Youngkin’s School Choice Plan Is Fantastic – OpEd
Former Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin has launched a nationwide school-choice campaign to promote his education initiative, Empowering America’s Parents. It would allow parents to enroll their children in a tax-credit program, one that is eminently fair and effective: It allows scholarships for tuition, tutoring, and disability services. “These tax credits unlock school choice on a virtually universal basis,” Youngkin said.
He is embarking on a multimillon-dollar advertising campaign to persuade voters to pressure their representatives to join this effort to bring equity to education. Currently, only the affluent can afford to send their children to private schools, and the cost of parochial schools is outside the budget of many parents.
Unlike some other school-choice programs, this one does not discriminate against Catholics. Right now Catholics are forced to pay for schools they do not want—their neighborhood public school—as well as the ones they want, namely their local parochial school.
Here’s another positive feature. The scholarships are paid for by private donations and a federal tax credit, not by state taxes. To be exact, the program does not raise taxes on anyone, and it does not take money away from public schools; charter schools are also included. Indeed, it would lower the cost of education to the taxpayers as more parents would take advantage of this school-choice program and exit the public schools.
Ninety percent of students are eligible to participate in this effort. Those who are not are those in public schools that do not meet some specified criteria, as well as students at the top of the income scale.
It is up to the states to opt-in or opt-out of this initiative. So far, 30 states have adopted the tax credit for students K-12; 20 have not.
We did an analysis of the 20 states that decided not to adopt this program, comparing them to data from the Pew Research Center on the most and least religious states in the nation. We were not surprised by the results.
Of the ten most religious states, all opted in; of the ten least religious states (and the District of Columbia), only three chose to be included.
In short, the problem lies in those states which boast of their “progressive” politics but which have the most regressive education policies. They are the ones who brag how much they care about quality education for the poor and minorities, yet refuse to give them the same choices afforded affluent parents.
Talk is cheap. Decisions are what count.
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