Mike DeGuire, in a piece for the Colorado Times Recorder, offers insight in the federal school voucher bill.
Republicans have reintroduced a federal voucher bill, the “Educational Choice for Children Act (ECCA) act, which would provide $10 billion in annual tax credits to fund private and religious K-12 schools.” If Congress passes this bill, the billionaire oligarchy will be closer to fulfilling their decades-long goal to privatize the K-12 education system. This act underscores the insidious relationship billionaires have with U.S. President Donald Trump regarding education as he implements Project 2025’s plan to “steer federal money to vouchers.”
For generations, the billionaires have been using their “philanthropic foundations” to change how public education is delivered and governed across the country. When school vouchers didn’t become a reality in the 1980’s, billionaires joined with neoliberals and conservatives in a bipartisan effort to fund the creation and expansion of charter schools and other privatization systems.
A 2022 report on private equity, “How Wall Street profits from a public good,” disclosed how investors were alerted for decades to get involved with public education as a means of making money. By far the largest beneficiary of these grants from “non-profit” billionaire-funded foundations has been the proliferation of charter schools.
Billionaires and their investors love charter schools. They use their resources as a slick mechanism to reduce their own tax burden and lower the overall tax rates for public education, which is one of the largest expenditures for local and state taxes in the country. Anthony Cody, one of the founders of the Network for Public Education, describes how the “philanthropy scheme” works for the billionaires and their investors in this video.
The billionaires use their foundations to pour significant amounts of money to school board candidates, politicians, charter schools, “astroturf” local organizations, think tanks, and community groups that are specifically designed to promote their agendas to restructure public education. Education “reformers” use state tests as hammers to create an illusion of meritocracy, to prove that public schools are failing, and to justify sending funds to charters and voucher systems.