Vote for School Choice on Election Day Parental freedom in education as an election issue is a good bet. By Larry Sand
https://amgreatness.com/2024/08/22/vote-for-school-choice-on-election-day/
As I noted in 2022 and 2023, school choice, where applicable, should be a campaign issue. With untold numbers of national, state, and local candidates on the ballot in November, voting for parental freedom is a winner. While this cause is usually associated with Republicans, Democrats who are not beholden to the teachers’ unions should also get on board.
Keri Ingraham, a Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute, highlights numerous success stories of pro-school choice legislators. In March, Texas saw six representatives ousted who voted against parental freedom. The Texas runoff election a few months later found three more representatives opposed to school choice voted out of office.
In Kentucky’s primary election in May, the two Republican representatives who received the most money from the teachers’ unions lost by 44 and 48 points each.
In Tennessee, after a bill to expand a school voucher program failed, Gov. Bill Lee went to work endorsing candidates who favored expanding school choice. His effort was successful, as 12 out of the 15 candidates he endorsed were victorious in the state’s primary election on August 1.
In Missouri, voters chose six pro-school choice candidates in their August 6 primary election, a clear sign of the strategy’s effectiveness.
Corey DeAngelis, a senior fellow at the American Federation for Children, adds that three Republicans in the Idaho House who had the most support from the teachers’ unions lost in the primary election, while their opponents all supported school choice.
Parental freedom is accelerating rapidly. Over the past three years, 12 states—Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Utah, and West Virginia—have passed universal or near-universal school choice, and more states are set to join them in the coming years. Texas is among the states poised to pass sweeping choice measures in 2025.
Most recently, Louisiana joined in. The state’s new education savings account program, Giving All True Opportunity to Rise (GATOR) Scholarship Program, was signed into law by Gov. Jeff Landry on June 19. The funds can also be used for tutors, online school tuition, curriculum, or even to fund a hybrid program where a student attends a private school part-time.
In all, 32 states have implemented some sort of private choice program in the U.S., and as EdChoice reports, over one million children now participate in these programs across the U.S. Moreover, 22 million students—or 40% of students nationwide—are now eligible to participate.
Politicians should pay heed to polling on this issue. A 2023 poll from RealClear Opinion Research reveals that 71% of Americans, including 80% of Republicans, 66% of Democrats and 69% of independents, support school choice.
While Democrats have typically been the party of education in the past, that is not the case anymore, with two-thirds of respondents saying they do not think Democrats are focused enough on improving K-12 schools, according to a new poll.
In 2023, a different poll showed that 79% of black voters expressed support for vouchers, and 78% favored education savings accounts.
It goes without saying that the teachers’ unions and fellow travelers are very unhappy with this turn of events. In addition to the usual grousing about taking funding from government-run schools, at least one union has taken to the courts. In May, despite the school choice program’s popularity, the Utah Education Association sued to have the courts stop it. Following a typical union talking point, the union president dramatically made the claim that the program “harms public school students and educators.”
But this is an absolutely bogus accusation because where school choice is instituted, public schools are not only undamaged but actually improve.
Patrick Wolf, School Choice chair at the University of Arkansas, explains, “Thirty-seven different scholars have conducted 31 separate studies of the competitive effects of private school choice programs on the test-score outcomes of students who remain in affected public schools. Twenty-seven of those studies conclude there are at least some positive effects. …Three studies conclude there are no significant effects either way. Only one study, done by a doctoral student at Indiana University, concludes that the effect of competition from school choice on public schools is negative. The record of the school choice competitive effects hypothesis is 27 wins, 3 ties, and 1 loss. That’s a wipeout. A separate group of scholars recently combined all the findings in a statistical meta-analysis, or a “study of all the studies.” Unsurprisingly, they concluded that private school choice programs have a positive competitive effect on the performance of public schools.”
Wolf also discloses that his research team identified 57 studies with 531 statistical findings about the relationship between private schooling or private school choice and four general types of civic outcomes. “Throughout these studies, private schooling was associated with higher levels of political tolerance, political knowledge, and community engagement, and levels of political participation among private school students and graduates were comparable to public school students and graduates.”
It’s important to note that the Republican Party platform now endorses universal school choice. As Heritage Foundation scholars Jay Greene and Jason Bedrick write, party platforms are a “way of signaling to voters the policies that politicians are likely to pursue if they’re elected to office. But platforms also send a message to a party’s candidates about what policy positions the party expects them to support.”
Greene and Bedrick add, “For the first time, the Republican Party is signaling to voters and its own politicians that they should pursue policies that enable all families to choose the educational options that align with their values and work best for their own children—whether public or private, religious or secular.”
Currently, there are 23 states fully controlled by Republicans compared to 17 fully controlled by Democrats, with the other ten states having split control.
Since just ten of those 23 Republican-controlled states have universal school choice, the legislators in those states must pound the school choice drum. If so, we might expect to see a doubling in the number of universal school choice states over the next several years.
The universal school choice wave is rolling and shows no signs of abating. Savvy politicians will get on board with this significant cause.
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