When education needs the federal government

OPINION:

It’s heartbreaking for a parent when they know their child’s school isn’t working, yet they have no other options. That’s a problem faced by too many parents every year. The D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, which celebrated its 20th anniversary earlier this year, was created to help low-income parents in Washington send their children to private schools. But sadly, only 1% of students can utilize the program due to insufficient funding — a problem that will persist under the recently introduced Financial Services and General Government appropriations bill for 2026.

Generally, the Constitution gives the federal government no role in education, but there are a few exceptions. Since the Constitution gives Congress exclusive jurisdiction over Washington, the Opportunity Scholarship Program is one of those exceptions.

The OSP is aimed at lower-income families, defined as families that receive benefits under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) or earn no more than 185% of the Federal Poverty Level (currently $49,303 for a family of three) when they enter the program.

Returning families can earn up to 300% of the FPL (currently $79,950). The maximum amount for a K-8 scholarship is $10,000, and for high school it’s $15,000. These scholarship amounts are far less than the $27,500 per student spent in D.C. Public Schools, which doesn’t even include the more than $10,700 per student in capital expenditures this fiscal year.

The initial draft of the 2026 Financial Services and General Government appropriations bill, which funds the scholarship program, keeps it at $17.5 million, where it’s been in recent years. This is only enough to provide scholarships for around 1,300 students out of the 115,000 who live in Washington. Returning participants get priority for the scholarships, so very few new students are accepted each year.

For the upcoming school year, more than 900 students who applied were turned away due to a lack of funding.

The Scholarships for Opportunity and Results (SOAR) Act, which authorizes funding for the OSP, provides the same amount for district and charter schools in Washington. But it amounts to less than $400 per student in public schools, or around 1% of their per-pupil funding.

Without spending any additional money, Congress could shift all of the SOAR funding to the Opportunity Scholarship Program and triple the number of students served. This would be transformational.

According to Rachel Sotsky, executive director of Serving Our Children, which administers the program, the insufficient funding has forced them to discourage participation. They’ve made the application deadline earlier and reduced their outreach to the community.

“It’s very discouraging for our team to be encouraging all these families and then they really have no chance of getting the scholarship,” she told me. “Particularly years where we could only award a very few new families off the waitlist. So we definitely pulled back on our outreach and our outreach events.”

It’s likely that there would be more demand for scholarships if there was higher funding. For starters, if there were more scholarships available, Serving Our Children would promote the program more and more families would learn about it.

There’s a good chance some families who are interested decide not to apply since they know how slim their odds of receiving a scholarship are.

School choice has been a prominent theme this year for the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress. The “Big Beautiful Bill” the president signed last week created a new tax credit scholarship program that goes beyond the constitutional role of the federal government and may not benefit students in Washington, since city leaders may not opt into the program.

As Congress debates appropriations for the next fiscal year, expanding the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program would allow school choice supporters to increase choice while upholding the Constitution. And that would be a victory to celebrate.

• Colleen Hroncich is a policy analyst with the Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom.