BOSTON — A statewide nonprofit group is backing the Trump administration’s controversial federal scholarship tax credit program, putting it at odds with a coalition of teachers unions, civil rights groups and public education advocates urging Gov. Maura Healey to reject Massachusetts’ participation.

The Massachusetts Council of Nonprofits is calling for “strong support” for the Education Freedom Tax Credit program, which would allow taxpayers to claim federal tax credits for donations to organizations that provide K-12 education scholarships. States must opt into the program, and Healey has not said whether Massachusetts will participate.

The questions at the heart of the dispute centers on whether Healey should opt Massachusetts into the program, which would offer tax credits starting in 2027, and whether it would expand services for all Massachusetts students or primarily steer money toward private school tuition and national scholarship organizations.

MCN Director Jim Klocke said the program could bring hundreds of millions of dollars in new federal funding to Massachusetts each year. Because public school students make up the vast majority of K-12 students in the state, he said, nonprofits would ultimately direct most of the benefits to them.

“We think this is a strong new opportunity for educational services nonprofits of all sizes to receive more federal funding, to increase their donors over time, and to serve more kids and to come up with even more creative services to help kids, especially those who are most in need,” Klocke said.

Some nonprofits already have structures in place to distribute scholarships, he said, while others could establish them over the next several years.

“This is a great mechanism, not only a great mechanism for expanding educational services. It’s a great mechanism to help nonprofits recruit new donors for education services, and we think it’s going to spur an awful lot of creative innovation in educational services over the next five to 10 years,” Klocke said.

Opponents of the program, however, said the program’s regulations could make it difficult for community-based nonprofits to participate and favor organizations specifically created to administer private school scholarships.

Viviana Abreu-Hernández, president of the Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center, said a program requirement that scholarship organizations must spend at least 90% of their revenue on scholarships, with no more than 10% available for administrative costs, could force nonprofits to create separate structures and significantly alter their business models. 

Klocke rejected those concerns.

“We have a different view,” he said. “It won’t require that they turn their organizations upside down, it’s really a new mechanism to get some new funding. The 90% figure is there to ensure that nearly all of it goes to students — it’s a good governance practice.”

Jessica Tang, president of the Massachusetts branch of the American Federation of Teachers, said nonprofits supporting the program may be relying on overly optimistic assumptions about their ability to benefit.

“I really do think that they’ve been misled into thinking that they’re going to benefit when, in reality, the evidence before us shows that they might receive maybe a tiny little bit of funds, but it’s going to be overwhelmingly the private schools that benefit,” Tang said.

Tang argued that federal rules would prevent Massachusetts from imposing its own standards to ensure funding reaches public school students or those with the greatest needs.

“It’s allowing for multi-state [Scholarship Granting Organizations] to be able to use those funds,” she said, “and that we can’t opt out of that multi-state SGOs. So what we know will happen is that these big SGOs that have already been set up in the other red states that have a lot of these voucher programs already are going to swarm into Massachusetts.”

The Massachusetts Teachers Association and AFT Massachusetts are among the groups in a new statewide Protect Our Public Schools coalition calling on Healey not to participate. Their coalition contends the tax credit program would divert resources toward private education rather than strengthen public schools.

“It’s long been the goal of anti-public school radicals to replace the democratic ideal – created in Massachusetts – of public schools that serve all students with a new vision: giving public funds to private schools, and returning us to an education system that is fundamentally separate and unequal,” Massachusetts Education Justice Alliance – Education Fund Executive Director Vatsady Sivongxay said in a statement Monday. “The new federal regulations released last week are even worse than we expected. If Massachusetts allows the federal voucher program in our state, it will have a substantial negative impact on our public schools and the students they serve. And once we open the floodgates to vouchers, it will be difficult to recover when we inevitably encounter the wave of fraud, discrimination, and misuse of public taxpayer dollars that other states with voucher programs have experienced.”

MCN says the program would supplement — rather than replace — existing federal education funding.

The competing nonprofit arguments add a new dimension to a broader debate over whether Massachusetts should accept the federal program, with both sides claiming the rules could determine which students and organizations ultimately benefit.

Over the past few months, when asked whether she would opt Massachusetts into the program, Healey has said she needed more information from the federal government. Though the U.S. Treasury Department released proposed regulations last week, she said she still needs more clarity. Her opponent in the general election, Mike Minogue, has not only said he would opt Massachusetts in, but that “it’s one of the number one reasons I’m running.”

Healey is one of 20 governors, mostly from blue states, who have yet to opt in as of October. 

Of the 30 states that have opted into the tax credit, many are helmed by Republican governors, but not all: Democrats like New York Gov. Kathy Hochul have also decided the program was worth taking a chance on, and groups like Democrats for Education Reform have been trying to make the case to governors like Healey that they should do the same.