Public School Funding Is On Thin Ice.
A flurry of voucher bills introduced over the past few weeks would privatize the majority of our K-12 funds. Members of Congress are signing up to cosponsor these bills and momentum on Capitol Hill is snowballing.
Senator Lamar Alexander and Rep. Luke Messer introduced a bill (the Scholarships for Kids Act, S. 1968 /H.R. 4000) that would turn 63 percent of federal education funding into private school vouchers. That means all federal education funding – with the exception of federal subsidies for school lunches, funding for students with disabilities, and funding for students attending schools on federally impacted land or military bases – would be diverted to voucher programs. An additional bill introduced by Senator Tim Scott (the CHOICE Act, S. 1909) targets dedicated special education and military funding. S. 1909 would allow IDEA funds to be used for private school vouchers, give vouchers for students from military families, and expand the D.C. voucher program. These bills combined would turn essentially all federal education funding into vouchers.
Allowing the majority of our education funding to flow to private schools would have an overwhelming negative effect on schools with high populations of children living in poverty, who are the primary beneficiaries of these federal dollars. Poverty greatly affects student learning and siphoning dollars from public schools will only make it more difficult to educate vulnerable students who face increased barriers to academic success. Plus, numerous studies prove vouchers do not help students and families: they do not improve student achievement, deprive students of the rights provided to public school students, and threaten religious liberty by funding religious education and lack accountability to taxpayers.
We need your help to ensure public schools don’t get left out in the cold. Please take a moment to contact your U.S. Senators and Representative today and tell them you want them to oppose these bills.
