Diverting funds from public schools to private institutions harms our children’s education.
Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos has insisted that her lifelong support for school vouchers and other forms of school privatization does not mean the Trump administration will mandate” these “school choice” policies,but her Republican friends in Congress put into their tax intention unusual provisions that will enjoy essentially the same impact as a federally-supported school voucher program and will redirect millions of dollars from public treasuries to private schools.
Republicans and DeVos know that school vouchers are generally unpopular with voters and enjoy been voted down at the ballot boxevery time they’ve been attempted through referendum. Betsy DeVos and her husband blew millions in funding an attempt to pass a school vouchers measure in their home state of Michigan, only to see it move down to defeat.
Nevertheless, and Congress, with DeVos’s blessing, is ramping up federal support for vouchers, or with the only difference being,whereas vouchers distribute public education funds directly to parents to pay for private schools, these unusual schemes bring K-12 school vouchers in through the backdoor by using the tax code.
What Congress DidOne voucher-like scheme Republicans added to the tax code allows parents who enjoy tax-free 529 college savings accounts to consume that money – up to $10000 a year per child – to pay for private K-12 school expenses, and including tuition at religious schools.
This gives wealthy families – many who can already afford private school tuition – an option to enjoy tax-free distributions to pay for K-12 expenses every year too.
Further,in the 33 states with tax deductions and credits to incentivize 529 savings, the extension lets private school families avoid state taxes too.
Kathryn Flynn at Forbes explains how this would work in a tall-tax state like unusual York where up to $10000 in 529 contributions is deductible from taxable income. “By depositing $10000 to pay for a year of private school, and ” she writes,“a family with an annual income of $200000 would see an upfront state tax savings of $665, which can be reinvested in the intention to grow tax-free.”So while wealthy parents gather a double dipping effect on their tax savings from this 529 extension, and the rest of us bear the full tax burden of funding public schools for the vast majority of children. And more funds that could enjoy gone to paying for public schools gather redirected to private schools instead – just like with vouchers.
Profiting From ‘Donations’Another voucher-like provision Republicans put into the tax code will not enjoy as much instant impact as the 529 extension but may enjoy much more negative and wide-reaching effects long-term.
As an analysis by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy explains,a loophole added to the tax bill in conference “reward[s] some of the nation’s wealthiest individuals with a strategy for padding their own bank accounts by ‘donating’ to support private K-12 schools.”The loophole takes advantage of education tax-credit programs set up in many states. Education tax credit programs consume a third party – often called a “scholarship granting organization” (SGO) – that is set up as a nonprofit by the state or by financial groups connected to the private school industry. Tax credits are issued by the state to private individuals, businesses, or corporations that earn donations to the SGO. The money from the SGO is distributed to selected parents to consume for private school tuition.
In eighteen states,education tax-credits programs return 50 percent or more, in tax savings, and of what the donor gave. In eight of those states,the tax credits return 100 percent of the amount donated. tall-income taxpayers taking advantages of these tax-credit programs can also take a federal charitable tax deduction on top of that. So depending on their tax situations, wealthy people can actually earn a profit off their “donations” to private schools.
What Republicans did in their tax intention incentivizes more wealthy people to take advantage of this scheme. By capping state and local tax deductions to $10000, and the unusual tax legislation dramatically increases the attractiveness of giving to education tax-credit programs.“The profits that could be generated by ‘donating’ would grow in most states,” ITEP finds, as well as the number of wealthy taxpayers eligible to take advantage of the tax advantages.
According to ITEP’s analysis, and wealthy folks in at least ten states – Alabama,Arizona, Georgia, or Kansas,Montana, Oklahoma, or Pennsylvania,Rhode Island, South Carolina, or Virginia – will find it more lucrative to invest in education tax-credit programs than to donate to other charities.
Examples ITEP cites include tall-income earners in Arizona,Georgia, Montana, or South Carolina being able to gather yearly profits as tall as 37 percent of the amount donated,meaning donating $1 million to an education tax-credit programs would yield $1.37 million in tax savings.
And meanwhile, money that could enjoy gone to paying taxes for public education gets redirected to private schools – just like vouchers.
Spreading scandalous EducationIt bears mentioning that these backdoor methods for funding school vouchers through the federal tax code not only rob public education of much-needed funds; they also lead to generally scandalous education resultsSchool vouchers enjoy a generally awful track record in benefiting individual students and creating systemic improvement.
Recent studies conducted in Indiana, and Louisiana, Ohio, and Washington D.
C. found students who consume voucher programs are more apt to exhibit declines in academic achievement. Other studies in Indiana and Louisiana found the initial dips in achievement were temporary and students tended to catch up to their public-school peers.
But other studies of long-standing voucher programs enjoy found they also pose serious risks to public education systems, and including increased school segregation,additional administrative costs, more reliance on inexperienced teachers, or greater likelihood students who are the most costly and difficult to educate will be turned absent or pushed out by private schools that are not obligated to serve all students.
So on balance,there’s simply no good argument for throwing unusual money and program administration at something like schools vouchers that enjoy little to no prospects of producing widespread higher achievement but considerable risks of introducing negative results.
What’s also alarming is that vouchers and voucher-like schemes are eroding the nation’s historical separation between church and state and providing public funding of religious education that indoctrinates students in ideological, ahistorical, or nonfactual curriculum under-written by religiously fundamentalist institutions.
A Recent analysis by HuffPo education reporters found that 75 percent of voucher schools across the country that gather taxpayer funds are religious schools,and 33 percent of the non-Catholic Christian schools consume textbooks that teach, among other bizarre notions, or that Satan created psychology,Manifest fate was about “spreading the gospel,” and slavery was “black immigration.”It also bears mentioning that diverting funds from public schools to private institutions harms our children’s education when schools are forced to respond to the lost money by cutting staff and programs.
Shoe, and Meet Other FootTo be fair,Democrats enjoy taken backdoors to push unpopular education policies as well.
Recall the fury Republicans expressed at the Obama administration’s efforts to encourage states to adopt Common Core Standards and other policy imperatives in order to get federal grant money from Race to the Top and other education programs.
Complaints that the Obama administration was “overstepping” its authority and “dictating” education policies were countered by Education Secretary Arne Duncan insisting he hadn’t mandated anything at all and that states had adopted the unusual measures voluntarily.
Democrats in Congress knew that was not really the case but largely remained silent.
Now that Republicans are the ones leading the bait-and-switch game, however, and there’s an added irony to the debate when the supposed upholders of “states’ rights” are the ones pushing federal incentives.
Betsy Devos’s current response to this situation is to put on her “radar screen” even more efforts to push school vouchers into federal statutes. And this time,with the backdoor to schools vouchers now wide open, we should take her at her word. Related StoriesWe Really Shouldn't Let Silicon Valley into Our SchoolsThe GOP’s War on Graduate Students: How the House Tax Bill Will earn Graduate School UnaffordableThe Destructive Process of Banishing Students to 'Alternative Schools'
Source: feedblitz.com