September 7, 2025 Boston Globe Editorial Board Opinion_new federal scholarship program
Teachers unions want Massachusetts to reject money that can be used by private and public school students. But the state should keep an open mind.
Even before its details are known, opponents are already pressuring Democratic governors to reject a new education scholarship program enacted by Congress and signed by President Trump as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. But it would be foolish to deny scholarships to kids in Massachusetts simply because Republicans created them. Healey administration officials should keep an open mind as the program’s rules are crafted, and opt in if doing so would benefit enough of the Commonwealth’s children.
Critics of the bill see it as a backdoor school choice voucher program, and it will undoubtedly help private schools by helping families with tuition. But it also has potential to help public school students, by paying for expenses like tutoring and after-school programs. In a state with a notoriously high cost of living, officials would be betraying their constituents’ interests if they left federal money on the table.
The US Treasury still has to write the program’s regulations, so some details — like the extent to which states can impose restrictions on scholarship-granting organizations — remain unknown. The program doesn’t start until Jan. 1, 2027, and Healey is right in waiting until the final rules are released to make any decision.
But the basic idea is that any taxpayer can contribute up to $1,700 to a nonprofit scholarship-granting organization, and that taxpayer will then get a tax credit equal to their contribution. The scholarship-granting organization must spend at least 90 percent of the money on scholarships that pay educational expenses for families earning up to 300 percent of area median income. In Boston, that can be as high as $489,600 for a family of four, and about 90 percent of all families would qualify.
For families at private and parochial schools, the benefit is clear. But only around 7 percent of Massachusetts’s students — approximately 67,500 last year — attend in-state private or parochial schools. What often gets lost in the conversation is there is a potential benefit for public school students as well, since families can use the money to pay for supplemental services like extra tutoring, after-school programs, technology, or full-day kindergarten. While wealthier parents seeking extra math tutoring or speech therapy today can pay for additional services or move to a district with more resources, the scholarship tax credit program — if implemented wisely — could help students whose parents can’t afford extras.
“This is about choice and agency for 90 percent of kids in Massachusetts to enhance their educational opportunities,” said Katie Everett, executive director of the Lynch Foundation, a private family foundation that supports a range of educational programming, including programs run by the Catholic church.
Chris Smith, president and executive director of Boston After School and Beyond, oversees a network of 450 after-school and summer programs for generally low-income Boston area students, funded primarily by the state, Boston Public Schools, and philanthropy. Smith said he’s not advocating for the scholarship tax credit program, because he doesn’t know what, if any, unintended consequences it would have. But if Massachusetts opts in, he believes organizations like his could use the money in a coordinated, accountable way to expand out-of-school programs. “Every year, demand for funds outstrip supply two to one, so there’s not as many spaces for kids, and programs are not meeting their full potential,” Smith said.
Zoe Teegarden Silverman and her husband, who both work as consultants, have twin boys with special needs who just started seventh grade, one at Boston Latin School and the other at New England Hebrew Academy, a Jewish parochial school. Silverman said she and her husband are restricted in the jobs they can take because both children need services their schools cannot provide, so their parents must drive them from place to place and pay for additional therapies. Silverman hopes if Massachusetts opts in, her family could apply for scholarship money to pay for more special education services to be delivered in both the public and private schools and to pay for transportation if a child needs it midday transportation.
The good news for cash-strapped districts is this pot of money could fund extra services without dipping into state or school budgets.
There are legitimate concerns about the program’s implementation and consequences, and state leaders should be thinking about how to address those. But none of the objections to the program would justify withholding financial support to parents across the state.
For instance, Jon Valant, director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at Brookings, said there’s nothing to stop scholarship-granting organizations from giving money to private schools that lack antidiscrimination protections or to programs that don’t provide a strong education. If the state opts in, state regulators will have to approve a list of scholarship-granting organizations. If federal rules allow it, there may be a role for the Legislature to impose state rules and oversight on these organizations.
The Massachusetts Teachers Association has worried that the program would incentivize some students to move from public to private schools, thereby reducing funding to public schools.
Some advocates also worry that a scholarship-granting organization formed by private schools will have a bigger donor pool than one formed by urban nonprofits. But a well-organized group of urban nonprofits could make a compelling case to donors — and they should be preparing to do so.
What the state should not do is turn aside help for its residents simply for ideological or partisan reasons, which would be a replay of what happened after the passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010. Obamacare expanded Medicaid eligibility, but some Republican-led states turned aside the federal money for ideological reasons. The losers were their own low-income constituents who couldn’t access affordable health insurance.
The scholarship tax credit program could help Massachusetts students at both private and public schools. As long as the final rules are reasonable, Massachusetts shouldn’t deny students scholarship money and send our taxpayers’ dollars to other states just for political reasons.
_____________________________
Editorials represent the views of the Boston Globe Editorial Board
