States continue to line up for the new federal school vouchers program, and Betsy DeVos's American Federation for Children is ready to make the best of it.
The vouchers are a feature of the Trump's Big Beautiful Bill; they're a tax credit scholarship set up where you can contribute to a scholarship [sic] grant organization (SGO) that manages the voucher money, and in return you get to stiff Uncle Sam for 100% of what you contributed. It's a dollar for dollar tax credit; there is no more generous tax dodge anywhere in the tax code.
Individual taxpayers can only donate up to $1,700, which will make racking up the big bucks a challenge in some states. But AFC thinks they've found a way around that.
AFC, you will recall, is a right-wing organization, well-connected to the DeVos family (Betsy had to quit being the chief of AFC in order to take the education secretary gig). They pushed hard for school privatization via "choice" for many, many years. Current CEO is
Tommy Schultz, who has been with AFC for
almost a decade.
Webb notes that "as a scholarship granting organization" AFC is putting "real muscle" here.
Schultz explains the "transformational" tax credit scholarship bill allows people to donate up to $1,700 to a scholarship organization and get a "dollar for dollar tax credit." If you owe the IRS $2,000 in taxes, he explains, just give $1,700 to a scholarship organization and only owe the feds $300. Which is true, but doesn't leave any more money in your hands than you were going to have just paying your taxes. Schultz is pitching that as a reduction of your tax liability. This is not a surprise-- this will be and has often been the pitch, because it's more appealing than "You can personally add to the government's deficit."
That will "free up billions of dollars," Schultz says. Frees from what? Being captured by the feds, I guess. He's going to keep pushing the notion that this will give students "access to a better education," which is the central lie of the whole program. Because first, there is no reason to believe that vouchers lead to better education, and
lots of reasons to believe that they don't. Second, vouchers systems make sure that private schools retain the right
to discriminate against LGBTQ persons, students with the "wrong" religious faith, students who have academic issues, students with special needs, and any students the school just doesn't want to accept for whatever reason. Laws are written to deliberately
preserve that power to discriminate.
Schultz notes that "the beauty and elegance" of this new voucher dodge is that it's a change to the tax code, and not, say, a piece of education policy with oversight and accountability attached. "There won't be any nefarious Department of Education strings attached to it." No accountability. No oversight. No rules.
"We are very much invested in making sure that millions of kids can get access to the best education possible..." says Schultz, which, again, is baloney, because if that were the actual goal, one would call for vouchers big enough to cover tuition costs or require voucherfied schools to accept all students or demand oversight and accountability to insure that participating private schools were, in fact, best.
Oh, and tutoring, too, Schultz adds, because choicers are trying hard to sell the possibility that these federal voucher funds might be used for tutoring. Because if people who have no intention of moving their kids out of public schools can be convinced that they will gain something from this program, maybe that will broaden support for it.
Why is AFC getting into this. Schultz says they really want to scale the fundraising that this will unleash. "Our scholarship entity will be acting as a platform for other scholarship groups that they can tap into." A small, state-based SGO might be able to scrape together a few million in $1,700 increments, but AFC thinks they can sweeten that pot considerably, first by throwing $10 million into a "donor awareness, and marketing and acquisition campaign" to help scale the program "all across the country."
What does that even mean? Will this giant SGO focus on fundraising for smaller SGOs, and will that result in AFC having a controlling interest in the voucher program for many states? Will AFC have unlimited freedom to contribute as much as they want to state programs? Schultz doesn't explain more;
AFC press materials indicate a partnership with
Odyssey which is a company that...well...is
the only provider in the country that offers an automated, end-to-end school choice platform. Our best-in-class technology connects families with school choice programs that provide funding for school tuition and eligible educational resources that align with the unique talents, gifts, and needs of each student.
Everyone uses the word "scale" a lot. Webb says, "Again, real skin in the game" and I'm not sure whose skin in which game he means or who has been putting fake skin in there.
Webb talks about "guardrails against abuse." He swears he's a school choice OG, but there are good and bad charters and magnets and ideological, too; "it's not just about private and public." There isn't really a question here, but Schultz takes a pause and leaps in.
What this program, like state programs before it, is going to do is put "funds in the hands of families" and "really, the most accountable way to implement any policy at the state or federal level when it comes to education is to not have the bureaucrats involved." This is just dumb. The notion that parental response will be sufficient to keep private and charter schools from fraud and mischief and general incompetence has already been disproven many many many many times. Private and charter schools only have to snooker a small slice of the market in any given year, so losing "customers" is no big deal-- certainly not a motivator for higher quality. But more importantly, if we depend on parents saying, "Well, that year was a bust. We're not going back," then we are throwing away a valuable year of a child's education so that market forces can magically take effect.
I don't know if Schultz is one of those people with a childlike belief in a magical invisible hand of the market, or if he's just blowing smoke because he's one of those folks who thinks business titans shouldn't have to answer to anyone, including government. Either way, his assertion is baloney.
But he will double down. When you see parents choosing the best schools for their sons and daughter, he argues, you really see a flourishing marketplace, including better test scores and lower incidences of fraud (like the bad stuff that has crippled our public education system for 30 or 40 years, he adds). He does not offer a specific example of this magic, because no such example exists. But he will rant about the public system, rail about low test scores (schools with no students proficient, he says, ignoring what "proficient" means). He cites Florida, Ohio, and Indiana as places with "booming" school choice ecosystems going on and it's true they have lots of unregulated unaccountable choice in those states, but nothing to suggest that it's helping education at all (also, bringing up Ohio in the context of fraud-free education is a bold choice).
The claims just keep piling up. Taxpayers are saving money. Kids are getting better educational outcome with all the research. These are not true statements. Marketplace competition makes things better, because parents can vote with their feet. Feet-based voting does not help anything, and smart market-loving economists like Douglas Harris have explained why the free market does not fit with education.
But Schultz is going to roll right through the usual talking points. These new vouchers will really help the schools, like the Catholic schools, that are trying to help lower and middle class families. He did make a mistake there and talking about helping schools instead of helping kids, but that really is one of the points of choice-- to funnel public taxpayer dollars to private schools. And we already know, in state after state, that vouchers are mostly serving well-off families whose kids were already in private, mostly religious schools. The "We'll save the poor kids" story is inspiring-- it's just not reality.
Webb wants us to remember that anyone can donate to the federal voucher program, not just parents. Schultz agrees. Call your tax professional and learn how you can get in on this. There will be other national SGOs besides AFC (count on it). "Every single American can become a philanthropist," Schultz says. "By giving us their money," he does not add. "This can bring billions of dollars off the sidelines," he says for about the third time, so we should note that this money was not going to sit on the sidelines, but was going to help the federal government pay its bills.
By the way, we spend a lot of money on education and the test scores didn't go up, so we need to send money to unaccountable unregulated schools to make a better future for America. "We are the best, most free, most prosperous nation in the world," Schultz says, but if we have a mediocre education system, then boo. How we got to be the best nation in the world with that mediocre education system is a mystery he does not address. Also unaddressed-- how SGOs typically get a 5% to 10% cut of the money they handle.
