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--:-- Host: Less than a year ago, there wasn't a state in the nation with universal school choice, a policy that provides public education funds directly to families to spend on whatever type of schooling they want. Today, there are five. Arizona, Utah, Iowa, West Virginia, and Arkansas. Dozens more now allow parents to take advantage of tax credits or savings programs for private schools or homeschool programs. Most of those states are led by Republicans. But while the Wall Street Journal has called school choice a litmus test for the GOP, some red states are joining with Democrats in actively resisting it.
--:-- Host: For this episode, Daily Wire culture reporter Megan Basham will explain how school choice became so popular with both red and blue voters, and why some Republicans are still resisting the will of voters on the issue.
--:-- Host: Thanks for waking up with us. It's March 19th, and this is your Sunday edition of Morning Wire.
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--:-- Megan Basham: So Megan, School Choice has been on conservatives' wish list for years, but suddenly there's been a good deal of sweeping new legislation. And it's not just a viable issue, it's become a winning issue. Now, along with the states I already mentioned, Florida, Texas, Nebraska, and South Carolina also look like they could embrace it soon. How did School Choice advocates manage to bring about a tipping point?
--:-- Megan Basham: Yeah, you know, and as a talking point for conservatives, school choice doesn't just go back years. It actually goes back decades. To give you just one example, this was Ronald Reagan speaking at a White House workshop on choice in education way back in 1989. We're here to talk about a remarkable advance in American education, an idea whose time has come. For when we talk about choice in public education, what we mean first and foremost is parental choice. We're talking about reasserting the right of American parents to play a vital, perhaps the central part, in designing the kind of education they believe their children need. Choice works, and it works with a vengeance. Whether it's a Harlem school district in which scores have risen dramatically because parents are now permitted to choose which school to send their children to, or the marvelous program in Minnesota that is fostering unprecedented competition among public schools to make them more attractive to parents and students. Choice is the most exciting thing that's going on in America today.
--:-- Megan Basham: And it's funny because he sounds exactly like the speeches we're hearing from some Republican governors today about school choice. The difference is, while it may have been exciting to school choice activists back then in the 80s and 90s, They weren't really able to get enough legislators excited about it to overcome the influence of teachers unions, which have always fought against these kind of reforms. But then came COVID and that really changed the state of play. As kids were learning online from home, moms and dads got a much closer look at the quality of their instruction. And a lot of parents discovered that they didn't much like it especially when it came to lessons on gender and sexuality or curriculum that teaches that some races are more privileged than others or that America is systemically unjust. And some parents also just found that effective education could maybe be a little more elastic than they initially thought. Maybe it didn't have to mean sending their kids to a classroom for seven hours. Maybe it could mean learning at home or with a pod on a flexible schedule.
--:-- Megan Basham: This was Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders as she signed a universal school choice bill into law less than two weeks ago. As a mom, I will never allow our state to sideline our parents in students' education. That starts by ensuring parents have a choice to send their kid to the school that best meets their individual needs, no matter where they live and no matter what their income. Our new Education Freedom account allows parents to enroll their kids in whatever school is most appropriate for their family, whether it be public, private, parochial, or homeschool. We're rolling out this program for our most at-risk families first, and within three years, it'll be available to every family in Arkansas.
--:-- Megan Basham: Jason Bedrick, an education research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, told me that in many ways, these parents have been leading the charge and they're picking up the policy groundwork that those longtime school choice advocates had already put in place. So much so that even some Democrats have started supporting this kind of legislation. The GOP did see this as an opportunity and start moving in that direction. But at the same time, they were doing so because parents were waking up and parents were clamoring for it. As a matter of fact, the tie-breaking vote in Kentucky a couple of years ago was a Democrat who said that he had never voted for school choice before and actually that he still opposed it. But he was voting for it because he had had so many of his constituents call him and say, you've got to help us. We need something. We need it right now.
--:-- Megan Basham: It also seems like Republicans have realized how much this issue can be framed as a civil rights issue. It gives lower income families who often come from minority communities access to better education. And polling now shows that school choice is extremely popular with Hispanic voters with 77% favoring it and 70% of black voters supporting it as well. In fact, the fastest growing demographics defecting from the public schools in favor of homeschooling over the past few years have been Black and Latino families. And the only demographic that we're not finding majority support for school choice is white Democrats.
--:-- Megan Basham: So the GOP has been seizing on this fact, and it's becoming something of a wedge issue for Democrats. Tennessee Senate Majority Leader Jack Johnson sponsored education savings account legislations in that state in 2019, and it targeted poor-performing public school districts with some pretty heavy minority populations. I spoke to him about this bill. There was tremendous support from many in the African-American community or Hispanic community, as well as folks that are in these urban areas where they have a failing school system. That's where we drew the line for this initial legislation that we passed. And some would love to have statewide universal school choice. I understand that we are nowhere near having the political will to get there. But we are, and we were able to pass, and we've already even expanded, making school choice an option for those parents who have kids that are in failing school systems.
--:-- Megan Basham: Why would a state like Tennessee have a hard time passing this? You know, that's a good question. And I talked to some people who work in Tennessee's state capitol on background, and they pointed out that this most recent measure is pretty modest, and it really only covers a few hundred students, though they do expect that to grow. Yet getting even that passed was a harrowing fight, they tell me, and not just because of opposition from Democrats or teachers unions. This state legislature is overwhelmingly Republican by a ratio of 73 to 26. And yet the bill passed the House by only one vote. And at first, it didn't even look like it would pass at all. The House Speaker had to keep the vote open for almost an hour while he negotiated with members to get them to try to switch sides.
--:-- Megan Basham: So while Johnson said he supports expanding that initial law that passed back in 2019, he was willing to take what he could get in this case. I don't want to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. I support school choice. And where we need it the most are in the areas where we have it available now. And again, it was four years ago, so we have some new members. The political will of the Tennessee General Assembly may have changed to a degree. But four years ago, we were barely able to get a limited program that only applies to two counties in Tennessee, barely able to get that passed by one vote in the Tennessee House of Representatives. So to that point, my background sources said they don't expect to see universal school choice in Tennessee anytime soon, and that it's going to be Republicans who are resisting it.
--:-- Megan Basham: And that's interesting because Tennessee isn't the only GOP state where that is the case. Idaho is one of the most conservative states in the country, and its legislature is also overwhelmingly Republican, and the state hasn't voted for a Democrat for president since 1964. So a number of Idaho House members were trying to expand the grant program to allow it to help pay for private school tuition or scholarships. And the obstacle in this case was Republican Governor Brad Little. He made it very clear that he does not support public education funds going toward private institutions. And he said that allowing the education grant funds to be applied to private school tuition or homeschooling costs would be, quote, taking food out of the mouths of a program that we know is going to work.
--:-- Megan Basham: And then you look to Wyoming, which is actually the reddest state in the union, according to Gallup and the Cook Political Report. Their Republican House Speaker, Albert Summers, is blocking a bill that already passed the Senate and has 33 co-sponsors in the House. So what that means is that more than half of the chamber has already co-sponsored it. So there's really no question that it would pass if it were brought to the House floor for a vote. But Summers has not allowed that to happen. He says the bill goes against his support for local control and making sure that authority stays within the local school boards, town councils, and county commissions. However, some of his Republican colleagues say it's because he's beholden to the Wyoming Teachers Union, which not only opposes this bill, but also a bill that bans schools from including lessons about sexual orientation.
--:-- Megan Basham: Summers has also blocked that bill from being brought up for a vote. So State Representative John Baer, who is chair of the Wyoming Freedom Caucus, said that the state has, quote, a lot of people who run as Republicans, but have very progressive beliefs. Now, it's surprising that so many Republicans would be particularly beholden to these teachers unions, though.
--:-- Megan Basham: Yeah, and I'll say that Bedrick didn't really highlight that as the main issue for most Republicans who oppose school choice. He says unions are more of a factor for Democrats, but he did suggest that Republicans' relationships with public school superintendents can be an obstacle. But there's still a lot of holdouts, especially in rural areas where the school superintendents exercise a lot of influence. Very often, the local public school district is the single largest employer. They've got the superintendents have lots of political connections. And when a school choice bill would come up for a vote, the superintendent would sit down for a meeting with the state legislator and just tell them this is going to destroy our public school district. And, you know, all the parents are going to be upset at you and you're going to lose.
--:-- Megan Basham: But even in rural areas, the winds have been shifting on school choice. In the Texas Republican primary this past March, 89% of Republicans supported a ballot measure that expressed support for school choice. And actually some of the highest levels of support came from some of the more rural counties in Texas. And Bedrick says that emboldened some Republican governors who want to push this issue to actually target their own party holdouts in primaries. He particularly points to Iowa's Governor Kim Reynolds.
--:-- Megan Basham: Last year, Governor Kim Reynolds tried to get her bill passed. She got it through the Senate, ran into trouble in the House, And after playing chicken for a while, ultimately the bill failed. But what Reynolds did was take the very rare step of endorsing challengers to sitting legislators in her own party who had opposed her signature school choice legislation and knocked several of them out, including some people that had committee chairmanships. These were some influential members of her party, but they were on the wrong side of an issue that she felt was top of mind for voters, and the voters backed her on that, then expanded the GOP majority in the state legislature. This year, she came back with an even more ambitious policy, basically education savings accounts that families can use for a wide variety of expenses. Things like tutoring, private school tuition, tutoring textbooks, homeschool curricula, online learning, and every single child in the state is eligible.
--:-- Megan Basham: And that bill passed this year. But I do also want to point out that there are some Republican leaders and a number of conservative parents who oppose school choice legislation on some very different grounds than fear it's going to deprive public schools of funding. Their concern is that allowing public funds to go to private institutions and homeschool programs might open the door to allow government interference.
--:-- Megan Basham: So this was Alex Newman, an analyst for the Freedom Project, explaining those concerns when discussing the failed Idaho school choice bill. It was a coalition of Republicans and Democrats that stopped it, obviously for very different reasons. Opponents cited a lack of accountability in the bill, which is, of course, a big problem that a lot of homeschoolers have with the voucher program, too, is that once the money comes, then they're going to want accountability. They're going to want to know what we're doing, what are we learning, et cetera, et cetera. and then eventually they'll want to control it. They were concerned that government funding of homeschooling or private schools would lead almost inevitably to government regulation and then ultimately control.
--:-- Megan Basham: So I asked Bedrick about their concerns and here's what he told me. When it comes to our liberties, the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. So we always have to be vigilant. But I think we also have to recognize that the government doesn't need to be funding private education for the government to try regulating it. And if you were to take a look at, like there's a map that HSLDA, the Homeschool Legal Defense Association, has in terms of which states respect the autonomy of homeschoolers and which states are trying to micromanage homeschoolers. And then you take a map of states that have robust school choice policies, including policies that homeschoolers can use, like in Arizona, Florida, and West Virginia. It's the states that have robust school choice options that also tend to be the states that are respecting the autonomy of homeschoolers.
--:-- Megan Basham: But the more families that we have that are invested in private education, whether in a private school or homeschool environment, the greater the constituency there is to defend private school and homeschool autonomy if and when the government decides that they're going to try to come after you. What seems pretty clear, though, is that the old model of education where money is only going to public schools that kids are assigned by districts is facing some massive disruption. And that's largely parent-led. So both Republicans and Democrats are finding themselves having to provide some new answers for their positions. And it's certainly shaking up the political landscape.
--:-- Host: Right. Well, this is going to be a really interesting issue to watch. Megan, thanks for reporting.
--:-- Megan Basham: Anytime.
--:-- Host: That was Daily Wire culture reporter Megan Basham. And this has been a Sunday edition of Morning Wire.
