☞ FACT: Vouchers students can continue to receive scholarships after the program ends.

Because the Invest in Kids voucher program is set up as a tax credit scholarship scheme, the voucher-scholarships don't need to end when the law sunsets. 

Rather than getting a 75% tax credit from Illinois when they write a check to a voucher middleman, wealthy benefactors would instead get a federal deduction for making a donation to a private school or scholarship fund—just like they did before the Invest in Kids program existed.

Why should Illinois heavily subsidize contributions to private schools but not ones to other charitable causes? Why isn’t 37% back from the feds sufficient for wealthy donors rather than 75% back from the state of Illinois? Illinois has had a robust private school industry for more than a century—without public subsidies.

☞ FACT: A thriving public school system that serves all children cannot exist alongside a publicly-funded private system.

Well-known media figure Father Pfleger, who hosted the pro-voucher event at St. Sabina, a school in Chicago funded with Invest in Kids dollars, was in the news asking “why can’t we have both” a voucher program and well-resourced public schools?

Why can’t we? Because religious schools, even those getting vouchers, do not have to educate all kids. They can legally discriminate against nearly all protected classes, including students with disabilities and English-language learners. 

Siphoning public dollars away to private schools that discriminate creates a two-tiered, segregated system that has fewer resources left in public schools to educate the very students who need more.

Father Pfleger’s own parish school, St. Sabina Academy, is a prime example of this. According to the most recent ISBE data, St. Sabina served between 1 and 9 special education students out of a total enrollment of 157 students. Meanwhile the public schools nearby enroll anywhere from 12% to more than 25% students with Individualized Education Plans (and even a nearby charter serves 10% SWDs.)

The Archdiocese of Chicago website states only that some schools “work to include students with various learning requirements.” 

Earlier this year, when asked about where to enroll a student with an IEP, Empower IL shared a list of only 20 schools that supported IEPs out of the 442 private schools they process vouchers for!

☞ FACT: One-quarter of voucher funds went to just one of Illinois’ 59 State Senate districts last year.

Illinois’ public schools serve almost 1.9 MILLION Illinois kids, and 80% of those schools are underfunded by the state. The voucher program served just over 9,600 private school students last school year, with funds concentrated in just a few schools in a few areas.

Here’s a map to look up your own House district and see which schools are getting how much via Invest in Kids: bit.ly/ILvouchermap2023

And here’s that same data in a table by House and Senate district. 

[Note: the Illinois Department of Revenue reports so little information on Invest in Kids that we can only calculate the minimum each school is receiving, not the total. This map and table only cover known spending, leaving about $10 million unaccounted for in 2022-2023.)