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As schools send children home for the summer, we need to recognize a frightening fact: This could be the last year of public schooling the way we’ve known it. Donald Trump’s new school funding scheme, pushed through as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, will kick in during the middle of the next school year, in January 2027. It’s going to create a financial tsunami for public schools. The real tragedy is that there’s no mystery to it: We already know what will happen, because the scheme is not really new at all. It brings us back to the bad old days, to the failed and inadequate divided school budgets from before the Civil War. Trump’s plan brings back the devasting problem that our modern public school systems were designed to fix.

The new program has been called a national voucher system, but in fact it is more like a private school subsidy. Here’s how it will work: Taxpayers will be able to deduct up to $1,700 each from their federal taxes, whether they have any children in schools or not. They can send that money—a dollar-for-dollar reduction in their federal taxes—to “scholarship granting organizations,” or SGOs. Those SGOs, in turn, will distribute money to families to use for educational services such as tuition discounts at private schools. Not every family will benefit—SGOs can only give the money to families who earn under 300 percent of their area’s median family income. Also important is that states will have to opt in, and every state will have some say in deciding which SGOs can participate. So far, we have 29 states officially signed up, and a complicated political back-and-forth going on in the rest.

It’s very different from the traditional voucher programs that started in the 1990s. Unlike vouchers, the money goes to the SGOs, not to families directly. Most important, the money will not be coming directly out of state education budgets. It will come from federal coffers, and that fact has tempted some Democratic governors, such as New York’s Kathy Hochul, to flirt with the idea of opting in.

At the school district level, however, the potential budget damage could be severe. Every student that leaves their local public school to take a subsidized private education will take their state funding away with them. School budgets are cumbersome to change, with many fixed costs, such as buildings and personnel. Even if the number of students at public schools drops suddenly due to Trump’s private school subsidy—along with the funding that accompanies them—it will take time for schools’ financial liabilities to go down accordingly. Principals and teachers get the same salary whether their school has 500 students or 300; buses cost the same whether they transport 100 students or 50; furnaces cost the same whether they warm 1,000 students or 300.

It’s a frightening prospect; funding will drop off a fiscal cliff but costs will stay the same—for the short term at least. The money has to come from somewhere, so districts will be forced to cut basic educational services. As public schools totter, more families might be tempted to take the subsidy and leave public schools, creating a dizzying budgetary downward cycle.

To be sure, Trump’s subsidy will provide a bonanza for some. Large, established private schools with existing fundraising infrastructure could see a huge cash infusion. The new law doesn’t limit the amount of benefits families can receive, so theoretically a school could pocket sky-high tuition, paid for with Trump’s subsidy. And just as with traditional state-funded vouchers, some affluent families who already attend private schools could receive a significant subsidy. In my upstate hometown of Binghamton, New York, the 300-percent-of-median-income limit would include families making up to $190,000 per year. In a city such as Alexandria, Virginia, the cap would jump to almost $341,000. The very wealthiest families would be excluded, but there are plenty of well-off families who could participate.

There are still a lot of unanswered questions. What may be most important is that we don’t know which states will opt in. The states that do will have to decide what kinds of scholarship-granting organizations can take part, but we are not sure yet what the rules will be. States could, possibly, cut out certain types of schools, or certain types of programs. For example, a state could insist that participating SGOs observe public school antidiscrimination laws. Or they might not be able to. We just don’t know.

We also don’t know how many taxpayers will take advantage of the program. There will be 138 million people eligible, but it doesn’t seem likely that they would all take part, given the filing requirements. Even if only a fraction of taxpayers participated in the new program, though, the cost could be staggering. For instance, if only 48 million taxpayers gave their $1,700 to private schools instead of to the federal government, the reduction in the amount of money the federal government receives in income taxes would be more than the entire current budget of the Education Department. Would the money come out of the ED budget? Or serve as another excuse to cut that department’s funding? We won’t know until it’s too late.

Just as important, we have no idea if this radical funding scheme will survive after Trump’s presidency. For private schools thinking about expanding their fundraising systems to take advantage, that uncertainty will likely serve as a hard brake. Like businesses trying to negotiate Trump’s erratic tariffs, private schools might not want to invest in a short-lived experiment.

But even given all the uncertainty, there’s no doubt that this subsidy will devastate public schools, if only in the short term. Like other “choice” programs, the hardest-hit districts will be in rural areas, including those in red states. In Texas, for instance, staunch conservative legislators have defied Trump and ardently opposed the expansion of voucher plans, because of the ruinous impact on their public school budgets. And in other red states like Alabama, existing cuts to federal education spending have decimated school budgets in rural areas, harming Trump’s most dedicated fans.

There are a lot of question marks about the specifics, but we actually do know how this will play out in general, because we’ve been here before. For the first 50 years of the United States’ existence, all public schooling limped along financially, hamstrung by the kinds of subsidies Trump is bringing back. In those early years, every state split up their education budgets among a variety of schools. They sent dribs and drabs to a variety of private schools and subsidized academies; they sent the never-enough remainder to public schools. It was worse for everyone, everywhere.

New York City’s experience shows the dangers. Through 1825, the city split up its state funding among a wide variety of public and private schools. In 1824, for instance, the city sent a measly $16.38 to the school of Christ Protestant Episcopal Church to teach 12 students. They paid $554.19 to educate 406 children at the Catholic St. Patrick’s Cathedral school. After 21 private schools got their cut, the remainder went to the public schools. It was not enough to pay for a decent education at any of the schools, public or private. Worst of all, given the financial disincentives, there simply weren’t enough schools for New York’s children. Of the city’s 30,560 children, school leaders found, only 21,866 attended any school at all.

It didn’t fix all their problems, but in 1826 New York City’s leaders opted out of their private school subsidies. They sent their entire state education budget to the city’s public schools. By eliminating double costs for buildings, teachers, and supplies, the city was able to offer more schooling for more students in their expanding public school system.

By the 1840s, Horace Mann, of Massachusetts, hoped to copy the New York program in his state. As the state’s first secretary of education, Mann painstakingly collected statistics to prove to voters how damaging the subsidies were. With two separate school systems—one public, one private—most districts could only afford to offer six months of public schooling per year. Parents who wanted more schooling had to subsidize it out of pocket. Mann convinced voters to increase their own taxes by a smaller amount than those out-of-pocket fees, and used the money to provide 10 months of public school per year. There was enough left over to provide training for teachers, increase teacher pay, improve school buildings, and offer free textbooks.

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Due to the obvious benefits, in the decades before the Civil War, voters across the northern United States opted out of private school subsidies. In the South, however, states continued to subsidize private schools and academies, in part to ensure that the benefits of public schooling would not spill over to educate enslaved Southerners.

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We can see the results, and they serve as a stark warning from the past about our educational future. States that continued private school subsidies had far worse educational outcomes. In 1840 in Massachusetts, for example, just over 1 percent of white adult males were illiterate. (Back then, the census did not ask about literacy among nonwhite Americans.) In New York, just under 4 percent. In highly privatized Georgia, in contrast, the number was 19 percent; in North Carolina, which also continued to use its education budget to subsidize private schools, the number was 27 percent.

Certainly, those numbers reflect other factors, including the legacy of Puritan emphasis on literacy and overall increased education funding in the North. Yet we cannot ignore the facts of the case: States that split up their education funding among private and public schools consistently offered far worse education to all.

Now Trump’s budgetary wrecking ball threatens to return us to those dismal conditions. He’s using federal dollars to sweeten the deal, not state ones, but in the end the result will be the same. The cause will be the same, too. No one will be able to say we didn’t see it coming.