Moving Again? How the Education Freedom Tax Credit Unlocks Better Schools for Your Kids

Military families are used to instability, especially with regard to their children’s education. Every reassignment means packing up a household, enrolling your children in a new district or finding a new daycare provider, and starting over. It’s a cycle that repeats, for some, every two to three years for as long as a service member's career lasts, often compounded by a parent's deployment somewhere in the middle of it.

A new federal policy set to take effect in January 2027 is aiming to make one part of that cycle easier: finding and securing the right school, no matter where the orders send a family next.

The Education Freedom Tax Credit (EFTC) is a federal tax credit for K-12 scholarship donations and is getting much attention from school choice advocates, researchers, and military family organizations. Supporters of the credit believe that it can have significant benefits for families who are trying to secure educational stability in the middle of near-constant relocation.

Military Kids Often Experience a Childhood Built on Change

On average, military children move between six and nine times between the start of kindergarten and high school graduation. According to the Military Child Education Coalition, this is about three times more often than their civilian peers. With the average military family relocating every two to three years, an estimated 500,000 military-connected children change schools every year.

Each move brings a new curriculum, a new set of teachers unfamiliar with military culture, and for the military-connected students who receive special education services, there is a new set of forms, evaluations, and waiting lists to navigate from scratch. Deployments compound the disruption, often leaving one parent to manage a child's entire academic transition alone while the other serves overseas.

Education researchers have long flagged the toll this takes. A study published in The Professional Counselor found that the stacked stress of repeated school transitions, layered onto separation from a deployed parent, can affect the academic, social, and emotional development of military-connected students, who make up nearly 4 percent of the nation's entire school-age population.

For military families, finding the “right school" is rarely a single decision made once. It's a decision they're forced to make again and again, often on a timeline dictated by military orders rather than the school calendar.

That disruption shows up clearly in Blue Star Families' research, according to Dr. Emily Becher, the organization's Vice President of Applied Research and Evaluation. "Our research shows that every move can reset a child's education," Becher said, pointing to patterns identified in open-ended responses to Blue Star Families' 2025 Military Family Lifestyle Survey.

Families most often described challenges tied to differences in curriculum and course sequencing with students arriving academically behind their new classmates, or being required to repeat material they had already mastered elsewhere, said Becher. For high schoolers, she said, families reported credits that didn't transfer, required courses that weren't offered at the new school, and graduation timelines thrown into jeopardy. Children receiving special education or gifted services, Becher added, often face a new round of evaluations and long delays before support resumes.

Families also describe an emotional cost that goes beyond academics, with children repeatedly leaving behind friends and trusted teachers, and running into enrollment roadblocks when military orders arrive after school-choice, charter, or magnet school deadlines have already passed. "We have to move so often, and it's always quick,” said Suzanne McCurdy, a long-time military spouse. “Changing schools so often is incredibly difficult for everyone involved."

While legal protections exist for military-connected students, Becher said families report they're enforced unevenly from district to district, leaving parents to fight to protect their child's academic progress while managing everything else that comes with a move.

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What Is the Education Freedom Tax Credit?

Rather than sending money directly to families, the EFTC works through the tax code: individual donors who contribute to a qualified nonprofit Scholarship Granting Organization (SGO) receive a dollar-for-dollar federal tax credit: up to $1,700 for individuals, or up to $3,400 for married couples filing jointly. Excess credits can be carried forward for up to five years. Those donations are then converted into K-12 scholarships, which eligible families can put toward private school tuition, tutoring, educational technology, dual enrollment, AP exam fees, and special education services.

Deb Gist, founder and CEO of the Future School Fund and former Rhode Island Commissioner of Education, explained the difference in a July 2026 interview published by Watershed Advisors' newsletter, "The Delta." Gist described the credit as functioning more like an incentive for private charitable giving than a government appropriation, noting that the dollars can support students moving to private schools as well as tutoring and extended-day programming for students who remain in public schools. She said states and districts have only a narrow window to build a strategy before the program launches, and that under almost any realistic scenario, implementation is not likely to be halted in the next few years.

To participate, individual states must formally opt in, which is a decision that falls to each governor annually by January 1, or the state's families risk losing access to scholarship dollars that flow instead to states that have opted in. According to ACE Scholarships, a Colorado-based nonprofit that has operated K-12 scholarship programs for more than 25 years, the income eligibility ceiling is wide enough to cover the vast majority of American schoolchildren, with eligibility extending to households earning up to 300 percent of the area median income.

"[The EFTC] delivers the opportunity to scale that freedom nationwide," said Norton Rainey, CEO of ACE Scholarships, outlining its Education Freedom Tax Credit initiative.

Why Does the EFTC Appeal to Military Families?

Military family advocates say the EFTC's appeal for this population goes beyond the tax mechanics. Because eligibility follows the student rather than a specific school district, a scholarship secured through an SGO in one state could, in theory, support continuity of educational services for a child who then relocates with military orders, addressing one of the complaints military parents raise most often: specialized services, therapies, or school placements a child qualifies for in one location often have to be re-established, sometimes from scratch, at the next duty station.

Tommy Schultz, CEO of the American Federation for Children, the advocacy organization affiliated with the AFC Scholarship Fund, has said the EFTC's launch is a turning point for school choice. "The future of American education is here," Schultz said when AFC announced the launch of its national scholarship fund earlier this year. AFC has said the new fund secured more than $10 million to support a national awareness campaign ahead of the credit's 2027 start date, with a stated goal of ensuring the EFTC reaches as many eligible children as quickly as possible.

For some military parents, the draw of a program like the EFTC is tied directly to problems they've already lived through. McCurdy said she would have loved a scholarship like this for private school options during a recent move, if given the opportunity. "The school district we were in grew way too fast and was vastly overcrowded during our time there," she said. "It really hurt my children's educational journey."

But McCurdy was candid that trust in a new program like the EFTC would have to be earned. "I would want to hear from someone that it worked, how it worked, how long it took to donate and receive a credit, etc.," she said, a reminder that word of mouth from other military families may matter as much as official guidance from the AFC Scholarship Fund or state agencies.

Unlike most families choosing a school once and staying, military families often need to evaluate school fit multiple times over a child’s K-12 career, looking at academics, special education support, extracurriculars, and even the presence of other military kids. Advocates argue that an SGO with national reach, rather than one tied to a single state or district, is uniquely suited to a population that doesn't stay in one place long enough to build loyalty to a single local program. Those who are skeptical of the EFTC program have raised concerns about the long-term effect large-scale scholarship tax credits could have on traditional public school funding and enrollment.

Military Families Can Learn More With AFC

For military families trying to make sense of a program that doesn't officially launch until 2027, the AFC Scholarship Fund has positioned itself as a national resource point. As the nonprofit Scholarship Granting Organization affiliated with the American Federation for Children, the AFC Scholarship Fund says its mission is to connect donors with students and to make the process of qualifying for and receiving an EFTC-funded scholarship as straightforward as possible once the credit becomes active.

Families who want to track the rollout, including when their state opts in, when applications open, and how eligibility will be determined, can sign up for updates directly through the AFC Scholarship Fund's website. The organization has also published a running series of explainer articles and family stories, including accounts from military households, as part of its effort to prepare families for the January 2027 launch.

For military families that have spent generations adapting to constant change, the promise of the Education Freedom Tax Credit isn't that it will end the moving. It's that, for the first time, finding the right school after every move might come with a funding solution built for exactly that kind of family.

This article is a result of a collaboration with the American Federation for Children.