(2023-09-11) The Conservative Push For School Choice Has Had Its Most Successful Year Ever

The conservative push for “school choice” has had its most successful year ever. For decades, activists on the right have pushed to steer state money toward alternatives to the public school system.

But despite all this effort, conservatives could only get limited and targeted school voucher programs into place — vouchers for low-income families, or those in low-performing school districts, or for students with disabilities.

Very suddenly, that has changed. It started with West Virginia in 2021 and Arizona in 2022, and then continued with a flood this year — Iowa, Utah, Arkansas, Florida, Oklahoma, Ohio, and Indiana. More may follow.

The reform sweeping red America is slightly different from a voucher — it’s called an education savings account, or an ESA

The aftereffects of the Covid-19 pandemic and an unfolding culture war shook up the status quo enough that a longstanding, well-financed conservative advocacy effort could finally defeat longstanding resistance

Critics of these changes argue they amount to a wealth transfer to families with kids in private schools, and they fear it will result in the weakening or even the eventual privatization of public school systems. They also voice concern over the separation of church and state, since many ESA funds will go toward sending children to religious education. (Tax Dollars For Religious Schools)

The most effective converts to the voucher cause were several deep-pocketed conservative donors — members of the DeVos, Koch Brothers, and Walton families, and leaders of the Bradley Foundation, among others.

When the quality of American schools became a nationwide concern in the 1980s and onward, conservatives pitched vouchers as a solution

But most Democrats were anti-voucher. They argued that voucher programs would harm the public school system, draining funds and students from it. Teachers unions, a powerful Democratic-aligned interest group, were staunch opponents because private schools were non-unionized.

Barack Obama notably backed charter schools, which are public schools administered by independent operators, but he was hostile to vouchers.

The simplest reason is that proposals to radically disrupt public schools were unpopular. The opposition was typically led by Democrats and teachers unions, but even many Republican voters were deeply skeptical about anything that could be framed as weakening their own public schools.

Often, suburban parents had moved to an area specifically for high-quality public schools. Meanwhile, in rural areas, there could be few private options

When voucher proponents took their case to the public, it went even more disastrously.

The obstacles for vouchers seemed so daunting that, in 2005, Dan Lips, an education policy expert at the Arizona-based Goldwater Institute, proposed a new spin on the policy: education savings accounts (ESAs)

Advocates hoped this would address the Arizona Supreme Court’s concern over funding religious schools, which had undone the state’s voucher program.

But a 2018 attempt to make every Arizona student eligible ran into the Red for Ed movement of teacher activism and walkouts in conservative states.

The pandemic and the culture war gave conservatives the opportunity for a breakthrough

Universal voucher bills had long failed because most parents didn’t want radical disruption of the public school status quo. The pandemic brought this radical disruption.

Polarizing battles unfolded over school closures, mask and vaccine mandates, and (after reopening) how long kids should be kept home if classmates tested positive.

Then the culture war that erupted over race, gender, and sexuality teaching in schools in 2020

Conservative activists saw opportunity. “It is time for the school choice movement to embrace the culture war,” the Heritage Foundation’s Jay Greene and James Paul wrote in 2022.

In a 2019 survey, 31 percent of Republican respondents said they had very little or no confidence in public schools; in a 2022 survey, that number had risen to 50 percent

The American Federation for Children has long been the leading advocacy group trying to get vouchers passed into law. It was initially funded, founded, and chaired by Betsy DeVos.

The group’s name is a dig at the American Federation of Teachers — meant to imply that the union represents teachers’ interests, while the group represents children’s.

In Arizona, a sympathetic governor was already in place: Doug Ducey

in 2022, his final year in office, Ducey took another shot at getting the nation’s first truly universal ESA program — in which even families already sending their kids to private school could get money — off the ground in Arizona.

Ducey faced the same three GOP holdouts in the state House. But he and his party’s legislative leaders deployed carrots and sticks.

In the end, all three of the holdouts flipped, voting for the bill. “To be frank, I have regretted it ever since,” John told me.

All three went on to lose their primaries that year anyway

It would not be the last. AFC intervened in state legislative primaries across the country that year, hoping some attention-getting defeats of incumbents could scare others into going along

they wanted to make “universal school choice” a litmus test issue for Republicans, as previous generations of anti-abortion, pro-gun rights, and anti-tax activists had successfully done for their own causes

as 2023 began, a wave of ESA bills rippled through red states. Corey DeAngelis, a senior fellow at AFC, became the public face of the effort, traveling from state to state, holding rallies, making media appearances, and tweeting constantly. After getting his PhD at the University of Arkansas’s (Walton-funded) education reform program, DeAngelis concluded that he could “make more of an impact” in an advocacy role. “You can write a thousand white papers and politicians won’t even read it,” he told me.

Arizona families who already sent their children to private schools or homeschools were immediately eligible for the $7,000-per-student benefit, if they signed up. Many have.

By mid-May 2023, about 61,000 Arizona students were enrolled in an ESA

Many controversies surely lie ahead as well. Private schools have wide latitude to discriminate in admissions (though it’s illegal to do so based on race)

the budget question. In many of these states, universal ESAs were passed at a time when state budgets were flush with Covid aid.

But the Covid aid is ending, which will eventually present a math problem for states if revenues slow down.