This article was originally published in The Hechinger Report.
WASHINGTON — During Donald Trump’s first term as president, he hesitated to speak boldly about school choice.
That’s according to Kellyanne Conway, then an assistant to the president and one of his former campaign managers. “He would say, ‘Aren’t we the ones saying it [education] is local? Why would the President of the United States do all that bigfoot?”
Expect that reluctance to become a thing of the past, Conway told the audience last week at an event dedicated to promoting the benefits of school choice — from expanded education savings accounts like programs in West Virginia and Arizona to charter schools and microschools. During his campaign, Trump has already spoken out about his embrace of parental choice. “We want federal education dollars to follow the student, instead of maintaining a bloated and radical bureaucracy in Washington, DC,” he said at a rally in Wisconsin last month.
Get stories like this straight to your inbox. Sign up for the 74 newsletter
(To be fair, Trump issued an executive order toward the end of his first term allowing states to use federal money to create school choice programs. When I looked at it a few years ago, I couldn’t find a single state who had accepted the offer.)
Conway urged participants in the post-election rally to speak a certain way in their arguments against lawmakers in the future. “Lead with solutions, not with problems. The problems may be the second part of the sentence, or perhaps the second paragraph. The panelists — including the founder of a group of charter schools for students with autism in Arizona, the leader of a private school for boys in Alabama and the head of a foundation that supports microschools — were all winners of the Yass Prize, fueled by billionaire Jeff Yass and run by the Center for Education Reform.
She also urged the crowd not to make a school choice about teachers unions, “which is a nice thing to do, especially this week, but it doesn’t teach another child.” (The National Education Association, the nation’s largest union, has generally opposed private school vouchers and has celebrated the defeat of school choice measures at the ballot box in three states. “The Decisive Defeat of Vouchers on the Ballot in Multiple States speaks loud and clear: the public knows vouchers are harmful to students and does not want them in any form,” NEA President Becky Pringle said in a statement.)
Lawmakers who need convincing won’t hold out just because of union pressure, Conway said. In Texas, for example, rural lawmakers concerned about the effect of vouchers on their schools have repeatedly rejected or torpedoed plans in that state that would allow parents to use public money for private school education. Republican Gov. Greg Abbott helped elect enough new members over the rural population, but that school choice could soon become a reality in his state.
The school choice event at the Ronald Reagan Building in DC was notable for the wide variety of people who attended, including parents and pastors, people who are white, black, and Latino, and several Democrats, including Colorado Governor Jared Polis and Senator Anthony. Hardy Williams from Pennsylvania. Some speakers told stories about opening their own charter schools and private schools. They urged the president-elect to take action on choice, including authorizing federal subsidies for school meals for children in low-income families, sending those children to private schools or other institutions outside of public schools to follow.
In Congress, where Republicans control the Senate and are expected to retain control of the House of Representatives, lawmakers have already proposed legislation that has so far largely failed. Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, who is likely to chair his chamber’s committee that oversees education, introduced a bill this session that would give families and businesses tax breaks if they contribute to groups that give scholarships to students to attend private or parochial schools. It would target students whose families earn no more than 300 percent of the region’s median gross income. Cassidy’s wife, Laura, runs a charter school for children with dyslexia in Baton Rouge.
“I think there will be a real opportunity to promote innovation in school choice,” Cassidy said. “There is great promise in this administration and I look forward to working with them.”
This story about school choice was produced by The Hechinger Reportan independent nonprofit news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
