Protect Our Public Schools

The “tax credit scholarship” voucher program, established under Section 70411 of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, is the latest step in the federal campaign to undermine public education across the country. 

Beginning in 2027, donors can claim a dollar-for-dollar federal tax credit of up to $1,700 for donations to private voucher organizations called scholarship granting organizations (SGOs), which distribute the money as vouchers to cover school tuition and fees. Historically, funding for these organizations subsidizes private and religious education. The program is completely optional, with the final decision resting with the governor.

A voucher allows public tax dollars you pay to be redirected toward private school tuition. The branding changes — “Education Savings Accounts,” “tax-credit scholarships,” “school choice” — but the mechanism is the same: public money flowing to private schools. 

As explained by the Brookings Institution, “tax-credit scholarship programs, like ESA [education savings account] programs, are variants of school voucher plans that were designed to skirt the legal and political obstacles facing vouchers.”

Unlike other federal programs, the federal school voucher program includes an extremely generous income cap—extending eligibility to households earning up to 300 percent of Area Median Income. In Massachusetts, this means public funding would be allowed to subsidize the private education of a student whose family earns as much as $500,000 a year.

Funds flow directly to private SGOs, which have the unilateral authority to decide who receives the money. These organizations aren’t required to be transparent or accountable to the public, and the private schools they fund can turn away students based on disability, academic record, behavior, religion, or almost any other criteria they choose.

Participating states are  prohibited from creating any guardrails as to how this money is spent. ​Public money would flow to private schools with zero accountability—putting our first-in-the-nation public schools at risk.

Massachusetts school districts are already facing budget gaps driven by rising costs and funding mechanisms that do not accurately reflect the cost of educating students today. Districts have seen significant drops in federal education funding as part of the campaign to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education. Every state that opts into this program is depleting money from available federal funds. Research has shown that the vast majority of vouchers and scholarships end up paying for students who were already enrolled in private school, with some never attending public school in the first place. If the state opts into the federal school voucher program, districts could lose state education funding as students leave for private schools using federally subsidized vouchers. The funding lost each time a student leaves has a significant impact on the entire public school district. Many districts are already seeking operating overrides to close budget gaps, and voucher-induced enrollment losses could intensify those pressures.

Rural schools are already facing declining enrollment, rising transportation costs, staffing shortages, and growing pressure to regionalize or close. Rural communities have few or no private school options, so students in these communities would see little direct benefit from vouchers, while overall federal funding would diminish. Again, participating states cannot take any measures to ensure that districts in need, including rural districts, benefit from these programs. Opting in to the federal voucher program would actively exacerbate the challenges these districts already face.

Urban districts in Massachusetts serve high concentrations of  low-income students, multilingual learners, and students of color while facing persistent budget pressures and opportunity gaps. These districts are already disproportionately impacted by the reckless cuts to federal education funding and the elimination of protections and resources these students and their families rely on. 

Vouchers do not advance civil rights; they weaken them while also disproportionately harming students of color, those from low-income families, and students with high needs. In fact, they’ve been shown to actively accelerate segregation. 

Every dollar diverted to private schools is one dollar fewer for critical federal funding, such as Title I and IDEA Special Education grants—two programs that actually do strengthen education outcomes for these students. The result could be wider racial, economic, and language opportunity gaps, moving Massachusetts away from a public education system that brings students together and would instead drive them apart.

This program was part of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 and was passed as part of the so-called  “One Big Beautiful Bill” in July 2025. It is one step of the  agenda to destabilize public education across the country. Other components are already impacting our schools, including: 

• Dismantling the U.S. Department of Education and significantly reducing the federal role in public education.
• Freezing and cutting billions of dollars in federal funding for public schools, including funding for academic enrichment and other student supports.
• Cutting staff to, essentially, eliminate the ability to enforce key protections students rely on including civil rights protections, nondiscrimination requirements, and those afforded under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. 

No state is required to participate. Each governor has until the end of 2026 to decide

Vouchers were not invented to expand opportunity for all students or choice for families. Vouchers are a product of the anti-integration movement in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education, when Southern states began offering “scholarship grants” to white families sending their children to segregated private schools. 

We have since seen numerous iterations of these efforts to subsidize private education at the expense of public schools in numerous states, including Arizona, Florida, North Carolina, Arkansas, Maryland, Tennessee, and more.

It’s not free. The federal government is choosing to give away $1,700 in tax credits to people who donate to this private school voucher program. That’s a policy choice. Those same federal dollars could instead support health care, food assistance, affordable housing, or investments that strengthen public schools serving all students. 

There’s no spending cap on the voucher program, but it’s estimated to cost upwards of $51 billion annually—more than what was spent on Title I and IDEA special education grants combined last year. 

If Massachusetts opts in, we would be accepting that trade-off. Instead of providing academic enrichment directly through public schools, low-income students and English learners would have to compete for privately administered vouchers alongside much higher-income families, while their public schools are defunded.

Evidence has shown time and again that wealthier families are much more likely to benefit from this shift of public money into private schools. Not only would public money subsidize the education of some of the wealthiest students, most of it would go to students who have no record of ever attending a public school. These families aren’t moving their children from a public school to a private school because they now have the resources or choice to do so. These families are receiving vouchers for the children who have always been enrolled in a private school. In Arkansas, 95% of voucher recipients had no record of public school enrollment. In Florida and Iowa, that number was 87%.

States will have no ability to ensure public money is going to the students who need it the most, as they will be prohibited from requirements on Scholarship Granting Organizations (SGOs) beyond federal law. These private organizations that will collect donations and distribute vouchers will not be required to prioritize students and expenses that the public might want the most.

Vouchers rarely cover the full cost of tuition, and private schools can reject any applicant. When Iowa launched vouchers, private schools raised prices 21–25%, putting them further out of reach. In practice, vouchers mostly subsidize families who already left — or never used — the public system.

Not only have studies shown that school voucher programs do not lead to better educational outcomes, they have actually been shown to have a detrimental impact on student outcomes. 

In Alabama, Florida, Maryland, and Tennessee, voucher students consistently perform worse than their peers in public schools. In Louisiana, 86% of voucher students do not meet state standards. In Arkansas, voucher students perform at the same levels as their peers—meaning the public schools are being drained of millions of dollars for voucher students to simply meet the same state averages. 

According to the National Coalition for Public Education, vouchers have the same detrimental effects on student math performance as a months-long closure after a natural disaster does.

In a recent analysis of education reforms, The New York Times ranked voucher programs as the most costly, least effective reform in terms of supporting student achievement. With good reason.  Costs incurred by state voucher programs in Florida, Arizona, and Ohio have ballooned to not only being far greater than anticipated, but being a primary driver of severe fiscal shortfalls. The federal program has no cap and is estimated to siphon off upwards of $51 billion in federal funding each year. Money that could be used to strengthen public schools, which serve all students, would be used to subsidize the private education of a few.

Voucher programs lack quality and robust accountability standards, and taxpayer money often ends up funding fraud and abuse. A December 2025 Florida state audit couldn’t fully account for $270 million in voucher funds, found $47 million paid out for children who were actually enrolled in public schools, and flagged likely overpayments for roughly 30,000 students. Policing this kind of abuse takes real state resources — costs that Massachusetts taxpayers would absorb on top of the program itself.

Public sentiment continues to be negative. Once people learn what voucher programs do, two-thirds of Americans report they’re against privatization efforts and would rather see significant public education investment. That’s why lobbyists for private schools and religious school advocates here in Massachusetts and beyond are shifting their messaging. This is no longer a voucher plan, it’s a “scholarship plan.”

Unlike public schools, private schools are not bound by the same civil rights laws that public schools must follow, so they can legally exclude students based on religion, disability, academic record, behavior, sexual orientation or gender identity, or for any other reason they choose. Some even require families to waive their children’s disability protections as a condition of enrollment.

The evidence shows voucher programs tend to increase school segregation rather than reduce it. As programs expand, recipients skew whiter and wealthier. When North Carolina removed its income limits, white students rose to 73% of voucher recipients while Black students fell to 11%, in a public school population that is 42% white and 24% Black. After South Carolina dropped its public-school enrollment requirement, white recipients jumped from 30% to nearly 70% in a single year, while Black and Hispanic students fell from 54% of participants to just 26%.

In short, the private schools that receive these vouchers can reject any child who doesn’t fit their business model — and the students most likely to be turned away are precisely the ones who are costliest to serve: children with disabilities, English learners, and those with greater needs. By contrast, our public schools are duty-bound to educate and support every child who walks through the door.

This federal voucher program was built to divert public money to private and religious education. These schools already have the organizations, donor networks, and administrative systems in place to start drawing down these funds the moment the program opens.

States participating in the program are allowed zero oversight protections. SGOs operate according to federal guidelines and nothing else. We would not be able to  require better data reporting on who receives vouchers and where they are used. Students using these vouchers would not be afforded the same nondiscrimination protections they receive in public schools, including those afforded under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), or require SGOs to prioritize public school students, lower-income families, or educational services including tutoring, transportation, and after-school programs over private school tuition. Instead, the federal rules would leave many of those decisions to private SGOs and their funders to decide, limiting the state’s ability to align the program with its own public education goals.

No. Families are free to choose private schools, and many do. Under this plan, the only people given the power to make choices would be the SGOs operating with nearly nonexistent guardrails and the private school admissions offices. Public dollars should be invested in strengthening the public education system that serves every child—not redirected to private institutions that can set their own admissions policies and are not accountable to the public in the same way as public schools.