Mike Koolidge, filling in for Dan Proft, discussed growing pressure on Governor JB Pritzker to decide whether Illinois will opt into the federal Education Freedom Tax Credit, a school choice provision included in last year’s federal reconciliation legislation known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Koolidge cited Capitol News Illinois reporting describing continued silence from the governor’s office on the issue, despite pressure from public school advocates, downstate voters, and state officials, and noted that a related bipartisan state Senate bill sponsored by Senator Adriane Johnson of Buffalo Grove has stalled amid limited legislative discussion.
Koolidge welcomed Dr. Patrick Graff, senior fellow at the American Federation for Children, to explain how the tax credit program functions and why he believes it represents a significant opportunity for Illinois families. Graff said the program allows individual taxpayers to donate up to $1,700 annually to state-authorized scholarship organizations in exchange for a dollar-for-dollar federal tax credit, effectively redirecting funds that would otherwise go to the federal government toward local scholarship funding instead. He said those scholarship organizations then determine how to allocate the resulting funds toward services including tutoring, special education support, tuition assistance, and dual-enrollment coursework, with scholarship amounts varying based on individual student need rather than a fixed per-student cap.
Graff said the program was designed with broad income eligibility in mind, citing new research finding that nearly 92 percent of children nationally would qualify to receive a scholarship under the credit. He noted that 31 states, representing more than 30 million children, have already opted into the program, while 19 states, including Illinois, have not yet done so, leaving an estimated 20 million children in those states without access to the funding stream. Graff emphasized that because the program operates entirely through federal tax credits, opting in would not require any change to Illinois’s state budget.
Addressing concerns raised in the Capitol News Illinois report about the program’s benefit to public schools and its accessibility in rural areas lacking private school options, Graff said homeschooling families in Illinois would likely also qualify for scholarship funding under the program’s design. He pointed to Florida’s experience with a similar large-scale school choice initiative, noting the state has added more than 700 new private schools over the past decade as increased demand from families prompted new educational options, including smaller, community-based “microschools,” to emerge in areas that previously lacked them.
Graff also cited declining public school enrollment trends in Chicago as a broader concern, noting that Chicago Public Schools kindergarten enrollment has fallen from more than 30,000 students annually around 2009 to roughly 20,000 or fewer today, contributing to significant budget shortfalls within the district. He argued that expanding access to the tax credit program could benefit public, charter, and private school students alike, since scholarship funds can be used for a wide range of educational services beyond private school tuition.
Graff estimated that if roughly 30 percent of Illinois taxpayers with sufficient federal tax liability participated in the program, it could generate nearly one billion additional dollars in education funding directed toward families and students statewide. He argued that money flowing directly to families through donor-funded scholarships would likely prove more efficient than funding routed through traditional public school administrative structures, and encouraged Illinois residents to contact their state legislators and the governor’s office to press for a decision on the state’s participation.