Wave Goodbye to the Last Normal Year for American Schools

from Slate

As schools send children home for the summer, we need to recognize a frightening fact: This could be the last year of public schooling the way we’ve known it. Donald Trump’s new school funding scheme, pushed through as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, will kick in during the middle of the next school year, in January 2027. It’s going to create a financial tsunami for public schools. The real tragedy is that there’s no mystery to it: We already know what will happen, because the scheme is not really new at all. It brings us back to the bad old days, to the failed and inadequate divided school budgets from before the Civil War. Trump’s plan brings back the devasting problem that our modern public school systems were designed to fix.

The new program has been called a national voucher system, but in fact it is more like a private school subsidy. Here’s how it will work: Taxpayers will be able to deduct up to $1,700 each from their federal taxes, whether or not they have children in schools. They can send that money—a dollar-for-dollar reduction in their federal taxes—to “scholarship-granting organizations.” Those SGOs, in turn, will distribute money to families to use for educational services such as tuition discounts at private schools. Not every family will benefit—SGOs can give the money only to families who earn under 300 percent of their area’s median family income. Also important is that states will have to opt in, and every state will have some say in deciding which SGOs can participate. So far, we have 29 states officially signed up, and a complicated political back-and-forth going on in the rest.

It’s very different from the traditional voucher programs that started in the 1990s. Unlike vouchers, the money goes to the SGOs, not directly to families. Most crucially, the money will not be coming directly out of state education budgets. It will come from federal coffers, and that fact has tempted some Democratic governors, such as New York’s Kathy Hochul, to flirt with the idea of opting in.

At the school-district level, however, the potential budget damage could be severe. Every student who leaves their local public school to take a subsidized private education will take their state funding away with them. School budgets are cumbersome to change, with many fixed costs, such as buildings and personnel. Even if the number of students at public schools drops suddenly due to Trump’s private school subsidy—along with the funding that accompanies them—it will take time for schools’ financial liabilities to go down accordingly. Principals and teachers get the same salary whether their school has 500 students or 300; buses cost the same whether they transport 100 students or 50; furnaces cost the same whether they warm 1,000 students or 300...

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