Gov. Mikie Sherrill faces a tough choice: Enroll New Jersey in President Donald Trump’s new school choice program by Jan. 1st, or leave what could be hundreds of millions of federal dollars on the table.
Say yes, and face backlash from her blue-wave-emboldened base, which calls this a back-door school voucher program channeling public money to private and religious schools.
Say no, and be accused of forfeiting federal dollars for needy New Jersey kids, including those desperate to escape failing schools or afford extra tutoring.
“The bottom line is that if you turn it down, it’s less money for New Jersey families. It makes the whole, sum total of existing in New Jersey, if you have kids, less affordable,” says Republican state budget leader Declan O’Scanlon. “How can you run on affordability and do that?”
Opponents, meanwhile, call it a costly private school handout that starves public schools. They often invoke the state’s long history with voucher campaigns that have largely stalled from lack of public support.
“New Jersey should not opt into the Trump voucher scheme,” said Steve Beatty, head of the New Jersey Education Association, the state’s largest teacher’s union. “There has never been a presidential administration more devoted to destroying public education, and this taxpayer-funded giveaway is a prime example.”
It’s a dilemma, particularly for someone like Sherrill with potential White House aspirations.
So far, she’s not signaling her intentions, at least not publicly.
“As we carefully review this federal guidance, we are examining who the program would serve, which opportunities are available, and how it could best benefit public school students,” a Sherrill spokesperson said. “The bottom line is clear: put kids first and strengthen New Jersey’s public schools.”
The battle over opting in
Here’s how it would work: Taxpayers can make a donation of up to $1,700 each to K-12 scholarships – or $3,400 for a married couple – and get a dollar-for-dollar discount on their federal tax bill. So the donation would not cost them a penny. Then the money would be handed out as scholarships by nonprofit groups.
So what’s the problem?
The charities themselves get to decide how big the scholarships are and whether the funds go to Catholic, Jewish or Muslim schools, to an elite private school like Pingry on the border of Morris County, or to extra public-school services like tutoring.
A Morris County family in the top 5% of state income earners would qualify for this money, as would a struggling single mother in Newark. With nearly no income cap, about 96% of families would be eligible, the federal Treasury department has estimated.
They could use the money at any public or private school, even those that are low-performing or discriminate against children with disabilities or gay parents, for instance.
It could be for a fancy all-girls’ school like Kent Place, an all-boys Orthodox school like Lakewood Cheder, or a coed Islamic school like Noor-Ul-Iman in South Brunswick.
So far, 32 states have signed up ahead of the program’s official rollout in 2027, most of them led by Republican governors like Ron DeSantis of Florida and Sarah Huckabee Sanders of Arkansas. But Democratic governors in New York, Colorado, and New Mexico have joined them. In three other states with Democratic governors – Kansas, Kentucky, and North Carolina – Republican legislators have overridden vetoes to enroll.
New Jersey, like neighboring Pennsylvania, hasn’t yet decided.
Governors must opt in every year to the federal program, known as the Education Freedom Tax Credit.
While proponents point to low-income families that would benefit, critics argue this would primarily subsidize tuition for existing private school communities, while being a net negative for public schools. Whatever donations school districts gain for things like tutoring would be dwarfed by the per-pupil state funding they’d lose as more kids leave for private school, they say.
“This would just more or less be a rebate for [the wealthy] to get additional money that they really don’t need,” state Sen. Shirley Turner (D-Mercer). “I don’t think the governor should opt in because this is nothing but another giveaway to the haves at the expense of the have-nots.”
So far, a 30-year push for school vouchers and tax credits in New Jersey has gone nowhere. Former Republican Gov. Christine Todd Whitman first pressed it in the 1990s, and later it was championed by the likes of then-GOP state Sen. Tom Kean Jr. More recently, Republican gubernatorial candidate Jack Ciattarelli proposed bringing Florida’s school voucher program to New Jersey (opens in new tab), but he lost to Sherrill by a decisive margin.
Proponents highlight the financial upside: If 30% of eligible taxpayers take advantage of the program, it could yield more than $1.7 billion annually for New Jersey students, estimates Democrats for Education Reform, a pro-school choice group led by former Providence Mayor Jorge Elorza that supports the measure.
What it would look like in New Jersey
In practice, the program’s impact will depend a great deal on decisions made by the non-profits that receive donations.
Local nonprofits like the Tri-County Scholarship Fund in North Jersey, for example, say they would still only give to accredited private schools and prioritize low-income families, and in some cases, expand to help public school kids in districts such as Paterson pay for services like tutoring.
Scholarships from Tri-County vary in size based on a family’s changing needs, says Prudence Pigott, head of the fund. They generally pay for about a third of tuition, with schools and families chipping in the rest.
In the past four years, their financial aid has allowed more than 100 Ukrainian refugee children to attend New Jersey’s Ukrainian Catholic schools, for instance, where they speak the same language.
If Sherrill opts in, they could start funding private services in public schools as well, to help reduce achievement gaps between poor kids and their wealthier peers, Pigott said.
“I think everybody wants the same thing,” she added. “To help kids that are under-performing in school, and maybe the resources aren’t there.”
James King, head of the New Jersey Catholic Conference, agreed that Catholic schools would still prioritize “helping the children most in need.” In the 33 Catholic schools in the Diocese of Camden alone, serving six South Jersey counties, about 3,000 elementary school seats and 1,000 high school seats are available, he noted.
In a news conference Thursday, a center-right think tank, New Jersey Policy Institute, plans to announce a partnership with a Colorado-based nonprofit, Ace Scholarships, to raise money for tutoring New Jersey public school students. If Sherrill doesn’t opt in, the money will go to scholarships in other states, says its executive director, Wells Winegar.
Yet opponents warn the program would allow money to finance tuition at elite private schools as well. Jessica Levin of the Education Law Center, which advocates for children in poor districts, said those private-school pathways have the most powerful, longest-running marketing and will capture the vast majority of taxpayer dollars.
“It’s just going to replicate inequality,” she said.
One estimate is that the program nationwide would cost $26 billion annually in lost federal tax revenue. It’s not clear how Republicans intend to pay for this, says Paige Shoemaker DeMio, a senior policy analyst with the Center for American Progress, a progressive think tank.
“I do worry how this will impact federal spending,” she said of potential funding cuts.
While Republicans favor the program and Democrats largely oppose it, blue state leaders remain split. New Jersey Sen. Andrew Zwicker (D-Middlesex), like Sen. Turner, is philosophically against “using public dollars to help fund students going to private school,” but Senate Education Committee Chair Vin Gopal (D-Monmouth) thinks our state would be at a disadvantage for not opting in.
To help public schools compete for the money, he urges New Jersey to build up a strong, state-backed fundraising organization for them. “If it’s not working after year one, she could opt out,” he added of Sherrill and the program.