Bush budget revives private-school funding fight

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- A proposal in President Bush's budget Monday to give a tax credit for private school tuition has revived a long-simmering dispute over using public funds for private or religious schooling.

The proposal would give families with students in underachieving public schools a tax credit up to $2,500. It could cover tuition, fees or transport to the private school, and would cost an estimated $186 million over five years.

Past efforts to use federal funds to support private schools, typically through vouchers or tax credits for tuition costs, ave faced opposition both on constitution grounds and for diverting funds from needy public schools.

MORE STORIES Bush presents a $2.1 trillion wartime budget

"This tax credit proposal is actually a back-door voucher scheme ... that takes money from the public treasury to finance religious and other private schools," said Barry Lynn, director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

California Democrat Rep. George Miller, who played a key role in brokering the recent school reform bill, said the tax credits would undermine further reforms.

"To make room for two new private-school voucher programs, the Bush budget freezes critical priorities like teacher quality, after-school programs, and bilingual education and includes not one nickel for school modernization," he said.

But Rep. John Boehner, an Ohio Republican and chair of the House Education committee, said the refundable tax credit would benefit poor families.

"Low-income parents in disadvantaged communities with failing schools should have the same education choices that affluent parents have," he said in a statement.

A major thrust of the education bill that Bush signed last month, known as the No Child Left Behind Act, was to improve bad public schools by holding them accountable and helping them get back on track.

Under the newly enacted law, students in those schools could transfer to another public school or could get tutoring or other supplemental services, but they could not get private tuition subsidized.

Proposals to include private-school vouchers, initially favored by Bush, were jettisoned early in the negotiations in order to build bipartisan support for that bill.

Copyright 2002 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.