Writing for Time magazine, Jessica Alcantara and Laura Petty, explain just how bad idea the federal vouchers in the BBB will be.
This week, Republican lawmakers are attempting to pass a budget reconciliation bill that pays for unprecedented handouts to the wealthiest Americans on the backs of cuts to programs that benefit most people. Hidden in this budget package before the House is a national private school voucher program funded through tax breaks for the wealthy that threatens to dismantle our system of public schools.
According to Senator Ted Cruz, school vouchers are “the Civil Rights Issue of the 21st century.” The Texas Republican argues that vouchers are key to providing educational opportunities for young people. On the contrary, expanding vouchers and eliminating public education will actively harm young people—especially Black, Latino, and Indigenous students.
President Donald Trump’s so-called “Big, Beautiful Bill” currently includes a provision hidden in the tax code that offers an unprecedented 100% tax deduction for donations to third party organizations that hand out private school vouchers. The push to create a national private school voucher program is part of a long legacy of efforts to return to the separate and unequal educational landscape of the pre-civil rights era. Since the 1960s, white segregationists pushed for private school vouchers to avoid the desegregation mandates of Brown v. Board of Education and maintain a discriminatory and unequal system of education.
We urge lawmakers to drop the private school voucher program from the spending bill and keep it out of the final budget package. We also call on lawmakers to pass legislation that fully funds public schools, such as the Keep Our Pact Act. If the lawmakers fail to do so, it will set us on a dangerous course back toward a pre-civil rights era reality, defined by deliberate racial segregation and extreme disparities in school funding and resourcing.
This private school voucher plan to strip millions of children of their opportunity to access free public education directly mirrors Project 2025. The issue with such a policy is that private school vouchers subsidize wealthy families who can already pay for private school, while decimating public schools for everyone else by diverting resources away from public education.
Opponents of free and accessible education argue that voucher programs give families more choice. In actuality, school vouchers go toward private schools that choose which children to enroll, reject, or kick out.