The federal “tax credit scholarship” voucher program, established under Section 70411 of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, is the latest step in the Trump administration’s 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). Historically, funding for these organizations subsidizes private and religious education. A state only takes part if its governor opts in.
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.
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. Rather than expand educational opportunities for students facing the greatest barriers, the program rewards high-income families who already send their children to private schools with tax credits and tuition breaks.
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.
In fact, under the current proposal states would be prohibited from creating any guardrails as to how this money is spent. It’s shifting public funding to schools with minimal or no curricular or testing requirements, taking resources away from public schools that not only serve all students, but also must meet strong accountability measures. 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 enrollment changes. 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, even though most operating costs remain fixed.
If the state cannot fully replace those lost funds, communities will face difficult choices: cut educational programs and services or ask local taxpayers to raise property taxes to maintain an adequate public education. Many districts are already seeking operating overrides to close budget gaps, and voucher-induced enrollment losses could intensify those pressures.
Rural and regional school districts:
Rural schools are already facing declining enrollment, rising transportation costs, staffing shortages, and growing pressure to regionalize or close. Opting into the federal voucher program would not only not address these challenges, they would actively exacerbate them:
- 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; .
- Academic enrichment funding that public school families could benefit from is more likely to flow where higher income, wealthier donors, and private school networks are concentrated, primarily in the Greater Boston area–putting students in Central and Western Massachusetts at a disadvantage; and
- Without the state’s ability to direct resources where they are most needed, the program could deepen inequities instead of fixing them.
Urban school districts:
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.
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 the most. In fact, they’ve been shown to actively accelerate segregation.
- Families earning up to 300% of Area Median Income compete for the same vouchers as lower-income students, risking the crowding out of students with the greatest needs.
- Every dollar spent on vouchers means a dollar less for critical federal funding, such as Title I and IDEA Special Education Grants.
- 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 President Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” in July 2025. It is one step of Project 2025’s dangerous education agenda, which calls for:
- 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.
- Expanding federally supported private school vouchers to shift public resources toward private and religious education.
No state is required to participate — each governor decides, and Governor Healey can choose to opt out of the program.
Vouchers were not invented to expand opportunity for all students or choice for families. They were invented to avoid integration. The first programs, called “tuition grants,” emerged as part of the coordinated campaign to evade school desegregation required by the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision in 1954. Between 1954 and 1965, Southern states passed as many as 450 laws and resolutions to block or delay desegregation, including measures that routed public money to all-white private “segregation academies” and gave white families tuition subsidies to leave newly integrating public schools.
It’s not free. Your tax dollars will be sent to an SGO with no transparency requirements and that you have no say on. 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 is public money subsidizing the education of some of the wealthiest students, most of it is going 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%.
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 Arkansas, 95% of recipients were already enrolled in private school; in Indiana, recipients were more likely to earn more than $100,000 versus less than $50,000. 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.
History says they grow far beyond projections. Arizona’s vouchers were projected at $65 million; the first-year cost was $332 million, and by 2024 it had reached $738 million — 1,229% over budget — becoming a primary driver of a $1.4 billion state shortfall. Indiana’s program started at $15 million and now costs nearly $500 million a year. Ohio’s is approaching $1 billion annually. These programs don’t stay small, and they have no cap.
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 taxpayers would absorb on top of the program itself.
Public sentiment continues to be negative. In 2018, both Arizona and Kentucky voters overwhelmingly rejected the use of school vouchers. 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.
As the highly-respected Brookings Institution explains, “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 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 deck stacks the deck toward private schools by design. The program was built to channel money to private and religious education, and private schools already have the organizations, donor networks, and administrative systems in place to start drawing down these funds the moment the program opens.
The federal government’s preview regulations indicate that states will have no ability to shape the program because they cannot impose additional 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.
This means Massachusetts is likely to have no ability to require better data reporting on who receives vouchers and where they are used, strengthen nondiscrimination protections for LGBTQ+ students or students with disabilities, 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. But that private choice should not be funded with public dollars. Public education funding should support schools and programs that are open to all students, regardless of race, disability, gender, sexual orientation, religion, family income, or the language spoken at home. 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.
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.