Middle income families enjoy the benefit of school choice — they can afford to move to better school districts. Most lower income families don’t have that option.
One way to extend school choice to poor families is to create educational tax credits encouraging donations to not-for-profit groups that would fund scholarships, suggests Chris Braunlich, a vice president of the Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy and a regular contributor to Bacon’s Rebellion. The usual objection to tuition tax credits is that they would constitute a drain on the state treasury, but Braunlich offers a clever way around that.
In a new research paper, “Better Education for All Children,” Braunlich proposes limiting the size of the scholarships to the amount of state aid allocated to the student’s school district. That way, what the state loses in tax credits it recoups through a reduction in state aid to local education.
Scholarships limited by the size of state aid would not be terribly large, Braunlich concedes, ranging from $1,204 in Fairfax City to $5,870 in Lee County. Because such sums normally would cover only a fraction of private school tuitions, I cannot see them comprising a meaningful school-choice option by themselves. However, if private schools could supplement these scholarships with tuition breaks — as many already do for poor students — the number of students affected could be substantial.
Concludes Braunlich: “The impact on the state budget would be a ‘wash,’ neither having more or less money for educational needs. Most localities would still have the funding they need to educate their students and at-risk children would have an alternative for a better education.”
