Opinion: School choice policies can reverse COVID governance’s tolls
Dan Lips, Head of Policy at the Lincoln Network, outlines in a National Review article why myriad states are expanding parents’ educational rights post-pandemic: After widely failed local lockdowns (which led to astronomical learning losses in students), parents are questioning public schools’ credibility and wanting accountable oversight. Arizona’s newly-created educational savings accounts (ESAs), as an example, should inspire similar policy advancements in states like California, asserts Lips. To receive daily updates of new Opp Now stories, click here.
Beyond emergency funding, lawmakers should look to reform long-standing federal education programs to give parents more control. For example, in 2021, Senator Mike Lee (R., Utah) and Senator Tommy Tuberville (R., Ala.) introduced the Children Have Opportunities in Classrooms Everywhere (CHOICE) Act. The bill would reform the Elementary and Secondary Education Act to require that states provide federal funding directly to low-income children through an expanded “529 savings account” (so called for the relevant section of the tax code) that can be set aside for college or used for private-school tuition, tutoring, or homeschooling. This bill should be a priority in the new Congress.
This approach should be applied to other key federal education programs as well. To give another example, Congress should amend the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act to strengthen parents’ right to choose their children’s educational setting. Disabled students suffered more acutely than most of their peers during the school closures. Giving the parents of children with special needs greater power to direct their children’s schooling could begin to reverse the damage and also promote equal opportunity in the future.
The federal Head Start program, which provides preschool benefits to disadvantaged children, could be transformed into a “Head Start account” program to give parents control of the more than $10,000 that is now spent per child on preschool, child care, and other services. Since it was created by President Lyndon Johnson, the Head Start program has never achieved its intended goals. A congressionally mandated national evaluation assessing the program’s long-term impact found that Head Start did not provide lasting benefits to participating children, compared with their peers who did not attend Head Start. But directly providing $10,000 to a million poor children for preschool and other education expenses would provide greater benefits…
The growing national consensus that the nation’s public schools cannot be trusted to deliver the kind of education that American children deserve has made it possible for Congress and state lawmakers to provide something better. Arizona’s new universal education-savings-account program should be a model for federal and state lawmakers to give parents true control of their children’s future. Transferring power in K–12 education from teachers’ unions and school-district bureaucracies to parents has never been more necessary, or more politically feasible.
This article originally appeared in the National Review. Read the whole thing here.
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