School Choice Emerges as Key Issue in Gubernatorial Races

Voters in 36 states are being asked to choose their next governors in 2022, which means those voters are also being asked to choose how the next generation of students will be educated.When it comes to education priorities, a recent report in City Journal found that Democratic gubernatorial candidates are rallying around school funding and early-childhood education, while Republican candidates are prioritizing school choice and parental rights measures.In Texas, Wisconsin, and Michigan, voters will be choosing whether to increase spending for traditional schools or to experiment with bold new funding mechanisms — potentially following in the footsteps of Arizona, whose outgoing governor, Douglas Ducey, introduced the first universal school choice program in the country.In Texas, Governor Abbott has vowed to introduce greater school choice freedom to parents across the state through voucher programs.“We need to restore parents as the rightful people in charge of making the decisions for their children about their health care and about their education,” Mr. Abbott said at a rally last month.“Empowering the parent means giving them the ability to send their child to any public, charter, or private school with state funding following the student,” the governor told the crowd at another rally last spring. Mr. Abbot’s Democratic challenger, Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke, has accused the incumbent of trying to siphon public school funding for private schools. He has called on voters to “reject Greg Abbott’s radical plan to defund” public schools. Mr. O’Rourke’s messaging is primarily aimed at rural voters. These voters, including Republicans, have long been holdouts on questions of school choice, even as the rest of the GOP has embraced vouchers, charters, and open enrollment programs. In many rural counties, alternatives to public schools are limited, so residents tend to see cities and suburbs — many with a wide variety of schools — as the primary beneficiaries of such policies.If Mr. Abbott wins these rural counties, it would signal a turning tide in public opinion about school choice, especially as options like education savings accounts offer more flexibility that might appeal even in counties with one school.In Wisconsin, Republican Timothy Michels has made a more ambitious pitch to voters: universal school choice.“Every parent is a taxpayer, so they should all equally have the benefit of those tax dollars to educate their kids,” Mr. Michels said in the October 14 gubernatorial debate.Currently, Wisconsin offers vouchers to low-income and special-needs students. More than 52,000 students are enrolled in the growing vouchers programs in the state — compared to public school enrollment of about 807,000.The incumbent Democratic governor, Anthony Evers, vetoed a bill from the state’s Republican legislature last spring that would have removed an income cap on vouchers, and has instead made increasing public school funding a central tenet of his education policy.Mr. Evers has called for spending about $2 billion of the state’s projected $5 billion budget surplus on public schools.In Michigan, a major policy divide between Governor Whitmer and her Republican challenger, Tudor Dixon, has been over Michigan’s Opportunity Scholarship program. The proposed program, championed by Ms. Dixon, would allow Michiganders to donate to education savings accounts for students — and those donations would be deducted from their state tax bills. An education news site, The 74 Million, reported that a group affiliated with President Trump’s education secretary, Elizabeth DeVos, has spent more than $4 million in support of Ms. Dixon and her education policy plan.Ms. Whitmer vetoed the Opportunity Scholarship program when it was sent up from the state’s legislature last year. “This is a dangerous strategy for Michigan and it will leave a lot of kids behind,” Ms. Whitmer told Chalkbeat last month. “[T]his is DeVos’ agenda to starve public schools of resources, to divert them to for-profit charters or parochial schools.”Disagreement between Republicans and Democrats, however, isn’t universal across the 36 races. In Pennsylvania and Illinois, election season has highlighted the bipartisan support for school choice policies. Democratic candidates in both states have bucked the conventional party stance and said they support voucher-like programs. Governor Pritzker of Illinois endorsed a tax credit scholarship for middle- and low-income students across his state that as recently as 2018 he said he opposed. Like the Michigan proposal, the Illinois program is funded by taxpayers who receive a 75 percent state tax credit for their contributions.Pennsylvania’s Democratic candidate for governor, Attorney General Joshua Shapiro, endorsed the Keystone State’s Lifeline Scholarship. The program offers education saving accounts to students in failing school districts.“I think we can invest in public education and empower parents to put their kids in the best opportunity for them to succeed, and I don’t think we have to harm public schools in the process,” Mr. Shapiro said last month.

School Choice Emerges as Key Issue in Gubernatorial Races

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