I'm sure the bill is flawed, but giving parents a way out of our deliberately-catastrophic fake education system is a great boon.
But only some of them. The Democrat-hired, John-Thune-permitted Senate Parlimentarian ruled that the provision to provide tax credits for private school was not a purely fiscal matter, and to get a vote on it, Republicans had to agree that only parents in states whose governments permitted them to use these tax credits could do so.
In other words: All of the blue states are going to forbid any of their citizens from using their own tax money to send their kids to good schools that they themselves pick.
Why? To protect the teachers union failure factories, of course. The teachers unions have a couple of truly disgusting imperatives, but the most sacred of them is having a monopoly on teaching children. They know if parents have any other choice, they'll flee the teachers union monopoly.
But maybe blue state voters will get angry enough when they see red state parents choosing their own schools that they'll demand that blue states opt in to the program, too.
And if not: F**k 'em. Let the blue states burn to the ground.
Buried in the 940-page "big, beautiful" budget blueprint is an unprecedented tax credit that, if approved, will be a long-sought victory for the private school choice movement in its drive to expand and break into Democratic states that for decades have blocked its path.
The tax credit program, which would provide scholarships to K-12 students to pay for private schooling, would mark a significant shift in federal education policy. The scholarships would be the first major federal initiative designed to propel the nationwide growth of private school choice, a largely conservative and Christian movement championed by President Trump and suburban Republicans alike.
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Beyond boosting participation, the program is also a wedge to crack into states controlled by Democrats. These blue-state lawmakers, backed by teachers' unions, have long resisted private school choice as a threat to public school enrollment. The granting of scholarships, advocates say, would plant a seed of interest among families in Democratic enclaves at a time when enrollment and academic performance have been steadily declining at public schools.
"In terms of the number of students served and the geographic scope, it would be the most important piece of school choice legislation ever," said Patrick Wolf, a prominent scholar of the movement at the University of Arkansas. "Advocates hope it will provide a proof of concept in blue states and show that if a few thousand kids get scholarships the public school system won't crater."
But the potential of the scholarship program to meet the advocates' goals has been weakened this week in the Senate. The program was included in the massive budget bill because, as a standalone measure, it wouldn't survive a filibuster by Senate Democrats. The budget bill can be passed by a simple Senate majority, provided it only addresses fiscal matters.
The Senate parliamentarian, however, objected to the scholarship program, ruling, to the dismay of Republicans, that it seeks to impose a policy on the states. In response, Republicans had to amend the initiative to allow states to decide whether to participate, a change that could hamper the movement's efforts to breach liberal jurisdictions.
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"We're all disappointed that the bill is not as good as it was when it went into the committee," said Jim Blew, co-founder of the conservative Defense of Freedom Institute and former assistant secretary in the Department of Education under Betsy DeVos. "If the Senate version is the final, it's a big win for families that want to choose a better school for their children."
A Blue State Workaround
The tax credit is partly a workaround of the blue wall of opposition to private school choice. Some 15 mostly Democratic states have never passed or have overturned measures that use public funds to pay for students' private education. The battles have been heated, with state teachers' unions typically leading the resistance to protect public school funding. In Colorado, the state education association helped defeat a ballot measure last year that it feared would lead to the establishment of a voucher program. Voters in Nebraska shot down an existing voucher program in 2024. Illinois is the only state in which the legislature ended a private school choice program. In the big blue states of California and New York, choice advocates have made little headway.
If the federal program becomes law, however, some Democratic states may come under pressure to opt in, partly because it doesn't draw on local tax dollars. It's free money.
"Leaders of blue states would have to explain to their citizens why they rejected free federal education dollars, instead leaving all that money for red states," said Wolf. "That's a tough sell."