A new day?gettyAfter creating a federal school voucher program, the Trump administration has had little trouble convincing red state governors to opt in. Among Democrats, only New York’s Governor Kathy Hochul and Colorado’s Governor Jared Polis have brought their states into the program.The debate for the remaining states includes one major question-- would the federal vouchers benefit public schools by allowing them to take advantage of another federal revenue stream? Democrats for Education Reform, a nominally-Democratic school choice advocacy group, argues that the money can fund after-school, enrichment, and tutoring programs. Even staunch voucher opponent Josh Cowen argues that widespread adoption is inevitable.There is still uncertainty about how exactly the federal vouchers will work, because the Treasury Department (which will oversee this education funding system) has not released finalized rules. But based on what we do know, we can make some predictions about just how beneficial the program will be for public schools.Designed PurposeLet’s start by noting that the program is designed to promote private school choice, not public school support. The Education Freedom Tax Credit was proposed in a slightly different form under Education Secretary Betsy DeVos as a federal level voucher program to provide both a tax break and voucher dollars for students choosing private school. If legislators wanted to propose a tax credit program to support public schools, they could create a simple process-- write a check to a local school district, then deduct the amount from your taxes. Instead, this voucher program requires taxpayers to make their donation to a Scholarship Granting Organization; the SGO will in turn bundle those funds into grants given to students’ families, who will in turn hand the money off to an education service provider. MORE FOR YOUIf that provider is a private school, the last handoff of funding is simple. But if the provider is a public school, there is yet another challenge to circumvent.The Public School Voucher GapPublic schools do not and cannot charge tuition, so if they want to collect voucher dollars, they will have to come up with some other service to provide. Some analysts, like Marguerite Roza of the Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab, suggest that public schools can collect money for “extras.” This might involve a district separating its offerings into the basic required coursework and the extra optional courses, so that students who want High School Premium Edition instead of High School Basic Edition would have to pay for the premium package with federal vouchers. The school district may want to partner with a third-party provider for tutoring and extra academic support (though it’s not clear why the third party provider would need the district as a partner). Most critically, the district would need to create an SGO that was aimed at providing scholarships for use at the schools in that district. SGOs can theoretically be set up around any particular cause or concern (literacy, English language learners, advanced math support, left-handed students), but in Pennsylvania, where there has been a tax credit scholarship program for 25 years, the pattern that has emerged is hundreds of SGOs, most of which are associated with a specific community or school. There are national-level SGOs forming, but so far they are exclusively focused on serving private schools. To qualify as an SGO for the federal vouchers, the SGO must serve multiple students in multiple schools; most districts have multiple schools thereby meeting that requirement within the district.Tiers on Tiers on TiersOne troubling outcome could be public schools offering different tiers of education. This would represent a real shift away from the American model of schools that pledge to provide as much deep and varied education as your child wants to pursue. Instead, schools could be explicitly offering a Basic Minimum track. That Basic Minimum could be funded by local taxpayers, and everything offered in the Premium track would be funded with federal dollars, leaving the “extra” offerings at the mercy of donor generosity and federal rule-making.If, as seems likely, each community would be served by its own SGO, it seems likely that donors will primarily donate to their own local SGO, thereby amplifying one of the inequities built into our school funding system. East Egg and West Egg schools both depend on real estate taxes, and if West Egg is a less prosperous community, its schools receive less funding. Under a federal voucher system, wealthy East Egg will also see more taxpayer donations to its SGO. Reformers have long argued that students’ education should not be at the mercy of their zip code, but in a system that finds an SGO in every zip code, that inequity will exacerbated.The Public School DrainingIn states with taxpayer-funded vouchers, those vouchers are most used by students who were never in public school to begin with. It is likely that the federal voucher will follow a similar pattern, so public schools may not lose a huge number of students and the state funding that goes with them. The federal vouchers do have one advantage over state versions. When a state grants tax credits for donations to an SGO, the state must either find a way to replace that lost revenue or else cut services. On the federal level, the revenue lost to tax credits can be tacked onto the deficit.It’s possible that federal vouchers will not hurt public school funding much, and that some public schools will find a way to tap into the voucher revenue stream. But what is not being discussed is the effect that such a system could have on the public school mission. From “we are going to try to give your child the best possible education we can afford” to “we are going to give your child the bare minimum and if you want more than that, you’ll have to either pay for it yourself or go shopping for a voucher.” From a system funded and controlled locally with assistance from the state to a system that depends on donations funneled through the federal government. Analysts who predict that the federal voucher system takeover of education is inevitable may be correct, and they may be correct that public schools in states red, blue and purple will all be tapping into this new revenue stream. It’s not clear if any of this can happen without changing the fundamental nature of public education in the United States.