Hello,

The evidence is clear: Private school vouchers divert needed funding away from public schools, are a boon to the wealthy and don’t help student achievement.

Yet even as President Donald Trump tries to end the federal role in education, he and his allies in Congress want to create a new federal role in education—not for public schools but for a national voucher program.

In Congress, Trump’s allies are trying to sneak a new voucher program into a bill about taxes. But this “tuition tax credit” is nothing more than a national voucher program that also allows people like Elon Musk and Betsy DeVos to turn a profit, personally earning millions of dollars from the scheme, while our public schools, which 90 percent of all students attend, are underfunded and undermined.

Send your letter to Congress telling lawmakers to stop plans to implement a national school voucher program.

We can’t let Republicans representing billionaires insert a national voucher program into a bill with so many cuts to essential services that they hope we won’t notice. Adding a so-called tuition tax credit to their tax bill would:

• Divert billions of dollars in public funds to private schools—even though public schools serve 90 percent of our students.
• Let wealthy taxpayers profit from this voucher scheme even as it channels more taxpayer money to wealthy families already using private schools.
• Harm students with special needs who rely on public school infrastructure and are often not welcome in private schools.
• Allow discrimination with public funds, even as our public schools, which are nondiscriminatory and open to all, do not receive the funding they need.
• Harm food banks, houses of worship, veterans’ organizations and all nonprofits that rely on donations, by creating a financial incentive for donors to direct their money to vouchers instead.

We know vouchers are bad news for our students, schools and communities. The evidence is clear that vouchers don’t help achievement; they have been used mainly by the wealthy who already send their children to private schools, and most important, they deplete essential funding from public schools.

We can stop this attack on our schools. In the same way parents, educators and community members came together across the country last November to defeat vouchers, no matter their political persuasion, we can stand with parents and education advocacy groups now to send a clear message to members of Congress trying to defund public schools through this federal voucher scheme.

Click to send a letter to your members of Congress opposing a tuition tax credit for private schools and a nationalized school voucher program.

In unity,
Randi Weingarten
AFT President