SPRINGFIELD — In November, Illinois state Sen. Dave Syverson vowed to fight to reinstate a program that provided scholarships to low-to-moderate income students to attend private schools.
Since 2017, the Invest in Kids Scholarship Tax Credit Program had allowed residents and businesses to donate up to $1.3 million a year to scholarship funds and receive a 75% income tax credit on those donations. Last year, the program provided scholarships to about 15,000 students.
But Democratic lawmakers in November declined to renew the program, ending the state’s first and only private-school choice program. Illinois thereby became the first state to eliminate an already-established voucher initiative.
Syverson, R-Rockford, told a crowd rallying for the renewal of Invest in Kids that “we’re going to continue to push for this.”
“We’ll start again in January, and we’ll try to get this back on track because I think it’s a program that’s clearly helped thousands of children succeed,” he said.
Nine months later, that fight has all but died.
‘A DROP IN THE BUCKET’
The Invest in Kids Act never garnered much attention from parents or students, explained Hannah Schmid, an analyst at the Illinois Policy Institute, a pro-school-choice group instrumental in creating the program.
With more than 1.85 million students enrolled in Illinois’ K-12 schools, scholarship recipients represented a “drop in the bucket,” she noted.
“I think there are a lot of Illinoisans that just weren’t aware this program even existed,” Schmid said. “When it ended, they were silent because they didn’t even know about it.”
That didn’t stop the state’s teachers unions and education associations from launching a full-out campaign to kill the tax-credit scholarship.
The Illinois Education Association called the program “one of the country’s biggest school voucher schemes” and said it operated “under the guise of helping low-income and students of color to have a choice.”
But the program wasn’t a guise, argued Bobby Sylvester, a long-time school choice advocate who helped raise money for the scholarship program. Only low-to-moderate income households at or below 300% of the federal poverty level qualified.
He said the program specifically targeted students who were stuck in failing public schools and didn’t have the resources to attend a private school that could better meet their needs.
“That support made all the difference in the world to those families being able to attend those schools,” Sylvester said. “There was massive demand. For every one student that we helped, there was another three, four or five in line.”
Even so, opponents of the law argued the tax credits siphoned about $75 million from state coffers that could have gone toward more public education funding for all low-income students, not just those receiving private-school scholarships.
Proponents argued that even with less tax revenue, the state still saved $12,000 on each student using scholarships compared to how much would have been spent to pay for their public-school education.
‘A FOOT IN THE DOOR’
The Invest in Kids Act gained approval after former Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner helped generate bipartisan support for the bill. The law established the program on a temporary basis through 2022. Lawmakers later extended it by one year through 2023.
But by November, the Democratic supermajority at the statehouse had little appetite to renew the program. An attempt by pro-voucher organizations in the spring to push legislation to create a new program wasn’t even introduced by its proposed sponsor, retiring Democratic state Rep. Kelly Burke.
The shift came as Illinois lawmakers increasingly viewed Invest in Kids not as a way to bolster options for low-income families, but as right-wing, anti-public-school policy, argued Paul Bruno, an education policy expert at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
“I think even though it wasn’t very large, there is a sense that the scholarships represent a kind of foot in the door — that if the small program exists, it’s easier to expand and it starts to increasingly chip away at the public school system,” he said.
The Chicago Teachers Union said eliminating the tax-credit scholarships marked “an incredible blow to a movement that is dead set on destroying public education and destabilizing Black, Brown and working-class communities.”
Twenty-one states currently have tax-credit scholarship voucher programs similar to the one in Illinois. Just last year, eight states, including Indiana, expanded access to their school-choice programs. More than 30 states, plus Washington, D.C., give students public money to attend private school.
Illinois’ decision to be the first in the nation to let a school-choice program expire highlights the deepening political divide on public education, Bruno argued. He speculated other, more liberal states could follow suit.
“The reaction in some blue states is to sort of circle the wagons around public education and traditional public-school districts,” Bruno said. “So it wouldn’t surprise me if you continue to see even more of that.”
School-choice advocates have conceded there’s little chance that Illinois lawmakers will approve any kind of private-school voucher program.
“We’re not sure there’s a coalition here that’s going to keep working to figure out what could be eligible in our state,” said Schmid of the Illinois Policy Institute.
For now, she explained, organizations like hers will focus on other ways to ensure that every child in Illinois has the opportunity to receive an excellent education, whether that be public or private school.
Sylvester, the tax-credit scholarship fundraiser, agreed there’s not much optimism for another school-choice program, given Illinois’ status as a blue-state powerhouse.
Still, he hasn’t totally given up hope.
“In the immediate future, there’s not likely to be a school choice program in Illinois,” he said. “But I never say never. Lightning can always strike the same place twice, right?”