A late December article in the Washington Examiner predicted a surge in school choice programs in Republican states in 2023. The article stated: “After a banner year in 2022 that saw Arizona become the first state to enact a universal school choice program supporters praised as the ‘gold standard’ of school choice, other state legislatures are poised to enact similar programs in the coming months.”

In Arizona, the Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) program dollars follow the student, and parents can decide where they want to enroll their child. Any student who opts out of public schools may receive approximately $7,000 annually for private school tuition, homeschool supplies, tutoring, or other educational aids.

Some red states are already following Arizona’s lead. In an exciting new development, Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds signed a school choice bill called the Students First Act on January 24, 2023 “allowing any Iowa student to use public money to pay for private school tuition or other expenses.” As in Arizona, the money will follow the student.

During the 2022 legislative session, Reynolds tried to get a school choice initiative passed, but members of her own party dragged their feet and the legislation failed. Now, with a new crop of legislators more friendly to Reynolds’s cause, Iowa was able to pass the bill. Texas also gained school choice-friendly legislators, and Governor Greg Abbott has said he will support a voucher program. Last May, Abbott pledged to give parents “a choice about which school is right for their child with state funding following the student”.

On January 20, The American Federation for Children reported that Utah’s House of Representatives passed HB 215, establishing an “Education Savings Account (ESA)” for all the state’s children. The bill passed the Utah House by a sizeable 54 to 20 margin and has advanced to the Senate.

Called the “Utah Fits All Scholarship Program,” this legislation would make all students eligible to receive an annual ESA of $8,000 for education expenses, including tuition for private schools, tutors, homeschooling curricula, and “partial scholarship awards” for students who remain in public school part-time. The bill favors students who some characterize as “falling through the cracks,” and it also includes a provision to increase public-school teacher pay.

The left is calling the teacher pay provision “a bribe,” and lamenting that, if enacted, the bill will harm public education. An ABC News affiliate reported that the Utah Parent-Teacher Association issued a press release stating that “although they do support increasing teacher salaries, they cannot stand behind distributing school vouchers that may cost as much as $8,000 per student with no oversight on teaching quality, standards, assessment and accountability.” Supporters of school choice believe this is precisely the reason such programs work; they at least have the potential to give students a better education as well as to avoid woke indoctrination.

Corey DeAngelis, senior fellow at the American Federation for Children, executive director at Educational Freedom Institute, an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, and a senior fellow at Reason Foundation, told The Daily Signal last August that he was looking forward to 2023 and that, for school choice, “the winning has just begun. [T]he wind is at our backs and the teachers’ unions have overplayed their hand. At this point, they’re actively destroying their own empire by inserting political nonsense into the classroom... parents [are] pushing back.”

What does ‘school choice’ mean?

But does more school choice mean a better education overall? That’s a tough call even for parents who support school choice and only want the best education possible for their children.

Nearly 32 years ago in 1991, when the first Bush administration was making noises about enacting a federal school choice program that would allow parents the freedom to choose alternatives to government schools, Phyllis Schlafly described what real school choice should look like. While acknowledging that each of the 50 states would have to pass its own version of any federal program, Phyllis compiled a list of eleven features parents were looking for, including:

1. Choice to attend any public school within a district.
2. Choice to attend any public school in the state.
3. Choice to attend a public school dedicated to teaching the basics, including phonics and other traditional skills, and to enforcing discipline. (Phyllis acknowledged that in 1991: “Only a handful of such schools exist,” and that parents “camp out overnight for days to be in line to enroll their children for the limited slots available.”)
4. Choice of curriculum content in the public school; e.g., choice of learning how to read by the proven phonics method... choice of an abstinence-based sex ed program,” etc.
5. Choice to allow parents to opt out their children from curricula, books, classes, surveys, or methodology which parent consider privacy-invading or offensive to their religion, morals or values. (Today, the preference is to allow parents to opt their children “in” rather than “out,” an effort which Phyllis would have approved, but few states and districts allow it.)
6. Choice to attend a private school.
7. Choice to attend any public, private, or religious school.
8. Choice for high school juniors and seniors to complete high school at a community college.
9. Choice to attend a single-sex elementary or secondary public school. (Approximately 366 single-sex schools are reported to exist in this country as of 2022.)
10. Choice to homeschool, with public money going to homeschoolers.
11. Choice to homeschool combined with attending selected courses or activities at a public or private school, such as math, science, football, or band.

Phyllis also emphasized that students should have a choice of curriculum, books, and methodology. “Just to allow choice among government schools which have the same curriculum would be a cheat on the children and their parents,” she wrote. Today, other than the curricula in use at classical private and charter schools, finding a satisfactory “choice” for kids may be a challenge for parents, many of whom may not realize what their children should be learning because they were not properly schooled themselves.

Then there is the critical matter of accountability, and parents should recognize that in any school choice program, they are the ones to whom schools should be accountable. As Phyllis asserted: “The only kind of accountability that can have any meaning is accountability to parents and taxpayers, and the way that accountability should be enforced should be by allowing parents to choose the school where their school dollars are spent, and also to choose the curriculum and teaching methodology they want for their children... Choice is a fraud if it means choosing a different building but being denied a choice of curriculum.”

Arizona school choice program at risk

Twenty-one years after Mrs. Schlafly wrote her report on what school choice should mean, Arizona enacted the most comprehensive program in the country, and approximately 30,000 of the state’s children are already taking advantage of it. But it may not have a chance to either prove its worth or reveal its shortcomings.

In the wake of Arizona’s hotly contested and controversial mid-term election, the announced Governor, Democrat Katie Hobbs, has vowed to dismantle the popular ESA program, citing fiscal concerns. In her recent “state of the state” address, she charged that the program would destroy the budget. “Funding this expansion is poised to cost Arizona taxpayers an estimated $1.5 billion over the next 10 years if left unaddressed,” she claimed.

While an argument could be made that Arizona’s open border poses a more serious threat both fiscally and otherwise, Hobbs is no exception to the general failure of Democrats to address this issue. While offering a nod to border security by claiming that all citizens deserve “a safe Arizona,” she offered no real solutions. Instead, she took a veiled shot at conservatives, charging that “immigration has been politicized for far too long” and that “Arizona voters told us in November they don’t want or need political stunts designed solely to garner sensationalist TV coverage and generate social media posts.” She failed to mention what the many thousands of disenfranchised Republican voters in Arizona might have said at the polls had they been allowed to exercise their right to cast their ballots.

Voices are already being raised against Hobbs’ threat to derail school choice. The Center Square.com reported on January 17 that, while governors wield considerable power, they can’t scrap validly enacted legislative programs on their own. Goldwater Institute Director of Education Policy Matt Beienburg said Hobbs “can aim to abolish the program, but her hands are tied due to the legislative process handing the reins to other statewide officers.”

According to Beienburg, near the bottom of the Hobbs administration’s new 500-page budget plan, which purports to virtually eliminate funding for Arizona’s ESA program, is the admission that “the governor has no such unilateral power to do this.” He added: “Policymakers should remember that the only Arizona incumbent to lose a statewide race (of either party) this past cycle was the left-leaning champion of the teachers unions who opposed school choice and ESA, and who voters replaced with State Superintendent Tom Horne, who has pledged to uphold and protect the program. And fortunately, the continued distribution of funds for ESA families rests squarely with the offices of Superintendent Horne and school choice champion Treasurer Kimberly Yee — neither of whom report to the governor.”

Beienburg further noted that the Goldwater Institute “is ready to challenge the governor’s office in court should she attempt to hinder the ESA program via executive order.”

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