President Donald Trump signs the One Big Beautiful Bill Act into law on July 4. Photo by Samuel Corum/Getty Images
By Louis Keene
July 9, 2025
A first-of-its-kind national school voucher program is being hailed by some Jewish groups as a breakthrough — and mourned by others as a hammer blow to the separation of church and state.
The Educational Choice for Children Act — part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act signed into law Monday by President Donald Trump — handed a long-sought victory to proponents of school choice, giving all but the wealthiest households a tax rebate of up to $1,700 for money they put toward public schooling, funds which can then be allocated for private school scholarships.
There is no cap on the amount of money the federal government can spend on the program, which launches in 2027, though states have to opt into the program for their residents to participate.
Political support for voucher programs among American Jews has long fallen along denominational lines. Orthodox Jews, who tend to enroll their children in religious schools, have been at the forefront of advocacy for the measures. The Reform and Conservative movements, on the other hand, have publicly opposed such plans in the past.
The reaction to the bill from Jewish leaders reflected the disagreement. The Orthodox Union called its passage a “monumental win.” Paul Golin, a leader in the Humanistic Judaism movement, called it an “unmitigated disaster.”
How the national voucher program could pay for Jewish day school
Under the new program, families would be able to direct up to $1,700 of their federal tax bill to a scholarship-granting organization (SGO), which is a kind of specialized nonprofit that distributes financial aid to elementary or high school students. Each family would then receive a dollar-for-dollar reduction in their tax liability for the amount they donated.
In theory, anyone can set up a scholarship-granting organization, provided it spends at least 90% of its income on scholarships to at least 10 students across a minimum of two schools.
In theory, then, a pair of Jewish schools could form an SGO together, instruct parents to donate the $1,700 maximum to it — after all, it’s money they’d otherwise be paying in federal taxes — and redistribute that money as financial aid. A child who receives a scholarship from an SGO is effectively getting a tuition discount courtesy of the American taxpayer.
The bill rules out households earning more than 300% of the area median income from receiving the tax rebate or receiving scholarships under the program. But otherwise, the nonprofits are largely allowed to distribute the scholarships as they see fit — even if that means using criteria other than financial need.
That has left a gaping hole in the bill for subsequent legislation or litigation to fill, said Kevin Welner, a professor at the University of Colorado Boulder School of Education and the co-founder of the National Education Policy Center.
“There are a lot of open questions,” Welner said. “For example, could an SGO deny a family because they don’t want to spend the money on a Christian school, or a Jewish school? Can an SGO provide scholarships in an amount of like, $90,000 or $300,000 to a family? There’s no specifics in the bill.”
Another looming question is whether blue states that do not have their own voucher programs would opt into the federal one. Welner said that could depend on their ability to regulate its implementation. Otherwise, he said, the lack of specifics could introduce a number of problems into a state’s school system: fraud, discrimination, stratification and unfair access.
“It is a problem, because the quote, ‘free money’ element, the state isn’t going to want to refuse money that’s going to people in other states,” he said. “But they also aren’t going to want to bring in a policy that’s harmful.”
The ECCA debate
The same reason Orthodox Jews — who make up about 10% of the American Jewish population — tend to support vouchers is why non-Orthodox Jews typically oppose them.
The Orthodox Union and Agudath Israel of America, umbrella organizations representing Orthodox Jews, both advocated for the ECCA because it would lower the cost of yeshivas and other Jewish schools — a major quality-of-life issue in the Orthodox world.
Nathan Diament, the executive director of the Orthodox Union Advocacy Center, said in a statement that the bill’s passage was a “groundbreaking moment” for Jewish families “who strive to provide their children with a strong, values-based education.”
Meanwhile, the Union for Reform Judaism joined an interfaith coalition of 60 groups that signed a letter to House leaders calling the bill a threat to religious liberty.
“Religious freedom protects every American by ensuring that the government cannot force any of us to pay for someone else’s religious education,” the letter said. “Yet taxpayer-funded vouchers primarily go to religious schools.”
It added: “The responsibility for religious education belongs to families, houses of worship, and other religious institutions — we do not need or want the government to be involved.”
Golin, the executive director of the Society for Humanistic Judaism, said religious school subsidies would also accelerate the rise of Christian nationalism.
According to Pew, more than three-quarters of private K-12 students in the US attend religious schools, which are not held to the same anti-discrimination standards as public schools. And the vast majority of religious schools in the United States are Christian.
“Many, many more schools in America will be able to discriminate against Jews,” Golin said. “Why would I want to pay for that out of my tax dollars? The whole point of separation of church and state was not to make citizens pay for someone else’s religion, or to have religion dictated to them.”
The divide between Orthodox and non-Orthodox Jews on government funding for religious schools dates back decades.
During a 1967 conference of the Rabbinical Assembly, a reportedly substantial majority of Conservative rabbis present voted to oppose such subsidies, with one saying that “if the federal and state governments have monies to spend on education, let them be given to our public schools which so desperately need them.” An article about the vote in The New York Times noted at the time that Orthodox groups tended to disagree.
