When Vermont Governor Phil Scott signed into law H. 454 (now Act 73), education freedom in the oldest school choice state took a major step backwards. This is the second blow school choice programs have felt in recent memory, and it’s important to avoid sweeping these losses under the rug in favor of celebrating legislative victories.
Since 1869, Vermont has used public funds to help students attend private schools under specific circumstances. As a general summary, children who live in towns that do not operate a public school for their given grade may attend the public or nonpublic school of their choosing. This process is frequently called “town tuitioning,” and Vermont facilitated it 130 years before Wisconsin passed the first school voucher program. For those who haven’t lived in New England, the idea of a school district not offering a certain grade may seem odd, but it is the result of unique municipal and public school histories within this region. Vermont’s neighbors to the east and west, Maine and New Hampshire, also use town tuitioning.
H. 454 made several sweeping reforms to Vermont’s education finance system. Some are good, such as a transition to a foundation formula and more uniform education property taxes, both of which should move public school funding away from simply favoring the wealthiest districts. These are financing reforms that are crucial steps toward allowing funding to follow the student. Some reforms are neutral, at least so far, such as the movement toward redrawing school district lines.
But there is one policy change in search of a problem. The statute substantially restricts the types of schools who can receive funding through tuitioning. Private schools operating within the borders of a school district that offers K-12 are now ineligible to receive town tuitioning students. Additionally, private schools with less than 25% of their student bodies consisting of publicly-funded students are no longer eligible for town tuitioning. Private schools within districts that don’t offer all grades can still receive town tuitioning students; however, this policy excludes most private schools not in a rural area. All 12 of the state’s Catholic schools are expected to be ineligible. Therapeutic schools are an exception to this new policy and remain part of the town tuitioning system.
Whereas a student without a public school previously could attend essentially any out-of-district school with government funding, whether public or private, that student is now more or less restricted to only the public school options.
The law grandfathers in the thousands of Vermont students currently using the program to attend private schools, so they will not be affected. But this change will impact potential recipients moving forward.
For full disclosure, I am no expert on the state of Vermont. I’ve yet to visit. My secondhand knowledge of this turn of events relies on the reporting from those following this legislation up close.
However, I see this as the second case in the last year or so of a blue state abandoning a private school choice option. Illinois chose to let the Invest in Kids tax credit scholarship program sunset in 2024. While Illinois’ program was much newer than Vermont’s, it served more than 9,000 students.
As someone born and raised in the Land of Lincoln, I was cautiously optimistic that choice was winning over a very Democrat-controlled state. House Speaker Chris Welch invited Virginia Walden Ford to Springfield very early in his tenure. He spoke of Ford’s fight for choice as a matter of equity and described her story as one that swayed his opinion on expanding educational opportunities. While Governor J.B. Pritzker flipped back and forth between supporting and opposing the program, he was in the favorable column when he was running for re-election and when the program extension had a chance to reach his desk. It didn’t hurt that the firm that runs polling for Illinois Senate Democrats found overwhelming public support among for the Invest in Kids program, especially among groups typically considered key demographics for the party.
And yet, the program lapsed. A $1.5 million campaign from public sector unions bolstered enough opposition against a $56 million education program to shut it down.
Vermont’s and Illinois’ stories behind their lost programs differ. For instance, public sector unions played a major role in the Invest in Kids program’s demise, but unions were split on the bill that included gutting the town tuitioning program.
The recent histories of these two states raise the same question for me. Why now? It’s not like Illinois wasn’t facing political pressure against school choice in 2017, and Vermont has catered to a traditionally anti-choice camp for generations.
If you listened to many Republican-leaning school choice advocates, a blue retreat wasn’t supposed to happen at all. The “litmus test” movement argued that after school choice became normalized among red states (because choice was to be a “litmus test” issue for Republicans), heavily Democratic states would feel pressure from parents to adopt ESAs and similar policies. This justified using intense rhetoric and co-opting culture war issues as part of a national strategy that would eventually win over blue states.
It’d be one thing if we simply hadn’t seen results in blue states yet, but it’s another to see two states moving entirely in the wrong direction. In my opinion, the litmus test approach has backfired because it underestimated the power words have in creating heroes and villains. Our very human desire to support heroes and defeat villains often is way more powerful than rational self-interest.
Given those tendencies, making choice a “litmus test” for Republicans always risked making it a “litmus test” in the other direction for Democrats. This risks programs that have existed for a long time outside of the scope of national partisan politics (Vermont) or that represented uneasy bipartisan compromises and shifting party priorities (Illinois).
For whatever benefits the litmus test approach had for a particular time in particular contexts, its time has passed. Riding on the coattails of red state successes is not a sustainable blue state strategy, it seems. Focusing on choice as a solely Republican issue has not proven to be sustainable in places where Republicans do not have firm power. To help all kids, regardless of where they live, have educational freedom, we cannot settle for leaving choice vulnerable in blue and purple states. There’s no get rich quick scheme here. It will take steady, persistent work that operates within each state’s history, needs, and political dialects—as the choice movement has done for decades.