Kansas school vouchers, education savings account and tax credit scholarships explained

You'd be forgiven for tuning into a Kansas Legislature committee hearing on education bills and being confused as to what is actually being discussed.

So far this session, debates and testimony on school choice bills have often turned into meta-debates on the meanings of certain words and phrases. Republicans in the Legislature have insisted, and even argued, with constituents and conferees to insist they know of no school voucher bills in the Legislature.

But the terms "school vouchers" and "school choice" can refer to a variety of measures, some of which the Kansas Legislature has either enacted or pursued.

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Gov. Laura Kelly signed one limited school choice bill, open enrollment, into law last year. Although it does not deal directly with private schooling, the open enrollment statute will allow families to enroll their children in any Kansas public school, subject to yet-to-be-defined capacity limits. Open enrollment takes effect for the 2024-25 school year.

Other, more aggressive school choice measures — like education savings accounts or tax credit scholarships — are in their first few years of limited operations but could see big expansions with bills under consideration in the Kansas Legislature.

Does Kansas use school vouchers?

School vouchers, in essence, are government subsidies for families to use for tuition at a private school of their choosing. With vouchers, these payments are usually made directly to the school, and they may or may not cover the full price of tuition.

As with many school choice propositions, the idea behind school vouchers is that by supporting and funding private school tuition, public schools are pushed to improve to compete for students, a la free market.

For many school choice proponents, these bills — voucher or otherwise — are about improving a Kansas public school system they allege has failed thousands upon thousands of students, said Dave Trabert, CEO of the Kansas Policy Institute, a conservative think tank that has lobbied for various school choice measures.

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He said he does not imagine many families would even use the proposed school choice programs, at least initially, and that the vast majority of students would remain in public schools.

"The fact that kids have an opportunity to go somewhere else breaks the effective monopoly of the public school system," Trabert said. "And that makes them think, 'How can we do a better job of allocating resources to demonstrate that we can provide at least as good a product as the private school down the street?'"

Critics of school voucher programs and other school choice options disagree with that notion, though, and argue that public schools are a public good, in that everyone must pay to support the schools, even if they don’t have children who attend them, because society at large benefits from a population that is better educated.

Private schools and other non-public options fail at this, public school advocates allege, because they have no requirement or incentive to take the most at-risk students who need more intensive instruction, and they are subject to little, if any, oversight from the government.

Some private schools, such as most of Kansas' Catholic schools, choose to willingly follow the same accreditation procedure for the state's public schools. But it isn't required, and many don't.

"With an accredited private school, you know there are at least some requirements associated with those schools as far as publishing test scores and conforming to educational standards," said Leah Fliter, a lobbyist with the Kansas Association of School Boards. "But when you open the door to the state supporting, with tax dollars, schools that are not accountable or subject to any oversight, that's incredibly concerning."

Nearly 30 states use school vouchers, including Florida, where the state has approved a flurry of school choice legislation in recent years.

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School vouchers, especially when used to pay religious school tuition, have been challenged in court as a violation of the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause that prohibits the government from promoting or funding religious organizations in a way that would give one religion an advantage over another.

Additionally, a wave of anti-Catholic hysteria in the post-Civil War era led to a close, but failed effort by Republican James G. Blaine to pass an amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibiting the use of public funds to support religious schools in 1975. At any rate, 38 states — Kansas included — amended or drafted their constitutions to accomplish the same goal.

While most of those state’s “Blaine amendments” remain on the books, the U.S. Supreme Court in 2020 ruled them in violation of the U.S. Constitution and established that religious schools must be included in any private school groups that receive taxpayer-aid. In that case, the Republican-appointed majority of justices pointed to the First Amendment’s other half, the Free Exercise Clause, which generally prohibits the government from any individuals’ practice of their religion.

Kansas does not have a school voucher program, although different initiatives either proposed or enacted in recent legislative sessions function similarly in that they use public taxpayer dollars to pay for or offset the cost of private school tuition.

In any case, the term — which has picked up negative connotations in the field of education — is often used as a catch-all for any school choice proposals, particularly in recent debates in the Kansas Statehouse.

Kansas Sunflower Education Equity Act would create voucher-like education savings accounts

Education Savings Accounts, or commonly initialized as ESAs, are not vouchers, strictly speaking, but they function virtually identically, and critics of that funding model colloquially refer to them as vouchers as well.

With ESAs, families choosing against public schools instead receive, in a savings account managed by the state or a contracted party, the per-pupil funding that would have gone toward their children’s public education. Families can then apply that funding toward private schooling or most other education-related expenses, such as tutoring, textbooks, instructional materials and even therapy.

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Arizona was the first to pioneer ESAs in 2011, starting with accounts for students with severe disabilities to attend private schools. As the Arizona program expanded to include low-income students, other states passed similar legislation.

Despite concerns that families were fraudulently misspending nearly $1 million in ESA funds, lawmakers in Arizona continued to expand the program, and now nearly 50,000 students use ESAs for private schooling.

In Kansas, Rep. Kristey Williams, R-Augusta and chair of the House K-12 Education Budget Committee, earlier this legislative session introduced HB 2218, a bill that would create the Sunflower Education Equity Act and establish Kansas’ first version of ESAs.

Administration of ESAs would be put with the state treasurer’s office, rather than the Kansas State Department of Education, and a board made up of legislative, governor and agency appointees would oversee the program, which, in theory, would help deter and prevent fraudulent spending.

Families would receive 95% of the base funding per student — about $5,100 in 2023-24 — that would have otherwise gone to a public school to instead use for private school tuition or other education expenses.

The bill, as initially introduced, would have been open to virtually all Kansas students, including those who already attend private schools. Payments would not be allowed to the immediate family members of homeschooled students, however.

The bill was then amended to focus on public school students starting in 2023-24, with other students in families making less than 300% of the federal poverty level eligible subject to program capacity. That limit would be increased to 400% of the federal poverty level in 2024-25, and ultimately, any Kansas student could receive an ESA starting in 2026-27.

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State officials initially and roughly projected the program to cost at least $151 million, using inexact and low estimates of student participation and still-undetermined administrative costs. Amendments since the bill was introduced have only muddied the extent of the bill’s financial impact, and Williams, the chair of the budget committee, did not allow members to ask about finances in the bill’s latest hearing.

The committee last week used the contentious “gut and go” legislative procedure to swap the contents of HB 2218, the ESA bill, into SB 83, the Senate Education Committee’s version of tax-credit scholarship expansion. In the process SB 83 is scheduled to be debated on the House floor this week.

Other bills could expand Kansas tax-credit scholarship program

Strictly speaking, tax credit scholarships do not directly use taxpayer dollars to pay for private school tuition, but that’s because the state chooses to forego receiving those taxpayer dollars in the first place.

In a tax-credit scholarship program, individuals, businesses or organizations are given a tax credit for donating to a scholarship-granting organization. This credit is usually capped at a certain amount of tax liability, and the credit itself is often only a percentage of the actual amount donated. For example, a person donating $10,000 for a tax-credit scholarship may only receive a $7,000 credit on their state income taxes.

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The beneficiaries of tax-credit scholarships, like school vouchers and ESAs, are often limited to certain segments of current public school students, such as those from low-income families or at poorly performing schools, although these initiatives are often expanded to more, if not all, students.

In Kansas, the state’s tax credit program dates back to 2014, when legislators created the Kansas Tax Credit for Low Income Students Scholarship Program and directed it be used for students at the state’s 100 lowest-performing public schools.

The program gradually expanded and now serves any Kansas student in grades K-8 who is eligible for free- or reduced-price school lunch and formerly attended public school. In the years since, the tax credit has 70% of the donation to an eligible scholarship-granting organization, with individual taxpayer credits capped at $500,000 and the overall program limited to $10 million.

New bills heard this year would further expand the program to high school students and children of certain first responders, increase the credit to a dollar-to-dollar match and raise the program cap to $20 million, subject to demand.

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At a hearing earlier this spring, Rep. Mari-Lynn Poskin, D-Leawood, called Kansas’ program a “tax scam” for the unusually high limit for individual taxpayers, compared to other tax credits given for charitable contributions.

The status of tax credit scholarship expansion is unclear. The Senate’s version, SB 83, was used as a vehicle for the bill to create ESAs, while the House has yet to discuss HB 2048 on the floor.

Does the difference matter?

Studies into the effects of various school choice programs have described mixed success in improving student achievement, especially when students' test scores and other academic measures are adjusted to account for other socioeconomic factors.

While most school choice programs initially target money toward students in low-income families or poor academically-performing schools, those students often have other risk factors — such as lack of transportation or parent assistance with schoolwork — that remains the same, regardless of if they attend a public or private school.

For public and private school advocates, however, the difference between the mechanisms of various school choice bills may indeed be purely academic, particularly in differentiating ESAs from full-fledged vouchers.

The difference, then, is how one views the outcomes.

"This is not about sending money to private schools," said Trabert, the Kansas Policy Institute CEO. "This is about getting kids an education that they are not getting in the public school. If a parent feels that their child is not getting the education they need, then the legislation gives them another opportunity."

In contrast, public school advocates say that school choice measures are attempts to "hollow out support for public schools in whichever state these battles are happening."

"You continually erode the tax base that supports public schools, so they become the only option for people who can't afford to go anywhere else," said Fliter, the KASB lobbyist. "Then you end up with a system that serves middle- and upper-class kids whose parents can afford to transport them to a private school or parents who can stay at home and homeschool, because they have the resources for that. Meanwhile, the kids who can't drive a county away are the ones who remain behind."

Rafael Garcia is an education reporter for the Topeka Capital-Journal. He can be reached at rgarcia@cjonline.com or by phone at ‪785-289-5325. Follow him on Twitter at @byRafaelGarcia.

This article originally appeared on Topeka Capital-Journal: Kansas school choice bills have education savings accounts, tax credits