Senator Clinton, it has been suggested that education tax credit programs would allow universal school choice without creating the problem you have identified with school vouchers. Do you support state-level education tax credits, and if not, why not?

Here’s why this is the $64,000 question for the senator: asked about her views on school choice and vouchers, she recently responded as follows:

My problem with vouchers … is that if you provide vouchers through tax dollars, under our Constitution, to religious and private schools that you and I would agree are appropriate — that do a good job on education — how do you say no to the schools that, frankly, I would not want my tax dollars supporting — the school of white supremacists, or the school of the jihadists’ vision? You give vouchers to Catholics or Protestants, and then somebody says, ‘Well, I want my voucher for the church school that I want my child to attend.’ But you don’t want to support those values.… How do you draw that line?

The answer is to allow taxpayers to make that decision as they see fit, by offering school choice through tax credits instead of vouchers. Vouchers are, indeed, “public money.” We’re all forced to pay taxes. So, under a government school voucher program, we might be compelled to support sorts of education we find morally objectionable. But though Senator Clinton doesn’t seem to realize it, this is even more true of the existing public school system. That’s why we have been fighting school wars over what and how to teach our children for the past century and a half.

There is a simple solution to this problem: allow universal school choice through education tax credits instead of vouchers. Under a tax credit program, no government money is spent (see my blog post to that effect yesterday). Families who owe property taxes or state sales or income taxes basically receive a tax cut if they take financial responsibility for their own children’s education (paying tuition, or home-schooling them). Families with little or no tax liability would receive private scholarships that are funded by tax creditable donations from individuals and businesses. Both kinds of programs already exist, at a very tiny scale, in several states.

Both the personal use tax credits and the scholarship donation tax credits allow taxpayers to decide who receives their money — this is categorically different from both our current monopoly public school system and from government voucher programs. If you want to support the ability of poor families to choose their children’s schools instead of being locked into a particular public school, you can give money to a particular Scholarship Granting Organization of your own choosing.

If you don’t wish to subsidize education that you consider extremist, you can pick an SGO that does not allow its scholarships to be used at such schools. Because many different SGOs arise under scholarship tax credit programs, both low income families and taxpayer/​donors can find ones that comport with their own needs and preferences. This arrangement all but eliminates the compulsion about which the senator has expressed concern. And if she really cares about that compulsion, she should prefer tax credit school choice programs to the status quo, because the current monpoly public school system engenders more compulsion than any other.

So, Senator Clinton: Do you support school choice through education tax credits instead of vouchers, and if not, why not?