SB265/HB973 is primarily a private school tuition tax credit bill!
SB265/HB973 is a primarily a private school tuition tax credit bill!
| Contact your legislator NOW! |
| BOAST co-sponsor legislators |
| Betty Weller, MSTA vice president, testimony on SB265/HB973 |
The bill creates an income tax credit for 75% of the contributions made by a business or nonprofit organization to an eligible nonprofit organization that p rovide s scholarships to eligible students or teachers at a nonpublic K-12 school.
This program is not a strategy for improving public schools, does little for public school students, and reduce s revenue that otherwise could be available to invest in public schools. Research shows pubic schools that benefit the most from such contributions are in middle-and upper-income neighborhoods, and that those in low economic neighborhoods benefit very little.
Patterns on the usage of tuition tax credits in other states show that the beneficiaries of these credits are more often existing private school students. A study by the non-partisan RAND Corporation concluded that tuition tax subsidies rarely benefit poor children.
This bill is a backdoor approach to providing vouchers to parents of children in nonpublic schools by subsidizing tuition at private and religious schools with public tax dollars through the tax credit.
As with vouchers, these tax credits permit nonpublic schools to continue their ability to deny admission to any student, especially students with costly special needs such as a learning or physical disability or limited-English proficiency.
Nonpublic schools that would benefit from a tuition tax credit program are not accountable to the public in the way that public schools are by having to disclose data on student achievement, attendance, graduation and dropout rates, and other relevant basic information.
This bill inappropriately establishes MSDE as the administrator of tax credits, a function not currently within its purview.
While Maryland is projected to face a significant structural budget deficit, it cannot responsibly afford to lose revenue through a tuition tax credit that subsidizes private school tuition.
