Hope credit (or similar) for elementary education?

You are, but you may not want to share that information with your MIL.

"Jonathan Kamens" wrote

Ummmm......no.

See below.......

Pub 970 of course.

People often get confused about lots of things. Maybe this is one case where she mis-remembered something.

Most of us will be getting a stimulus check soon. You can use that for education expenses. FYI, the link to the publication is

That would be nice, but I will instead be using that to pay off part of the home equity line balance I am already carrying.

(This has stopped being about taxes and started being about the challenge of putting five children through private school, and hence this particular sub-thread should probably end here.)

Private school K-12 is no deductible I would like for it to be deductible because that would mean more tax revenue per student in public education.

Quality of education is not a function of tax revenue per student. But excess tax revenue per student can purchase quality administrative leadership in public education unless the nitwit school boards hire other nitwits with ED degrees or Ph.D. Liberal Arts degrees (AKA retail sales degrees).

INrarelyHO, the problem in the American Education system is the lack of reproductive organs in the administration.

I support vouchers for inner-city children who are unable to read at the grade level below to the grad level to which they have been promoted.

If you are teacher and you choose not to fail a student, you ain't nothin more than a bag man stealin from yer employer.

Dick

Since you want to stray from taxes...

This is an extremely naive view of inner city schools, and the many dedicated teachers there who try to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear

- and occasionally succeed. A kindergarten teacher I once knew and respected greatly told me she was almost certain she could predict which students would not graduate from high school within one week of the beginning of kindergarten. Education is NOT simply the product of which teachers a student is assigned to and which schools a student attends. It is a complex mix of factors, the most important of which is what the child has been and will be exposed to at home, both positively and negatively.

Although there are some early suggestions that that may not be really true. There are a couple of charter schools in Indy, for instance, who specialize in "problem children" taking those who have been tossed out of the Public Schools. They have shown interesting increases in testing scores in both the state tests and others such as reading levels. Neither have really been around long enough to be anything more than interesting, but that was more than was expected when they started.

Since I'm a former teacher (one year high school way back when, and when I had definite opinions on who should or not teach), I COULD add to this obviously off topic and NON TAX related issue...... but I won't.

But more to the topic, 20 years ago, well, even 10 maybe?, when a client would ask if college tuition is deductible, I would say: "Not just NO, but hell no. It'll never happen."

But then HOPE springs eternal, and now we have the HOPE credit; and 20% LEC, and then their's tuition deduction for first 4000$. oh, yes, and deduction for student loan interest.

What's next, a deduction for private school tuition? (shudder)

ChEAr$, Harlan Lunsford, EA n LA