Posted on Wednesday, February 12, 2025
|
by Outside Contributor
|
1 Comments
|
President Trump signed an executive order last Wednesday that puts wind in the sails of the school choice movement.
The executive order directs the Department of Education to prioritize discretionary federal grants for school choice and to issue guidance on allocating funding for elementary and secondary school scholarships.
The order also directs Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to examine how military families could use federal funding to select the school that best meets their child’s needs. The interior secretary is also directed to submit a plan to Mr. Trump on how families with children in Bureau of Indian Education schools could use federal funding to attend the school of their choice.
The timing could not be better: the National Assessment of Educational Progress – commonly known as the “nation’s report card” – scores were also released last Wednesday. Reading scores dropped by 5 points for both 4th and 8th-grade students from 2019 to 2024. Math scores declined 3 points for 4th graders and 8 points for 8th graders over the same period.
These disappointing results come as the public school system has largely drained the $190 billion it received in federal emergency funding beginning in 2020.
Last week was also National School Choice Week.
School choice competition is the rising tide we need to lift all boats. Public schools generally improve when families have the power to vote with their feet.
Florida’s public schools, for example, drastically improved as the state expanded school choice over the past couple of decades. Florida has since jumped to the top of the national rankings after adjusting for differences in student demographics across states while spending 27% less than the national average per student. Florida now has over 500,000 students benefiting from school choice scholarships.
Families are celebrating education opportunities this year like never before. The teachers’ unions overplayed their hand by fighting to keep schools closed during the COVID era. Remote learning allowed families to witness ideological indoctrination in classrooms at scale for the first time in history.
There’s been more advancement in school choice in the past four years than in the preceding four decades. Twelve states have passed universal school choice policies since 2021, and 7 more states – Idaho, New Hampshire, North Dakota, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, and Wyoming – could go all-in on school choice this year.
In fact, school choice advocates expect that a majority of K-12 students in the U.S. will reside in states with universal school choice by the end of 2025.
President Trump’s new executive order supercharges the school choice revolution.
However, the Department of Education’s amount of discretionary federal funding is limited. Congress needs to take action for more meaningful change.
The good news is that there’s a proposal in Congress to expand school choice nationally. The Educational Choice for Children Act is a bill that would create a federal tax credit scholarship program. It would create a federal tax benefit for contributing to K-12 scholarship-granting organizations, and the program would be neither run nor regulated by the federal Department of Education.
The bill passed the House Ways and Means Committee on a party-line vote last September. That vote was the first time a nationwide school choice bill passed out of a Congressional committee. The bill was just reintroduced by Republican lawmakers for the 119th Congress last week.
House Speaker Mike Johnson supports the legislation, and President Trump said he would sign it.
President Trump is leading the way to empower all American families with education freedom. Now, it’s up to Congress to do the same.
Corey DeAngelis is a senior fellow at American Culture Project and the executive director at Educational Freedom Institute. He wrote this for InsideSources.com.
Reprinted with Permission from DC Journal – By Corey DeAngelis
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of AMAC or AMAC Action.
Read full article here
