broader electorate, but even most undecided Democratic voters actually stand on the issue. State Senator Dora Drake put it well in her endorsement of Crowley, saying that he understands the nuances facing Black and Brown families and their kids.
Charlie Barone—who opposes private school choice—concedes the point:
Polling by Morgan’s group found that, in the lead up to last week’s gubernatorial, “undecided, late-breaking Democratic voters favored a candidate who supported school choice by 32 points.”
Furthermore, Charlie writes:
National Parent Union’s polls show the same high levels of support among parents for school choice as those cited above although, as I pointed out roughly a year ago, those same parents want many things from private school choice programs (e.g., no out-of-pocket tuition and open enrollment) that they currently are not getting (but do get from public charters). In other words, I don’t think private school choice is good policy but, on the other hand, the opposition of White Democratic voters to something their Black and Brown counterparts support and participate in does somewhat smack of paternalism with a not-zero chance of political risk.
There’s lots of angst in ed policy circles around high schools. Perhaps that’s nothing new, but nobody seems happy with the current state of affairs regarding graduation requirements, state accountability systems, or the tensions between college and career preparation—all topics we’ve covered repeatedly here at SCHOOLED.
Consistent with widespread dissatisfaction with the status quo, there’s plenty of willingness to experiment and try some new approaches. But I hope we can all agree that New York’s is not one we should celebrate. My colleague Meredith Coffey spells out why in her new post, “New York’s portrait of a graduate is a disaster in the making. Here’s how to minimize the damage.” She explains:
Under the new plan, however, students will take Regents only for federal compliance purposes; passing won’t be required to graduate. Instead, as part of a new framework called the New York State Portrait of a Graduate, a high school diploma will be based upon students’ demonstration of six vaguely appealing “interconnected attributes”: academically prepared, creative innovator, critical thinker, effective communicator, global citizen, and reflective and future focused.
The specifics of the new graduation requirements are still in the works, but so far, official documents indicate that students will “establish their readiness” through “exhibits of evidence,” apparently the state’s hazy umbrella term for tasks including “performances, portfolios, assessments, [and] presentations.” Also, “real-world projects” and “work-based learning” may be involved. Individual teachers will design, administer, and score their students’ “exhibits of evidence” according to a statewide rubric with mastery levels, rather than letter or number grades. I’m really leaning on quotes here because, frankly, most of the guidance is too nebulous to paraphrase.
Though some other states are similarly deemphasizing traditional state testing and developing “portraits” and “visions,” New York is an outlier in its aggressive effort to overhaul its entire assessment system—and to effectively give up on clear academic expectations. As terrible as that is, it’s also more than a little troubling that the Empire State has committed to dismantling the Regents requirements without a clear sense of what will replace them.
We’ve debated before the role that “portraits of a graduate” should play and whether they are destined to amount to lowered academic expectations. But there’s little doubt in my mind that the Empire State’s version, at least, is nothing but mush.
Speaking of mush: Freddie deBoer recently took a swipe at CREDO’s charter school studies and demonstrated all sorts of fuzzy thinking. He writes:
When the average person talks loosely as though there’s some sort of generic charter advantage, they’re usually referencing CREDO research, even if they don’t know they are.
This is all rather surprising, given that CREDO has not produced robust evidence in favor of charter schools, not in the 2023 study or its precursors. As we shall see, even if we assume that CREDO has solved the problem of the fundamentally non-random samples inherent to the task of comparing charter to public—which we should not, because they have not—the evidence supplied by CREDO in the favor of charter schools is so marginal and so noisy as to be meaningless from a policy perspective. And yet the message that the media took and shared from that report—the good news!, the vindication!, the headlines in Education Week and the New York Post!, the press releases from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools!—was that the typical charter student was the beneficiary of a meaningful learning boost compared to their traditional public school counterpart.
Why did this message spread so widely and resonate so loudly, if I’m right that even CREDO’s own numbers show very modest differences? Because of a remarkably savvy bit of marketing in how CREDO’s numbers were presented. The report did not show its findings in terms of effect size differences between charter and public, which would be the field’s standard way of sharing results. Rather, the outcome that was shared again and again was that a typical charter school student in the dataset had gained sixteen additional “days of learning” per year in reading and six in math. For a few months there you couldn’t read educational media without running into those numbers: sixteen additional days of learning in reading per year, six in math. It became a bit of holy writ in the endless quest to make bad students good with ACCOUNTABILITY and market reforms.
Some of Freddie’s points are fair. As my colleague Brian Fitzpatrick noted in a Fordham staff email thread, serious academics really do hate the “days of learning” measure of effect sizes, and the average impact of all charters really is tiny. But it’s tiny because of the super-low performance of virtual charter schools, as well as the underperformance of many suburban charters. When we focus on urban brick-and-mortar charter schools, especially those run by charter networks, the impacts are much more impressive.
And we don’t have to rely on Brian’s take, or just on CREDO’s studies. The definitive review of the literature endorsed by the Association for Education Finance and Policy, and written by Tulane scholar Doug Harris, states its major findings on participant effects thusly:
Students attending charter schools experience more growth in standardized test scores and may have a higher chance of attending college than students attending traditional public schools.
Charter participant effects vary widely—more so than the effects of traditional public schools, and these participant effects are larger for urban, charter management organization (CMO), nonprofit, and brick-and-mortar charter schools.
Plus, as my colleague David Griffith quipped:
It’s interesting that CREDO’s first study found negative effects—a loss of 7 days of learning in reading and 22 days of learning in math—when their only goal is to show that charters are superior.
I guess they wanted those initial losses to appear larger than they actually were.
Other edu-opinions worth your attention
Chad Aldeman, “Why Common Tests Matter” (in state voucher programs)
Daniel Buck, “Kentucky Audit Reveals Systemic School Failure — What’s Happening in Your State? ”
Corey DeAngelis, “A Nebraska Lawsuit Claims Public Schools Are Unconstitutional”
Ray Domanico, “Private Schools Are No Threat to Democracy”
Jessica Grose, “AI in Norway’s Schools”
Michael Hartney and Vlad Kogan, “Absentee Teachers: The Other Attendance Problem”
Colleen Hroncich, “In the AI Era, School Choice Is Crucial”
Patricia Levesque, “The Three Prongs of Education Reform Success: Policy, Programs, and Political Perseverance”
Kenneth Marcus, “Why Moving the Office of Civil Rights from ED to DOJ Will Be Better for Families”
Karen Hawley Miles, “What Districts Actually Need to Implement College & Career Pathways at Scale”
Kelsey Piper, “Why parents love a school with bogus numbers” (about Alpha School)
Benjamin Riley, “The 50 Percent Problem”
Natalie Wexler, “Do We Need Another National Reading Panel?”
Daniel Willingham, “Students Should Only Use AI for Things They Already Know How to Do Well”
We said goodbye this week to Dolly Parton. Beyond her legendary contributions to the American songbook, she cared deeply about literacy and used her fame and fortune to provide millions of free books to children around the world—every month. In her honor, check out Linda Jacobson’s 2024 piece on Dolly’s Imagination Library.
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And in a new article from The 74, Patrick O’Donnell reports on how Ohio is addressing the “mismatch…between what schools offer and businesses want” when it comes to industry-ready credentials, and highlights Fordham-Ohio’s work on the issue:
Fordham has reported multiple times in the last few years on ways some districts, notably urban, high-poverty ones where some students struggle to graduate, have large numbers of students earning low-value credentials just to earn a diploma.
“Credentials are intended to signify students’ acquisition of technical skills and help them gain an edge in the labor market, not simply be a workaround to a diploma,” wrote Fordham’s Aaron Churchill. “Ohio schools have discovered the easiest ones to attain and used them to get students to the finish line (and inflate their graduation rates as well as report card ratings).” That system, Churchill and Fordham’s Jessica Poiner reported, had more than 9,000 students earning RISE UP retail sales and customer service credentials in 2023—credentials that, combined, allow students to graduate—but were sought by employers for just three jobs statewide that year.
Last week, Boston College professor Heather Cox Richardson used her popular Substack to create a misleading narrative about the history of school choice in America. By cherry-picking events and attributing singular intentions and perspectives to major events and initiatives—all calibrated to make her argument against parental choice—she loses the chance to teach her readers about the nation’s complex history of public schooling.
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In a post that Pangram flagged as being (appropriately) 100 percent AI-generated, Dana Williams says “effort migration”—outsourcing tedious learning—is the way of the future, that “AI isn’t helping students cheat,” and that “the ability to think critically with technology will become one of the most important forms of literacy a student can learn” since that’s what employers will want in adults. Dana says we should rethink academic integrity as a result, but applying this reasoning to K–12 schools, where students haven’t developed independent critical thinking skills, is a dangerous path.
Aleksandra Appleton reports on Indiana’s efforts to build postsecondary pathways that avoid the shortcomings of many existing apprenticeship models. The plan lets high schoolers begin training for in-demand careers, then helps those students earn a college degree down the road—often with financial support from their employers.
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After years of falling or stagnant student achievement, Maryland is changing how students learn math. The source of the declines isn’t completely clear—Baltimore Banner’s Liz Bowie wonders whether raising the bar with Common Core inadvertently harmed struggling students:
Theories abound, but today educators believe the way teachers translated the standards into the classroom didn’t help. Students were expected to perform at higher levels than ever before, and often there was no plan to help students who were already behind. In addition, many of the concepts were taught once, rather than being reinforced in the next year or two. That meant struggling students fell further behind.
It’s a mystery also on Nat Malkus’s mind, as he considers factors ranging from smartphones and social media to the pandemic and the Great Recession. He wonders about the timing of federal efforts, too, but suggests it was ESSA and the decline of NCLB that caused—or reflected—a broader cultural shift against high standards.
My colleague Brian Fitzpatrick weighs in on our college-for-all debate:
The college-for-all movement didn’t go far enough. It erred in focusing on student and family preferences. Far, far too many young people go to college, but they are wise to do so. The problem is one of supply and demand for college credentials.
On the demand side, too many careers require a college degree. To take an egregious example: Washington, D.C., requires that childcare workers who care for infants have a college degree. Would I recommend that a young person with poor high school academic performance intent on a career in childcare go to college? Generally, no—unless they live in D.C.! Examples abound: New York now requires nurses to hold a bachelor’s degree, even though hospitals have been training competent nurses with associate degrees for decades. Many states require hair stylists to get far more training than EMTs.
Regarding supply, much ink has been spilled on how universities, not students, are the primary beneficiaries of the hundreds of billions of dollars the federal government spends annually on tuition subsidies. Beneficiary #2: employers. Why would Marriott spend money training hotel managers when it can shift those costs to students and taxpayers by requiring a degree? Like housing before 2008, when government subsidizes the financing of a good, overconsumption drives up prices, and “beneficiaries” end up worse off.
My solutions: Let the employment market sort out which degrees add value and let banks work out how to finance them. Drop degree requirements in state laws, eliminate or pare back licensing boards, and follow the lead of states like Pennsylvania and drop degree requirements for government jobs. While we are at it, the feds should get out of the business of offering student loans entirely. In the meantime, let’s accept that college over-attendance reflects policymaker mistakes, not the flawed decisions of parents or students.
See you next Friday!
Mike
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I agree that the federal voucher program is not designed for public schools. Besides fretting about the creation of various tiers (do you want to sign your child up for School Basic or School Premium), a process that will only exacerbate the differences between wealthy districts and not-so-wealthy districts, I also fret about the self-canceling nature of any financial "benefits" for a public district. To take advantage of the new funding stream, schools will need to create new programs, like an after-school tutoring program; that results in a new funding bucket for the district, with a net gain to the district of $0.00. It may well benefit some students, which is a great thing, but to argue that it will benefit the district as a whole is untrue.
Let's face it-- the whole "these vouchers will also benefit public schools" is an argument fabricated solely to erode resistance of blue state governors.
I simply don't understand how anyone can be confident at this stage that funds could be used for public schools before the regs are issued. If the regs say that states will be able to tell SGOs that they must spend funds they collect on public schools -- then it is a no brainer that Democratic states will participate. But to me that seems hugely unlikely-- the intent is clearly that this program will mostly benefit so called "school choice" in the private and religious school sector. What I would like to know is why the IRS and Treasury are taking so long to issue these regs -- over a year after the bill was approved. None of the outstanding questions are that complicated. Is it because the administration wants to push resistance to the program as close as possible to the implementation date of Jan. 1 (including over the December holidays)? This way "blue" states that want to participate beginning on Jan. 1, even if the rules are favorable in their direction, which I doubt they will be, will hardly have any time to plan for them -- so states with an existing SGO infrastructure will be hugely advantaged at least in the first year of implementation.