The Educational Choice for Children Act (ECCA), introduced by House and Senate Republicans, would provide a dollar-for-dollar federal tax credit for donations to nonprofit scholarship-granting organizations (SGOs). These SGOs, in turn, would provide funding to support students enrolling in private school or to help school-age children and their families pay for costs such as books, online instructional programs, test fees, and tutoring. Families are eligible for SGO funding if their income is up to 300 percent of the area median income. In this essay, we estimate the potential effects of the ECCA bill.

Why This Matters

Members of Congress considering whether to pass the ECCA into law should assess the potential uneven impact this policy would have across states and student demographics. Further, our analysis of potential ECCA funding indicates that private school seats are slightly underallocated to areas serving higher shares of students below the federal poverty level, relative to higher-income areas. Given the broad parameters under which SGOs can operate, it is difficult to predict exactly how the policy might be implemented, which might generate additional risk for an unequal allocation.

Key Takeaways

Looking at the implementation of similar state-level programs, we predict that most of the funding will be allocated toward private school tuition. We use data on the location of private schools to show the following:

• Not all students live near a private school. We estimate that about 1 in 5 students live at least 5 miles from a private school, and 1 in 10 students live at least 10 miles away from the nearest age-appropriate private school.
• Students in rural areas, high school students, students from middle-income neighborhoods, and American Indian and Alaska Native and white students are most likely to live far from a private school.
• This proposal is likely to direct slightly less funding to counties with higher poverty rates relative to counties with lower poverty rates. This assumes all students have an equal opportunity to receive the scholarship. If wealthier families are more likely to use the ECCA benefit, funding could be more tilted toward high-income households.
• We show that, both in terms of geographic access to private schools and funding allocation, the impact of this proposal would likely fall unequally across the 50 states and Washington, DC.

How We Did It

To characterize access to private schools, we use private school locations as listed in the US Department of Education’s Private School Universe Survey for school year 2021–22. We link these data to the population-weighted centroid of each census block group, identifying schools within 1, 2, 5, and 10 miles (in great-circle, or “as the crow flies,” distance) from that point. We use the estimated population of school-age children in each census block to calculate how many students live within a given distance of a private school.

Because of the flexibility allowed to SGOs in terms of awarding scholarships, and the uncertainty around how many individuals and corporations can donate to receive the ECCA credit, our analysis of the distribution of ECCA funding relies on the assumptions that ECCA-aligned SGOs will receive the maximum $10 billion in funding, that no new schools or vendors will open in the short term, and that all students will have equal opportunity to access funding from SGOs. We model the allocation of funding under three possible scenarios and compare them with the allocation of Title I and IDEA funding.