The party explicitly rejects the school-choice program in its 2024 platform.
Kamala Harris often positions herself as a champion of “opportunity.” On education policy, however, her party is singing a different tune. At the behest of teachers’ unions, the Democratic Party platform, released in September, explicitly rejects a time-tested and bipartisan school-choice policy: opportunity scholarships, which the party claims “divert taxpayer-funded resources away from public education.”
Opportunity scholarships are a simple concept that profoundly improves children’s lives. While states have taken different policy approaches, including vouchers and tax credits for donations to scholarship-granting organizations, all opportunity scholarships share one thing in common: they provide funding to vulnerable students, including those in poorer families, in failing schools, or both. Students can use that funding to help pay for private school or alternative learning options. While opportunity scholarships are far from a panacea, they are an important way to expand educational choices.
Ironically, Democrats once helped to popularize these policies. Congress created an opportunity scholarship program for Washington, D.C. with bipartisan support in 2003. In 2006, Democrats helped enact or expand opportunity scholarships in Arizona. Scholarship programs passed with bipartisan support in Indiana in 2009, Virginia in 2012, and North Carolina in 2013. Even Illinois’ Democrat-dominated General Assembly, with the help of a Republican governor, enacted an opportunity-scholarship program in 2017.
Pennsylvania provides perhaps the clearest example of these scholarships’ longtime bipartisan appeal. In 2001, the commonwealth’s Republican governor Tom Ridge worked with Democrats in the legislature to create one of the country’s first tax-credit scholarships. His successor, Democrat Ed Rendell, expanded the program’s funding no less than three times, ensuring that thousands more students could participate. Most recently, Democratic governor Josh Shapiro in July raised the program’s funding cap, signing a $62 million expansion into law, plus an extra $20 million for another tax-credit scholarship.
The ink had hardly dried on Shapiro’s pen when his party turned against these scholarships. And with the Democrats’ shift, existing state programs are in danger. Last year, for example, Illinois Democrats ended the scholarship program that they had created six years earlier, depriving nearly 10,000 low-income students of their escape route from the state’s failure-ridden public schools. Thwarting the program’s renewal was reportedly a priority of the state and national teachers’ unions.
Forcing students to attend failing public schools is a boon to teachers’ unions. When students perform poorly in district-run schools, unions can cite those students’ performance to justify demands for even more funding. Opportunity scholarships, by contrast, not only enable kids to attend better schools but typically cost less than public education, gutting unions’ argument that more funding is the only solution. In Pennsylvania, for example, the average opportunity scholarship is less than $2,000, while the average cost-per-student in the state’s public schools is nearly $22,000.
The real solution is school choice. Opportunity scholarships are a small yet important means of enabling students, particularly those with the fewest resources, to escape failing schools. Americans know it, which is why these scholarships have long been the most popular school-choice policy. Both parties once agreed. Today, however, the national Democratic Party has rejected Opportunity Scholarships, spurning the hopes of millions of children who depend on them.
Jeff Yass is managing director and a co-founder of Susquehanna International Group.
Photo: Maskot / Maskot via Getty Images
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Copyright © 2024 Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © 2024 Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, Inc. All rights reserved.
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