ACE Scholarships CEO Norton Rainey shared with the Washington Examiner that if the ECCA is passed, it will expand the opportunities to raise funds for tuition thanks to the creation of federal tax credits. The bill would create $10 billion in annual tax credits for school choice programs.
“This [law] would offer an opportunity for all 50 states in the United States to benefit from this school choice program,” Rainey told the Washington Examiner. “We love tax credits. Our donors love it as well too because they can really make a difference by serving the lowest-income kids. This particular bill at a federal level does exactly that. It will serve the lowest-income families.”
Using tax credits to fund students’ education helps avoid cuts to school budgets. Critics of school choice vouchers often express concerns that the system drains funding from public schools.
Taxpayers get to decide which school voucher funds they want to donate to, ensuring that organizations generating funds and schools are held accountable, according to Jo Brinkerhoff, ACE Scholarships vice president of marketing and events.
“A taxpayer can easily go to another SGO [scholarship granting organization] that they think will do a better job, but then that trickles down also to a school,” Brinkerhoff said. “A parent is paying to go to that school, so if that school is not performing, the money follows the student. So the student goes to a different school, that money goes to that school, so there’s this sense of accountability that we don’t have in our current education system right now.”
Rainey said the organization is receiving major backing from key players from the Trump administration such as Energy Secretary Chris Wright, who previously served on ACE Scholarship’s board.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order to begin the process of dismantling the Education Department, with the intention to remove bureaucracy from education. The president and Education Secretary Linda McMahon have placed a large emphasis on school choice.
“The school choice movement right now is probably at a very, I’d say, its strongest place that’s been, and more importantly, I think the opportunity for kids to benefit is really at the greatest level that we’ve ever seen in the history of our country,” Rainey said.
The average income of an ACE Scholarship family is $60,000, with the average contribution size of a family to their child’s education being $2,500. Rainey shared that every family makes a contribution to their child’s education to ensure “they have skin in the game.”
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The organization is active in 12 states, and in the past 25 years, the nonprofit group has provided over 100,000 scholarships to struggling low-income students who are on average two grade levels behind. It has issued approximately $330 million to cover the costs for students to attend private schools.
Data collected by ACE Scholarship revealed that 98.9% of its scholarship recipients graduate high school. In comparison, 81.9% of students at low-income schools graduate; 72% of its fourth graders are reading at grade-level proficiency, while just 32% of fourth graders in public school are meeting their grade’s reading level proficiency standards.
