Government officials and education experts are right to express concerns about recent evidence of declining academic achievement among the students who struggle most. Researchers are exploring potential reasons, including pandemic-era learning loss and the negative effects of excessive screen time.
(READ MORE: Opinion: School vouchers are a reverse-Robin Hood scheme)
As the head of a public interest law firm that advocates for students, I wholeheartedly agree that helping our most disadvantaged students must be at the center of any effort to improve equity and excellence in education. But those concerns shouldn’t be used as a rationale to embrace false solutions that not only fail to address the root causes of declining achievement but also lead to potential harms to students and schools.
One such false solution surfaced in a recent op-ed in the Washington Post by Arne Duncan, the former secretary of education under Barack Obama (and my former boss at the U.S. Department of Education), and Jorge Elorza, the current CEO of Democrats for Education Reform, an advocacy group for alternatives to traditional public schools. Duncan and Elorza call on governors to address declining scores by adopting a provision in the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act signed by President Donald Trump.
That provision creates a new federal tax credit scholarship program that provides one-to-one individual tax credits up to $1,700 for cash contributions to “scholarship granting organizations” that pass out school vouchers. Currently, the law says those vouchers may be used for expenses for private education and for public school students, but we won’t know exactly what that means until the treasury department releases regulations. It’s up to each state’s governor to decide whether or not to opt in.