SCA’s lobby day is coming up in ten days and you can help even if you can’t attend. We will be opposing a bill that supports school vouchers which fund private religious schools. It’s helpful before we go into a Congressional office for a meeting if the email report shows that a particular issue, our issue, is trending. It actually helps just to get the meeting in the first place. That’s why I always appreciate it when people click on the Action Alerts and let their representatives know what they think.
The Educational Choice for Children Act (ECCA) provides a tax credit for people or corporations that donate to nonprofits that provide scholarships or vouchers for private school students. Up to $10 billion would be available for this tax credit program annually. So if you donate $1,000 to one of these nonprofits, next April 15 you can deduct $1,000 from the amount you owe at the bottom of your tax return. That’s money that could have gone to the government for public education, defense, national parks, or anything else, but it won’t.
Where it will go is to private schools, 77 percent of which are religious schools. Here are some problems with that:
- Current voucher programs overwhelmingly support wealthy parents who are already sending their children to private school. ECCA will, in effect, redirect federal funding away from important government services towards high income families.
- Vouchers do not reliably promote educational achievement. They are not viable options for many low-income students who still can’t afford the entire private school tuition, or for rural students with no private schools available. Voucher programs were rejected by voters in three states last fall, Colorado, Kentucky and Nebraska.
- Studies show that when vouchers become available, private schools raise their tuition.
- Private schools have very little public accountability in who they admit, what they teach, how they teach, and what accommodations they make for students with disabilities. “School choice” ultimately means the private schools choose whom to admit.
- ECCA is a clear violation of the separation of church and state. It diverts what should be federal tax revenue to religious schools without any restrictions on whether the money is used to teach religion. Whether it’s used to teach the Bible, the Torah, or the Qur’an, that’s wrong.
If I convinced you to help oppose this bill, you can find the Action Alert here.
I don’t have enough space left today to talk about the steady drip of anti-democratic changes going on. A few quick thoughts:
So far the lower courts have a good record of stopping illegal actions brought to their attention.
On Inauguration Day President Trump’s popularity rating was eight points higher than his unpopularity rating. Today it’s less than one point higher.
If there’s a protest somewhere near you on some issue, keep this in mind from a Justice Department official who was opposed to the Muslim travel ban in 2017: ”Throughout, public protest on the travel ban was enormously helpful. Where we might otherwise have felt like lonely voices in a bureaucracy, public outrage gave us courage and the knowledge that we were, in fact, working in the public interest. Advocacy on the outside made advocacy on the inside possible.”
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