Gov. J.B. Pritzker has not opted Illinois into the new federal tax-credit scholarship program, and that refusal is the only adult move in the room. An Indianapolis outfit has parked a roadside billboard near the state line to poach Illinois donors for Indiana scholarship funds. The only thing standing between that scheme and Illinois’s public schools is a governor the political class has decided to mock.
The billboard tells Illinois residents to “Take Advantage of Indiana’s EFTC Program. Turn your donation into opportunity for students and a tax credit for you.” It shows two smiling students framed against Lake Michigan and the Chicago skyline. Chicago scenery is being used to sell Indiana destinations. The sponsor is the Institute for Quality Education, based in Indianapolis, which has signed up to participate in the federal program as a scholarship granter.
The pitch is dressed up as generosity. It is a hijack.
The federal program soon will let Americans claim an Education Freedom Tax Credit of up to $1,700 for donating to scholarship organizations. Illinois residents are eligible to claim the credit, but they cannot direct those donations to local scholarship groups while Mr. Pritzker refuses to opt in. The Institute for Quality Education saw the gap and built a pipeline: lure Illinois donors across the state line on paper, pocket the administrative fees, and let Illinois classrooms absorb the loss.
There is no philanthropic halo here. There is a feeder stream.
The actual scholarship recipients will be Indiana students. The actual donor benefit will flow through Indiana’s nonprofit ecosystem. The actual long-term cost will land on Illinois classrooms whose families are being recruited to underwrite another state’s private-school pipeline. The mechanics are a strip-mining of Illinois’s tax base by an out-of-state operator.
Colorado’s Democratic governor has described the credit as “free money.” That phrase should set off every alarm. There is no free money when tax dollars are routed around public schools toward private and religious institutions with no obligation to take every child the public system must take. The money is free to the donor only because the public system absorbs the loss.
Funds can be used at public and private schools for tuition, tutoring, after-school programs, uniforms, or support services for students with disabilities. Generous-sounding, until you notice who captures the credit: families wealthy enough to claim it, redirecting dollars that would otherwise have flowed through the state’s ordinary school-funding formula to every classroom in every district.
A tax shelter is still a tax shelter when it arrives wearing a child’s smile.
Mr. Pritzker has been accused of dithering. He is doing nothing of the kind. He is holding the line because the Illinois Federation of Teachers and the Illinois Education Association signed a letter urging Democratic governors to reject the federal program, and they had the case to make. Stacy Davis Gates, president of the Chicago Teachers Union, said accepting the scholarship money would “normalize a voucher scheme that Illinois has already rejected.”
She is correct.
Illinois’s defunct Invest in Kids tax credit funded thousands of scholarships and carried a waiting list of more than 24,000 children before Illinois Democrats killed it in 2023. Defenders of the program call that waiting list proof of unmet demand. It proves the opposite. A waiting list that large is a marketing footprint, not a measure of educational need. It shows how aggressively scholarship-granting organizations can recruit families once public dollars are routed into their hands—and how little of that money returns to the public schools the same children left behind.
Invest in Kids was rejected for cause, not for cowardice. The program starved district budgets, segregated students by income, and converted public education into a write-off for upper-middle-class donors. Its waiting list showed that the marketing outpaced any honest accounting of who benefited.
The leaders of the Illinois Federation of Teachers and the Illinois Education Association understand what their counterparts in other states have learned the hard way: tax-credit scholarships start as supplements and end as substitutes. They start with the rhetoric of “choice” and finish with segregated funding streams and accountability-free classrooms.
That distinction is the entire fight.
The teachers unions are not afraid that alternatives will prove the failures of public education are intractable. They are alarmed that a federal tax shelter will launder the abandonment of public education into a feel-good feature. Pritzker’s refusal is not cowardice before the unions. It is deference to the people who actually run the schools that the Institute for Quality Education wants to drain.
The billboard should come down. The Institute for Quality Education should be told, plainly, that Illinois will not be strip-mined for its tax base by an out-of-state operator with a marketing budget and a federally underwritten angle. The sponsoring organization has every right to advertise. It has no claim on Illinois children.
Most Illinois taxpayers, asked plainly, would prefer their credited donations to help children in their own communities. That is precisely why the billboard is parked at the border: to intercept Illinois money before it can do any good in Illinois. The Indiana pitch reframes community obligation as narrow-mindedness and out-of-state charity as generosity.
The unstated price is the public school down the block.
A dollar routed to Indiana is a dollar that will not fund an Illinois public-school nurse, a special-education aide, an after-school program, or a building repair. It is a dollar diverted from Chicago, Springfield, or East St. Louis while those schools are told to do more with less.
Pritzker has held the line. He should keep holding it. The Indiana billboard is not a clever workaround exposing the governor’s faintheartedness. It is a preview of what a compliant Illinois would look like: a feeder stream for another state’s private-school industry, with Illinois’s most vulnerable students left behind in a public system starved of the dollars their wealthier neighbors were steered to send elsewhere.
Indiana’s gain would be Illinois’s loss.
The governor who refuses to enable that transfer is not dithering. He is doing the job he was elected to do.
