School choice advocates are celebrating the One Big, Beautiful Bill’s unprecedented creation of a federal school choice benefit that could empower parents across the country.
“[W]e are absolutely thrilled that there is finally a federal provision that is a school choice opportunity through a federal tax-credit program that enables donors to claim the federal tax credit to give money to qualifying … scholarship-granting organizations, like ACE Scholarships,” Norton Rainey, the CEO of ACE Scholarships, one of the largest such granting organizations in the country, told The Daily Signal.
The law, signed by President Donald Trump on the 4th of July, allows donors to lower their tax liability by $1 for every $1 donated to accredited scholarship-granting organizations, up to $1,700 donated. That money would go to the so-called SGOs, which give out student scholarships to help lower- and median-income families afford elementary and secondary private school tuition.
The legislation allows families making up to 300% of the median income of the region where they live to qualify for the scholarship from the tax benefit.
Rainey noted that in order for the benefit to be accessed by everyone in the United States, each individual state will have to choose to opt into that provision of the law.
“Just because it was passed federally doesn’t mean that all 50 states will participate. What we do know is that red states, in particular, likely will immediately, because they’re more inclined to support school choice,” Rainey explained to The Daily Signal.
Nevertheless, the nonprofit executive expressed optimism that the new federal benefit would supercharge the school choice movement.
If we can market this program effectively, not just [to] our donor base, but find creative ways to market this effort and let people know about this extraordinary opportunity to help out kids, we can really see [a] quantum leap in school choice at a national level.
Rainey emphasized that school choice is about giving poor families an escape from terrible public schools.
“See, the issue that a lot of people face is that the ZIP code they live in is commensurate with the income which they receive, and if you’re a lower-income family, you’re normally in a ZIP code where your public school is not performing as well, and they’re stuck,” Rainey explained.
“It’s about leveling the playing field so that every single American has access to education, which we believe creates a prosperous society,” he added.
The ACE Scholarships executive noted that his students get academic results.
“We know that our parents are very good decision-makers, evidenced by the fact that [about] 99% of our kids, or in this particular case, just under 15,000 kids, who are on [scholarships], graduate from high school, and in addition, they are far outperforming their peers in math and reading proficiency,” Rainey said.
“These are children who usually are far behind already, and when they get this scholarship, the schools are so committed to them that they work with them to get caught up, which they do, and once they get caught up, they absolutely begin to thrive,” he said.
Rainey emphasized that his organization’s goal is simply to give students access to better educational opportunities, regardless of whether those are in the form of public or private schools.
“I also think it’s important to say that we are not anti-public schools. A lot of people think if you’re in the school choice movement, you’re against public schools. We’re not. We are anti-mediocre education and not having access to a good school,” he said.
