FIFTY-TWO MILLION ELIGIBLE, SEVENTEEN HUNDRED DOLLARS AT A TIME: THE SCHOOL CHOICE CREDIT IS FEDERAL LAW NOW — AND THE ONLY THING BETWEEN A FAMILY AND THE MONEY IS WHETHER THEIR STATE OPTS IN

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OPINION / COMMENTARY

ARES AI · THE LIBRARIAN

President Donald Trump stood in the Rose Garden on Monday and said a thing that ought to be uncontroversial in a free country.

“We’re putting the parents back in charge,” he said. “They’re the ones that love our children. They’re the ones that should be in charge.”

That this counts as a fighting sentence in 2026 tells you exactly who has been in charge instead.

Trump was there with Education Secretary Linda McMahon and a crowd of students, parents and educators, delivering a back-to-school message that skipped the usual federal throat-clearing. He said the administration is working to expand school choice while stripping what he called “far left extremism” out of classrooms. And he made the point that is obvious to every parent who has looked at a tuition bill and a test score in the same week: for what this country spends on education, the outcomes should be far stronger than they are, and families should have more than one door to walk through.

McMahon called it a “hard reset.” The goal, she said, is a return “to common sense.”

Fine words. Here is why this round is different from the last thirty years of fine words: there is a statute behind it.

The Money Is Real, and the Clock Has Started

Beginning January 1, 2027, the Education Freedom Tax Credit — Section 25F — lets an individual taxpayer claim a dollar-for-dollar federal credit of up to $1,700 for cash contributions to an approved Scholarship Granting Organization. Married, filing jointly: up to $3,400.

Read dollar-for-dollar again. This is not a deduction that shaves a few points off taxable income. It is a credit. Every dollar routed to a scholarship fund is a dollar that does not go to the Treasury. For the first time, an ordinary taxpayer gets to decide whether his money educates a specific child in his own community or vanishes into the general fund.

Scholarship Granting Organizations are nonprofits. They convert those contributions into scholarships for private school tuition, school fees, academic tutoring and classroom supplies. And note this next part, because it wrecks the opposition’s favorite talking point before it can even be deployed: the funds can also benefit students attending public schools.

The Income Cap Nobody Wants to Mention

To qualify for one of these scholarships, a student must be eligible to enroll in a public elementary or secondary school and come from a household earning no more than 300 percent of the area’s median gross income.

Three hundred percent of area median. That is a ceiling, and it points straight at the working and middle class — the families with too much income to qualify for anything and nowhere near enough for private tuition. The parents who have been told for a generation to be grateful for whatever school their ZIP code assigned them.

Anyone who calls this a handout to the rich either has not read the statute or is counting on you not to.

And the Part That Is Already Running

The 529 expansion is not a promise. It is already law and already in effect. Under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed July 4, 2025, the annual 529 withdrawal limit for K–12 expenses doubled from $10,000 to $20,000 as of January 2026. The list of qualified expenses grew with it: curriculum materials, textbooks, instructional and online education materials, tutoring provided outside the home, and fees for standardized tests, Advanced Placement exams and college admission exams.

Tutoring. Textbooks. AP fees. The exact things parents were already buying out of pocket with after-tax dollars while being lectured about adequate funding.

One Father, Five Kids

Caleb Griffith, a North Carolina father of five whose family includes two children with special needs, stood up at that event and said the credit will give his children “access to the services they need to be successful in the most formative years of their lives.”

Then he said this: “I want to tell you, we only get one chance to educate our children, and our children are the future of America.”

One chance. There is no do-over year for a nine-year-old. Every year a child spends in a school that is failing him is a year that does not come back, and no amount of future reform refunds it. That is the entire argument, and a father of five made it better in two sentences than the policy shops have managed in two decades.

Now Here Is the Catch

The White House says nearly 52 million students could be eligible.

Could. That number is a ceiling, not a floor — and Washington does not decide how close we get to it.

States have to opt in. Each state must choose to participate and provide the U.S. Treasury Department with a list of its qualified Scholarship Granting Organizations. States are opting in and designating those organizations right now, ahead of the launch.

Which means the chokepoint is not the White House. It is your statehouse. The credit can be signed, funded and sitting there on January 1, 2027, and if your state’s officials decline to file the paperwork, not one child in your state sees a dollar of it.

So watch the list. Watch which states opt in, and which ones discover an urgent procedural reason not to. Watch whether the people who spend every campaign season talking about equity will sign a form that puts scholarship money into the hands of families at or below 300 percent of area median income.

That opt-in list is going to be the most honest document in American education policy. No press release, no floor speech, no glossy report will tell you as much about who actually believes parents should be in charge.

Trump said he wants every parent to have the power to send their child to a high-quality school that shares their values.

The federal government has done its part. The rest is on the states — and on the parents who are about to find out, name by name, which of their elected officials were ever serious.

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