Recently, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed legislation establishing a school voucher program with universal eligibility.
According to the Texas Tribune, “Most participating families will receive an amount equal to 85% of what public schools get for each student through state and local funding — roughly somewhere between $10,300 and $10,900 per year for each child.”
Parents of children with disabilities would be eligible for that, plus up to $30,000 more.
For now, the program will be capped at $1 billion in annual funding, with a priority given to lower- and middle-income families.
Even so, this is yet another milestone for the school choice movement. Texas is now the 16th state to have a program like this for which, in theory, every child would be eligible. Idaho, Indiana, Tennessee and Wyoming have also approved such programs this year.
Such programs, which allow parents to opt-out of the traditional government school system and empower them to provide for the education of their children, are a needed antidote to long-stagnant educational outcomes.
“Vouchers are not an end in themselves,” argued the great economist Milton Friedman. “The purpose of vouchers is to enable parents to have free choice, and the purpose of having free choice is to provide competition and allow the educational industry to get out of the 17th century and get into the 21st century.”
If only such reasoning entered the minds of California lawmakers, who are mostly beholden to the state teachers unions.
As a local survey by the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California found, 62% of public school parents support the idea of a voucher system in California.
Indeed, 50% of all adults surveyed by PPIC also supported the idea, which is impressive considering how rarely such ideas even come up for discussion in this state.
This also included 53% of adults in Los Angeles County and the Inland Empire, two very different areas of Southern California. In addition, more than 60% of Black and Latino Californians also supported vouchers.
Despite this broad support, the idea rarely ever comes up in public discourse or in the Legislature. It’s time for that to change.
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