The scheme is a scam by @BloggersRUs

The scheme is a scam

by Tom Sullivan

Matt Taibbi wrote in Griftopia, “There are really two Americas.” For the grifter class, government is “a tool for making money,” while “in everybody-else land, the government is something to be avoided.”

A tweet by education writer Jeff Bryant (Education Opportunity Network) alerted me to another education grift that sounded quite familiar.

Illinois is handing out coupons for well-off parents who already enroll their kids in private schools. Taxpayers may never know how many vouchers go to students already attending private schools because no one is required to report that information. @carolburris @DianeRavitch https://t.co/PkivFvyZ3M

— Jeff Bryant (@jeffbcdm) August 23, 2018

Last August, with almost no public vetting or debate, Illinois passed a massive school choice program, making it the 18th state to add a “tax credit scholarship” program. Now, at least 5,600 Illinois students are headed to private school with taxpayer help, according to data compiled by WBEZ. Tens of thousands of kids tried for the scholarships, which can pay up to $12,793.

Tax credit scholarships aren’t technically vouchers, but for families and schools, there’s little difference. Opponents call them “neo-vouchers.”

With vouchers, states pay private schools directly from taxpayer funds. But with tax credit scholarships, the state never actually takes control of tax money. Instead,

1. Taxpayers donate to a nonprofit “scholarship granting organization.”
2. Those groups award scholarships and distribute the money to schools.
3. The state then issues taxpayers a “credit” toward their tax bill.

In Illinois, taxpayers get a 75-cent credit for every dollar they donate. Because it’s all voluntary, state supreme courts have repeatedly upheld tax credit scholarship programs. Declining to hear a challenge in 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court said in a 5-4 decision that when “taxpayers choose to contribute to [scholarship organizations], they spend their own money, not money the State has collected.”

At St. Mary Star of the Sea School on the Southwest Side, 30 kids are getting tax credit scholarships. According to Principal Candice Usauskas, two-thirds were already students there. All seven kids who will attend Frances Xavier Warde with taxpayer help were already students at the school, according to the group that awarded their scholarships.

We may never know how many scholarship winners were already attending private schools because scholarship groups aren’t required to report that information.

Once the scholarship bill passed, the Times continues, “parents of children in private schools began flooding public school offices to officially ‘enroll’ their children.” To enroll, but not to attend. Rep. David Casas, one of the bill’s sponsors, explained why in a YouTube video (the video has been taken down; transcript by the Southern Education Foundation):

“Some people felt a little bit weird about that; felt it was a little dishonest that they would take their child, enroll them in a public school and not have them actually attend, but all of a sudden they actually qualify for a scholarship. I’m telling you, we deliberately put the wording in there for that.”

Reagan taught that government is the problem. In post-financial meltdown America and in the absence of Wall Street prosecutions, with presidential candidates and major corporations hiding profits offshore to avoid taxes, with tech billionaires renouncing their U.S. citizenship rather than pay theirs (and being hailed as heroes in the financial press for doing it), scamming the taxpayers to subsidize your child’s private education seems like pretty acceptable behavior, even for churches. But it is not arising from dogmatic anti-governmentism. Small-time players have simply discovered what the big-time grifters already knew — that government is the enemy only so long as public tax dollars are going into someone else’s pockets. Thus, conservatives, fundamentalists and others have gotten behind the movement to “reform” public education by diverting public tax dollars into their own pockets in the name of providing more choices for the underprivileged.