Daniel Buck
6.18.2026
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They say don’t bury the lede, so here goes: The Education Freedom Tax Credit (EFTC) could be an utter disaster.

The EFTC is a new federal program that passed through the reconciliation bill last year. It allows donors to provide a $1,700 donation to a scholarship-granting organization (SGO) and receive that money back through a tax credit. Those SGOs can then provide scholarships to students to pay for various educational goods and services: after-school tutoring, tuition at private schools, curricular materials, education therapies for students with disabilities, and other such expenses.

More simply, you can give $1,700 to an SGO and receive that money back (in the form of an income-tax credit), while the SGO gives out scholarships for various educational purposes.

Ideally, this program will create a funding stream to allow struggling Catholic and Lutheran schools to prosper, homeschools and microschools to flourish, and public schools to offer a litany of new, supplemental services.

How could it go wrong? Let me count the ways.

Most likely, this program becomes a glorified slush fund for public schools. They have the infrastructure to make it work: marketing teams, pre-built contact lists, and a bureaucracy. A public school district can mass email every single family and run campaigns to encourage donations to their preferred SGO. Homeschooling co-ops? Not so much.

A few public-school superintendents that I’ve spoken to have gotten wise to this reality. Writing about a promotional event at the Treasury Department last week, the New York Times framed the program as functionally equivalent to vouchers for public schools. And along with this likelihood is simple waste: spending a bunch of money and thereby contributing to our national debt, without getting anything in return by way of student learning or academic outcomes. We’ll see new bureaucrats, new programs, and the same mediocre outcomes.

Another risk, which Deputy Assistant Secretary for Tax Policy Kevin Salinger acknowledged in his remarks at Treasury, is fraud and abuse. The possibilities are endless: family members hired as “consultants,” huckster educational services, “education purchases” that are personal goods, the list goes on.

Of all the ways this could go wrong, fraud and abuse ranks low for me. Other school choice policies rein in such misconduct. For example, Jason Bedrick never tires of pointing out that Arizona’s ESA program has fraud, yes, as any system will, but the extent of it is functionally a rounding error. Moreover, Salinger’s remarks imply that Treasury is taking seriously the risk of such malfeasance. That being said, conservatives need to be ready to have the next “Quality Learing Center” debacle land in their laps.

The greatest risk in my mind is that in time this program will become a stick that the federal government can wield to thwack private schools into submission. Were private schools to adjust their budgets or expand such that they come to depend on funds through this program, it then becomes a point of leverage for antagonistic administrations.

It wouldn’t be the first time. At the level of higher education, administrations have leveraged grants and Title IV funds to force universities into compliance—from eradicating DEI to Title IX compliance. The same could happen here. Any time an institution accepts public monies, it invites regulation. As others have said, “he who pays the Piper calls the tune.” At the state level, there have already been initiatives to place regulations on private schools that accept public funds. Exploiting this program for regulatory control is most certainly on the minds of at least some Democrats and perhaps also some Republicans.

As it’s currently written, the federal law regulating the EFTC has only a few requirements for participating SGOs: They must devote 90 percent of their income to scholarships, serve more than 10 students who do not all attend the same school, and provide moneys only to students from households earning less than 300 percent of the area’s median income. Furthermore, the guidance that Slinger presaged seems to indicate that states will not be allowed to place further requirements on SGOs.

That said, were a President Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to come into office, there’s little to prevent her from politicizing standards of compliance or approval for SGOs: for example, excluding SGOs that fund religious schools that deny trans students an ability to use the bathroom of their choice. Such a change would mostly certainly trigger a court case on First Amendment grounds. While that litigation winds through the courts, a Catholic school has a difficult choice to make if 20 percent of its budget is tied up in EFTC.

As a final risk, might I simply point to the graveyard of failed federal education policies? Reading First, School Improvement Grants, Race to the Top—if past is prologue, this EFTC could prove to be just another failure. There are surely countless other ways that this program could falter beyond the concrete possibilities above.

I want this program to succeed. I want struggling private schools to find a lifeline that allows them to compete with the free alternative of public education. I want students in failing schools to have the resources necessary to escape and secure a quality education. I want new educational models—co-ops, microschools, part-time homeschools, unique charter and private schools—all to flourish. I want blue states to have the benefits of a school choice policy. Were I advising a governor, I’d still recommend they join the program regardless of my reservations.

But if conservatives aren’t careful, in 20 years, the EFTC could be just another chapter in a book penned by some policy wonk warning of failed federal school reforms.

Policy Priority:
Quality Choices
Topics:
Governance
Private School Choice
Elliot Regenstein Theresa Hawley Katie Reed
6.18.2026
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Lately there has been a lot of discussion about whether states should opt in to the federal “Education Freedom Tax Credit”—a dollar-for-dollar federal tax credit for individual contributions to nonprofit scholarship granting organizations that distribute funds to eligible K–12 students. This conversation comes at a time when many states are expanding support for their own educational choice investments, including through the use of education savings accounts (ESAs)—which last year received $10.6 billion in state funding, according to EdChoice. So far, most of the discussion has focused on the K–12 years, which prompts us to ask: Why hasn’t early childhood been a bigger part of the education choice movement?

We are not here to opine on whether governors should opt into the federal tax credit or if their states should enact or expand ESAs. Those decisions involve multiple considerations that vary across the political spectrum. We are here to say to education choice advocates that, if you are serious about expanding educational opportunity, you cannot afford to ignore the pre-kindergarten years. Here’s why:

Because publicly funded pre-k is limited and private options are expensive, families with lower incomes are most likely to go without. Many of the children who miss out on pre-k for financial reasons are the same ones who later struggle in K–12. Targeted funding that gives those families access to quality early education is one of the highest-leverage interventions in the choice toolkit.

  • The early childhood system is already built on choice. Early childhood is already delivered through a variety of provider and program types. This “mixed delivery system” incorporates both traditional K–12 schools and private providers (including religious providers). Many private and parochial schools start with a pre-k program, and in some cases, it’s much easier for a child to gain admission to those schools if they start at age three or four. For the schools, education choice funds that can be used for pre-k might allow them to expand their offerings in those years, and at the very least should make it easier to fill the classrooms they already have. For those who support educational pluralism, the early childhood system already has implemented many of the principles that are driving the choice movement.

  • There’s an opportunity to drive policy coherence across systems. Both the ECE and K–12 systems value parental choice and access to high quality experiences to at least some degree, but these values are implemented very differently in the two systems. Having policies that reinforce the separation of early childhood and K–12 makes for incoherent public policy, which is frustrating for families. Flexible funding through education choice programs could serve as a bridge between the two systems, reflecting how families actually make decisions about their children’s education. And if choice advocates really believe in providing public resources to support parents’ education choices, why should they place artificial limits on when families can use those resources?

Where the policy stands and where it falls short

Few choice advocates have paid attention to the pre-k years—and the results are visible in their recent successes. At the federal level, the Education Freedom Tax Credit created in the One Big Beautiful Bill applies to children “eligible to enroll in a public elementary or secondary school.” While many elementary schools offer pre-k classrooms—and increasingly private and charter schools do, too—pre-k programs do not appear to be included in the statute. Similarly, the Trump administration’s executive order focused on education choice uses the term “K–12” and does not say anything about early childhood. The Department of Health and Human Services has issued guidance on how to use child care subsidy funds to support the goals of the executive order, but barring an unexpected twist when the Treasury Department issues final regulations, this tax credit will not include early childhood.

At the state level, most private education choice programs do not include early childhood. Education savings accounts are rooted in service for children with disabilities—but as these programs have expanded to serve broader populations in K–12, they have not seen a similar expansion into early childhood, though there are a few exceptions: Arizona and Florida allow ESA funds to be used for early childhood special education, and some Texas families can use vouchers for pre-k. Wyoming deserves credit for including early childhood as part of its ESA program, which was a priority for Governor Mark Gordon. The Equality State’s model is worth examining and expanding.

What advocates should do

Include early childhood! The educational benefits are substantial, the need is strong, and the politics are likely to be favorable. At the state level, any new ESA legislation or expansion should include ages three and four as eligible years, not just kindergarten and above. At the federal level, early childhood could be added to the existing tax credit or any new supports for education choice that emerge. Early childhood education is not an issue that cleaves neatly along party lines, as evidenced by existing investments in the “Southern Surge” states.

As education choice advocates push for policy change at the federal and state level, we encourage them to remember that education begins before kindergarten—and to work toward policies reflecting that reality. While some choice advocates and early childhood advocates may struggle to find common cause, others will turn out to be natural allies. It’s at least worth a conversation. We encourage policymakers and advocates working on educational choice to get that conversation started.

Policy Priority:
Quality Choices
Topics:
Curriculum & Instruction
Governance
Private School Choice
Jeff Murray
6.18.2026
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While we are now several years removed from the pandemic, work continues to remediate its inadequate substitutes for in-person teaching and learning. Tutoring emerged as a favored response from schools. But the type, amount, and quality matter if academic outcomes are going to rebound. A recent study focuses on a specific aspect of tutoring quality to determine its value to students: the instructional and curricular alignment between tutoring and the classroom.

Researchers Cara Jackson and Ayman Shakeel, from the Center for Outcomes Based Contracting and Abt Global, respectively, conducted a randomized control trial in a single school district in Tennessee during the 2024–25 school year at the request of district leaders. In a new Chalkbeat article, those leaders explain that their schools had been providing literacy tutoring to hundreds of students for years in hopes of boosting academic achievement, but their data showed that “students were not exiting intervention” and were instead becoming “intervention lifers”—running in place just to keep from falling further behind. Believing that the culprit was instructional misalignment between tutoring and the regular school classroom,[1] the district spent the last of its pandemic relief funding to purchase as many instructionally-aligned tutoring materials as they could afford, tried them out on as many kids as they could accommodate, and hired Jackson and Shakeel to evaluate the results.

The trial was a small one: 296 total students in grades K through 3, all of whom scored below the 40th percentile on the aimswebPlus literacy diagnostic administered at the start of the 2024–25 school year. Of these students, 179 were randomly assigned to the instructionally-aligned treatment group (the most that could be accommodated) and 117 to the business-as-usual control group. Tutoring took place either in the classroom or in a separate room of their school building, with tutoring group size regularly varied for both treatment and control students. Some control group students used a computer for their tutoring from time to time, but no treatment group students ever did. As was typical in the district, control group tutoring could be led by paraprofessionals or teachers. Treatment group tutors were exclusively teachers, in order to maximize alignment between tutoring and classroom instruction. Sessions for both groups were intended to occur daily, but teacher and student absences throughout the year lessened the true dosages. Session lengths were not prescribed and varied daily, averaging around 41 minutes per session for both groups.

Jackson and Shakeel find that treatment group students scored an average of 0.12 standard deviations higher than students in the control group on end-of-year aimswebPlus testing, which is statistically significant. They also find a positive impact for instructionally-aligned tutoring of 0.17 standard deviations on the state’s standardized ELA exam, though that effect falls below statistical significance. Treatment effects are strongest for boys and for the lowest-performing students at the start of the year. More interestingly, students do better when tutoring sessions are conducted by adults who did not hold a master’s degree, be they licensed teachers or paraprofessionals. The researchers surmise that these younger, less-experienced tutors stuck more closely to the curricular expectations of the tutoring materials than their older, more-experienced peers. Additionally, tutoring group size appeared to matter—all else being equal—with the highest impacts seen in tutoring groups comprising four students; no more, no less. No explanation is proffered for this curious finding.

In the end, the researchers urge a cautious interpretation of their findings (instructionally-aligned tutoring might be a way to boost students out of “intervention lifer” status) and more investigation. They would love to have more specific data on absenteeism, more details about which adults were conducting which tutoring sessions, and of course, more students in both groups. The district in question, they write, was immediately “working to expand the instructionally aligned tutoring,” although their Covid funding has long run out and the resulting expansion is going to be far more ad hoc than their initial effort as studied here. None of which bodes well for district students, regardless of how long the remediation effort continues.

SOURCE: Cara Jackson and Ayman Shakeel, “Creating Coherence: Does Instructional Alignment Affect the Impact of Tutoring?” Annenberg Institute at Brown University (November 2025).

[1] In this report, “alignment” is defined as curriculum, instruction, and assessment—including tutoring—acting as “a unified system for common learning goals.” In the district, alignment was actualized by purchasing tutoring materials from the same company from which they sourced their English language arts curricula.

Policy Priority:
High Expectations
Topics:
Evidence-Based Learning
Curriculum & Instruction
Robert Pondiscio
6.18.2026
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More than a decade ago, I reviewed the The Science of Learning, a slim report published by the then-new advocacy group Deans for Impact. At the time, it felt like an intervention, nearly an epiphany. Teacher preparation had long been dominated by progressive education theory and pedagogy, and many of the report’s core claims—that memorization matters, prior knowledge shapes learning, practice improves retention, and “skills” like critical thinking depend on what you know—were far from universally accepted. A newly released second edition arrives under very different circumstances.

What’s striking is not how much the report has changed, but how little. It’s nearly doubled in length, but its organizing questions—How do students learn and retain new information? What motivates them to learn? What are some common misconceptions?—remain largely intact. Core insights about knowledge, memory, motivation, transfer, and learning endure. The report has been expanded, updated, and refined, but it hasn’t been fundamentally rewritten.

That’s precisely the point. The durability of its original framing suggests that the field has (or ought to have) learned something important over the last decade: The science of learning is not another fad or passing enthusiasm destined to be replaced by the next education trend. The central insights remain as relevant and enduring today as they were when Deans for Impact first published the report in 2015.

In some respects, its greatest achievement may be that it no longer feels especially controversial. Ten years ago, many educators derided “rote memorization” as a relic of an earlier era, to be replaced by student-directed projects and discovery learning. Knowledge was often subordinated to skills. “Critical thinking” was frequently discussed as though it were a transferable skill that could be taught independently of content. On the contrary, one of the central findings of cognitive science is that students cannot think critically about what they do not know—and that deep understanding rests on a foundation of effortlessly retrieved knowledge that’s stored in memory. Broadly speaking, though, cognitive science remained a boutique concern for nearly a decade, occupying a relatively small corner of the education conversation.

Today, concepts such as cognitive load theory, retrieval practice, prior knowledge, and worked examples are widely discussed among educators. The science-of-reading movement has brought many of the report’s core assumptions into the mainstream, and knowledge-rich curricula continue to gain traction. Explicit instruction is no longer something educators feel compelled to whisper about or embarrassed to champion.

No single organization deserves credit for these shifts. But at least some credit should go to Deans for Impact, which played an important role as an early translator of cognitive science research, helping bring key findings to teacher preparation programs.

The second edition reflects the organization’s maturation. It places greater emphasis on common misconceptions about learning and spends more time addressing implementation pitfalls. If the original report was a concise introduction to what cognitive science tells us about learning, the new edition reads more like a field guide informed by a decade of watching educators attempt to put those ideas into practice. That evolution reflects a larger shift in the field itself. When the first edition appeared, the challenge was changing minds. Today, the challenge is changing institutions.

That remains uphill work. If you prefer to see the glass half full, the National Council on Teacher Quality has just reported that the share of elementary teacher preparation programs aligned with scientifically-based reading instruction has doubled since 2023. More than half such programs now earn top marks for preparing future teachers to teach reading using methods grounded in research. That’s no small accomplishment.

Half-empty? That means nearly half of teacher preparation programs still fall short, with one-in-five earning a failing grade from NCTQ. That’s a lot of bad training still finding its way into American elementary classrooms. Many programs continue to devote insufficient attention to foundational content knowledge in subjects like science, social studies, and mathematics. They spend more time on pedagogy than on the content teachers are expected to teach.

The challenge facing education is not a lack of evidence. In many cases, we know more than ever about how students learn. The challenge is translating that knowledge into the routines, systems, and structures that shape teachers’ daily work.

The second edition of The Science of Learning inadvertently highlights this reality. It repeatedly emphasizes principles that few serious observers would dispute: students learn by connecting new information to prior knowledge; memory is essential to understanding; practice strengthens learning; and expertise develops gradually through sustained effort.

The more daunting question is why institutions often resist acting on those insights. Fordham’s recent survey of teachers found something both surprising and sobering: Teachers who relied most heavily on their pre-service preparation for their knowledge of the science of reading demonstrated weaker knowledge of it than peers who credited professional development, classroom experience, or curriculum-based learning. The science is gaining ground, but many aspiring teachers still appear to learn its lessons despite their teacher-prep programs, not because of them.

Suffice to say that Deans for Impact’s project remains unfinished. The first edition of The Science of Learning arrived when the challenge was persuading educator-preparation programs to take learning science seriously. The second arrives when the challenge is ensuring that these ideas are embedded deeply enough in enough institutions that they become the norm rather than the exception.

Jeff Murray
6.17.2026
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  1. A couple of interesting points in this piece, covering discussion items from the most recent meeting of Columbus City Schools’ elected board. First: It seems that the General Assembly has finally hit upon an “underused school facilities” bill that districts can’t see a way to circumvent. “If Senate Bill 311 goes through unchanged,” Chief of Strategy and Performance Russell Brown told his elected bosses, as many as six CCS buildings “are vulnerable” to being forced into closure/sale by the state. He continued, without a trace of irony, saying that “there is a lot that is not in favor for our students” in the bill. “If we don’t act with urgency, these are properties we could lose.” I’m convinced, sir. Let’s pass that sucker ASAP! The second is that the Central Ohio Transit Authority (COTA) appears far more capable of delivering a student busing system that effectively serves all students—no matter what type of school they attend. Their data wonks presented detailed information to the elected board on every district, charter, private (and, hopefully) STEM schooler living within district boundaries: where they reside, where their schools are, and the most efficient public transit routes between them based on distance, time, and transfer requirements. The context of the presentation doesn’t really even matter. On the evidence of their comprehensive data and planning alone, COTA should immediately be made the full-scale replacement for the district-run transportation; given control all of CCS’s funding, equipment, and staff; and set loose to launch a functioning system for this fall. (Columbus Dispatch, 6/17/26)

  2. Of course it is unlikely that Columbus will ultimately be transformed for the better in the ways I suggest above: a right-sized footprint for their actual student population; charter/private/STEM schools actually getting first dibs on good, purpose-built facilities; and a transportation system that actually serves families. Not because they are not positive outcomes that smart people are working hard to bring about, but because there are way too many other folks dreaming about halcyon days in the past—a long, loooooong way in the past—who want only to be paid big money to do whatever they want in their district based on these irrational fantasies of yore. If you want proof, check out the two entirely incompatible streams of thought in this Ideastream piece about Cleveland Metropolitan School District. On the one hand, you have Georgetown University’s Marguerite Roza explaining clearly and calmly how CMSD’s current budget disaster was inevitable based on decades-long trends, actually upon them years ago, and was elided by the powers-that-be until it could no longer be ignored. On the other hand, you have a raft of current and former staffers, board members, and administrators—all of whose livelihood still depends on the district continuing undiminished—denying all of those trends, pointing fingers literally everywhere else (charter schools, the General Assembly, other districts with open enrollment, etc.) with no backup, and clinging to the dream of Cleveland somehow returning to its 1950s heyday. How all of this irretrievable nostalgia is meant to serve the actual students of today, I don’t know. But those are the forces in opposition in most of Ohio’s large school districts right now—clearly drawn and clearly destined for a showdown. (Ideastream Public Media, 6/17/26)

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Policy Priority:
School Funding
Topics:
Governance
Jeff Murray
6.15.2026
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  1. Last week we discussed for the first time the potential for building closures in Akron City Schools, which, like most other urban districts, has been losing students steadily for decades. We noted two particular aspects of the debate then: The potential “emotional toll” of seeing any school close and the fact that fact that the district had continued such a robust building program that all of their underutilized facilities were less than 20 years old, i.e.—a district full of brand-new white elephants. In this follow up piece, we get some clarity on that building program that leads us to a whole new, particularly-Akron-branded, wrinkle in the school closure discussion. As you may have guessed, going on a years-long building spree for brand new schools while simultaneously hemorrhaging student enrollment would not typically compute. But the district partnered with the City of Akron to pass a levy in the early aughts to a) start the building program, b) construct the buildings as “Community Learning Centers” with ready access to the public, and c) co-own them with the city. All this means that even though the district is on the hook for all of the expensive operation costs for the schools, the buildings are for all legal purposes not schools. And despite some hiccups in the district/city partnership over the years, this piece indicates that neither emotion nor student enrollment numbers (nor even financial distress, I think) will ultimately matter in terms of closure determinations. There appears to be no obvious way to close these underutilized community amenities without a protracted legal fight, especially as the 30-year legal framework/levy that created them continues in force. I suppose that’s a surefire way to keep them out of the hands of charter and private school operators, but it feels like a very expensive victory to me. (Akron Signal, 6/15/26)

  2. Meanwhile, in Cleveland, a city known for having a bit more collegial relationship between its district and local charter schools, I perceive that there are cracks forming in the partnership in the wake of district school closures. Two supporters of the Breakthrough Schools charter network published an op-ed over the weekend reminding folks about the Cleveland Plan and the longstanding connection between high-performing charter schools and Cleveland Metropolitan School District that plan forged. They also opine in favor of its unbroken continuation: “When we stay grounded in our values, aligned to a clear strategy, and relentlessly focused on outcomes for scholars and families,” they write, “we move closer to the Cleveland we all believe in, a city where every child, regardless of ZIP code, has access to a first-class education.” (Cleveland.com, 6/14/26)

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Policy Priority:
School Funding
Topics:
Governance