[ Editor's Note: The 2005 Utah Legislature is poised to introduce tuition tax credit legislation. The National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) have jointly researched the growing threat of tax credit vouchers (or tuition tax credits as they are referred to in Utah). Excerpts from their publication, “Tool Kit for Fighting Tax Credit Vouchers,” are included in this article in an effort to better inform UEA members about the history and danger of tuition tax credit schemes. ]

The current push for tax credit vouchers is best understood in the broader context of the ongoing attacks on public education. For the last quarter century, a variety of organizations and individuals have sought to divert public tax dollars to private schools.

The effort began as a straightforward, if misguided, attempt by religious groups to win some form of subsidy for sectarian schools, and was subsequently embraced by a number of groups intent on reducing the role of government.

Today, proposals to aide private schools persist in a variety of forms. Most frequently, they surface as school voucher proposals, under which public dollars that might otherwise be spent sustaining cash-strapped public schools are diverted instead to be spent on tuition for a very small percentage of students attending private, often religious, schools. But despite years of campaigning and litigating, voucher proponents have been unable to win widespread popular support for their plan; indeed, it has been defeated every time it has been put before the voters in the form of a referendum or initiative. In fact, the public appears to be tiring of the proposal. The 2003 Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup Poll found that 60 percent of the public opposes “allowing students and parents to choose a private school to attend at public expense,” up 10 percentage points over the 2002 poll.

As an alternative, the movement has developed a hybrid proposal: tax credit vouchers. Under these plans, government dollars would reach private schools without the government having to write the check.

Rather, individual or corporate taxpayers would be granted a tax credit – not merely a deduction, but a dollar-for-dollar credit – for money spent on tuition at private schools.

While these proposals do not involve a check from the government, they have the same practical effect as vouchers: funds that could otherwise be spent on public schools are spent instead on private ones. It matters little whether tax dollars go through the state's accounts or not, before ending up in private schools instead of public ones. Whatever the particular route of the monies, it is their destination that matters. In the end, public schools are denied funds they need to educate the 90 percent of children who attend them, so that a small percentage of students, generally from well-to-do families, can instead have a state-subsidized education at a private school.

In a particular disingenuous bit of public relations wizardry, proponents pitch their tax credit voucher scheme using the same argument they presented in traditional voucher battles: that the proposal will largely benefit poor families, who would otherwise be unable to afford private school tuition. In reality, this assertion has been even less true for tax credit vouchers than for “plain vanilla” vouchers: in the handful of states where tax credit vouchers have been implemented, credits have gone overwhelmingly to wealthier families already able to afford tuition bills. Tax credit vouchers have proved themselves to be vouchers for the wealthy.

In a further attempt to make the proposals politically palatable, proponents have begun to include provisions designed to appeal to the parents of children in public schools. Under these proposals, parents would be able to claim tax credits for certain – actually very few – expenses associated with their children's attendance at public schools, such as school supplies or calculators. These provisions are both an afterthought and a fig leaf. The lion's share of the tax break would go to parents sending their children to private schools – and indeed, that is the real purpose of such proposals to begin with. The inclusion of provisions aimed at public school parents is more about winning adoption for the proposals than about making the proposals equitable.