State Superintendent Chris Reykdal’s Statement on the Reckless School Privatization Tax Credit Passed by Congress

Congress adopted and President Trump signed a school privatization tax scheme into law. Below is State Superintendent Chris Reykdal’s statement. 

OLYMPIA—August 18, 2025—While slashing essential public benefits for families including Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act signed recently by President Trump also quietly passed an intentionally reckless school privatization scheme seeking to use public taxpayer dollars to fund private, religious, and for-profit schools all over the country. 

This school privatization plan designed by the Trump Administration and Congressional Republicans follows through on many elements pitched in Project 2025—a plan that was heavily influenced by the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute, both groups that support diverting public taxpayer dollars to private schools. This is “funded” with more federal debt—expanding America’s record budget deficit—a burden that generations of young people will bear. 

We already see the harmful effects of school privatization in other states—using taxpayer funds to subsidize private, religious, and for-profit schools that are statistically less diverse, often of a single faith, economically segregated, and unwilling to serve students with disabilities proportionate to their community demographics. The slow dismantling of public education while only truly supporting wealthy families that can already afford private school is as anti-democratic as it gets.  

Public schools are designed to protect the public good. For decades, our laws have made it clear that students, regardless of their family income, deserve access to a high-quality education. When the tax code is skewed to further privilege the wealthy via tax credits and direct subsidies, it comes with budget reductions aimed at our most vulnerable young people. 

These policies can also have the effect of reducing enrollments in public schools—starving them further of federal and state funding and the essential services those dollars provide. The loss of critical funding to public schools results in inequitable services and supports for students from lower- and middle-class families across America. 

The adoption of inequitable school privatization programs, paired with the constant vilification of public schools all across the country, are intentional and strategic decisions by an elite group aiming to redistribute public tax dollars to the wealthiest Americans. It is this same group that misuses assessment scores to aid them in their vilification, while propping up private schools that are not required to administer or report assessment scores, even if receiving taxpayer dollars. 

This rhetoric is not rooted in fact. The facts are that, by the eighth grade, only four states outperform Washington’s students in reading on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). At the global level, the U.S. ranked sixth in the world for reading on the most recent Programme for International Assessment (PISA) test and is 1 of 7 countries with the highest density of top performers in reading. 

These facts are an inconvenient truth to the privatization propaganda that has a new infusion of energy from the radical ideology that has embedded itself in the current White House and congressional majorities. We have to say out loud that a segment of Americans, currently with outsized influence, do not want all of our children to have success in shared spaces. 

Privatization works against integrated, diverse, and culturally rich schools that teach students to learn together in a complex society where not everyone thinks, looks, believes, or prays like you. This diversity of experience and values is a strength of the American education system that helped to propel us to the top in economic opportunity. 

School privatization takes us backwards. While states are given the choice to opt into the program and the Governor could authorize it in Washington, it would be a grave error to move forward without our policymakers deciding if they want the 10% of families—who are disproportionately wealthy—who send their children to private school to get a taxpayer benefit that appears to be unavailable in equal amounts to the 90% of families who send their children to public school. 

I oppose this effort as currently drafted and call on the Legislature to weigh in during the upcoming legislative session if, in fact, Congress has given them the policy authority they deserve in education that is clearly the intent of the 10th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. I further call on Congress to revisit this policy after the mid-term elections so that every family with school-aged children gets an equitable tax credit to help with education expenses that are not already covered by their schools. 

Public education is the most powerful common good in our country. I challenge the elected officials that represent Washingtonians to actively protect the public schools here in our state and unequivocally oppose this tax scheme in its current form.