The Trump administration is moving forward with a program that will put more federal tax dollars into private schools, through a tax credit program buried in the granular detail of the Big Beautiful Bill passed last year.
The program, set to go into effect on Jan. 1, will allow people to claim a federal income tax credit of up to $1,700 annually for donations made to organizations that provide scholarships to kids enrolled in private schools from households earning up to 300 percent of the area’s median gross income to qualify.
For a family in Waynesboro, where the median household income is $60,068, the scholarships would thus be open to kids in households with incomes in the $180,000-a-year range.
Poor kids would be eligible to receive the scholarships, too, of course, but the average private school tuition nationally is in the $13,000-a-year range for elementary schools and $17,000-a-year range for high schools.
Unless the scholarships in question would cover the entire cost of a private school tuition for a poor kid, that poor kid ain’t going to be able to take advantage.
And to that point, an analysis by the Associated Press of programs of this nature already in place in states like Arizona and Florida revealed that the scholarships overwhelmingly are used by families that were already sending their kids to a private school.
This is all about “education freedom,” a favorite cause of the MAGA right, which goes on about public schools indoctrinating kids into being ‘woke.’
To that point, as the Education Department was announcing the rollout of this new scholarship program on Thursday, another release from the department touted a letter from Linda McMahon, the Education Secretary, and former WWE CEO, “calling on schools to strengthen instruction on the history and human toll of communism and socialism.”
You can’t make this stuff up, folks.
It’s not like the private school system is set up to be able to accommodate a massive influx of kids into private schools from the K-12 public school system.
Data from the National Center for Education Statistics tells us that private schools currently enroll just 9 percent of all K-12 students in the U.S.
To double that, which would get us, still, to fewer than 20 percent of all kids in K-12 schools being enrolled in a private school, the capacity would need to expand to be able to accommodate an additional 5 million kids.
There is no groundswell in the “education freedom” movement to try to add to the scale of the private school system to be able to accommodate millions more kids; this tax incentive program is about giving money to wealthy people who already send their kids to a private school.
To that point, the folks in the Education and Treasury departments, in their release announcing the rollout of this program, provided an estimate of how many scholarships they anticipate the program eventually funding.
The number they gave us, 2.2 million, represents less than half the 4.7 million kids currently enrolled in a private school in the U.S.
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Chris Graham
