The weakness of the arguments made by those benefiting from the tax credit scheme called “Invest in Kids” can be assessed by their reliance on half-truths, misstatements of facts, and false assumptions.

The program is NOT currently slated to sunset at the end of 2023.

In fact, the sunset date in the law is a year later, on January 1, 2025. Donations eligible for tax credits can be made until Dec 31, 2023. Scholarships can continue to be handed out for the entire 2023-24 school year. To estimate the impact on tax revenues for FY24, the maximum loss would be $75 million, assuming donors make their tax-advantaged donations between July 1 and December 31, 2023. Emergency action is NOT needed this week to clarify the picture either for FY24 state revenues or for students and schools for the 2023-24 school year. 

The program is NOT about hundreds of thousands of hard-working children and families.  

There are just 9656 scholarship recipients this year across the whole state.  The biggest beneficiaries of this tax credit program are the 478 private schools that receive the scholarship funds, the scholarship granting organizations like the Big Shoulders Fund that keep 5% of the donations, and the affluent donors who get a generous tax credit to reduce their state income tax bill.  Almost all of the private schools in the program provide religious instruction and are able to discriminate against the hundreds of thousands of Illinois children with disabilities, who are also hard-working.

The program excludes many students and families.

What about the children who are excluded from many religious private schools because of LGBTQ parents, or disabilities?  Are they not also “deserving”? Fortunately, public schools offer a good education to all students.  And state laws and the state constitution protect all students in public schools from discrimination. The solution to inadequately funded public schools is not to divert additional dollars to a handful of private schools, but to focus every available dollar on public schools and their students, so that every child has an opportunity to attend good local public schools, no matter their zip code. Public schools do a remarkable job of teaching all Illinois children who come to them, including those who are English language learners, or who have special education needs. Public schools offer a well-rounded curriculum and are governed by elected boards with transparency and accountability in their use of public funds.

Tax credits DO have an adverse impact on Illinois K-12 education spending.  

By diverting up to $75 million of public revenues into tax credits for wealthy donors, year after year, this program does indeed impair the state's ability to fund not only public schools, but also the state programs that support the health and brain development of children from birth through their school years, like maternal health, early intervention, and health care.  And as our neighboring states have seen, the pressure to offer vouchers or tax credits to more and more, and eventually all students is likely continue to ratchet up.  This program needs to be ended before our public schools are irreparably harmed.

We don’t know whether the program is helping low-income children.

The public has not seen disclosure of how many students receiving IIK scholarships were already enrolled in a private school, how many were already receiving privately funded scholarships without the IIK program, or how many students have dropped out of the program when they found the private school not to be a welcoming environment.  We don't know anything about how the selected students are doing, despite the IIK Act's requirement for a study of this, nor do we know how their home schools were affected by students leaving and maybe coming back mid-year. We don’t know how many students are in families with incomes between 300% and 400% of the federal poverty level, which is the limit for IIK returning students.  (That is well above median family income in Illinois.)   We have heard that many students were discouraged from even applying because their learning needs could not be supported by the private school.  The program is certainly succeeding in enriching the SGOs and bolstering private school enrollments.  But their enrichment is not a public purpose deserving our state revenues while public schools are still so greatly underfunded.

Rather than begging for a share of our scarce and precious public dollars, the Big Shoulders Fund and the private schools should utilize their many other options to make their schools more accessible to middle-income and low-income families.  Wealthy donors can afford to pay the full amount of state taxes they owe, especially since they can take a federal charitable deduction for donations to the schools of their choice.

Legislators should demonstrate their support for the 1.8 million public school students in Illinois by letting this program sunset. 

Ann Courter is a former public school board president, a retired lawyer, and an advocate for good public policy.