A new TV ad urges Louisiana voters to demand that state lawmakers fund a program to give parents tax dollars for private education.
Quin Hillyer
A new TV ad urges Louisiana voters to demand that state lawmakers fund a program to give parents tax dollars for private education.
Quin Hillyer
The huge demand for the new LA GATOR Scholarship Program should teach lawmakers two things. First, they should come as close as possible to fully funding the program. Second, parents want, and deserve, the largest say in their children’s education — and in their children’s upbringing in general.
Families submitted more than 39,000 applications for LA GATOR between March 1 and April 15, with all but about 5,000 of them deemed eligible. If each one of the eligible applicants actually were awarded scholarships — an impossibility due to budget constraints — then it would more than sextuple the current Louisiana Scholarship Program.
Gov. Jeff Landry wants legislators to appropriate $93 million for some 12,000 recipients, but legislative leaders are balking at anything above $50 million.
The program provides what the Louisiana Department of Education describes as “state-funded accounts for school tuition and fees, tutoring, educational therapies, textbooks and curricula, dual enrollment courses, and uniforms.” Priority is given to families with lower incomes.
Let’s not get into the weeds of the state budget or how many schools will open scholarship spots. The larger point here isn’t to parse the details, but to see the big picture. The level of parental interest in LA GATOR is phenomenal. This interest in nonpublic-school scholarships comes even as Louisiana public schools are significantly improving — a credit to the current leadership’s “back to basics” approach — and even as about 150 public charter schools also operate in Louisiana, with many of them thriving.
What matters to individual parents, therefore, isn’t so much the aggregate statistics as it is the perception of what is best for the individual needs of their children.
Except at the margins or in extreme cases, this primary authority regarding children absolutely should be the parents’ prerogative. Even if you think “it takes a village to raise a child,” what that saying should mean is that thriving communities provide backup assistance and webs of extended family, churches and other “intermediary institutions” to provide safety and opportunity for children. It should not mean that the village supersedes the parents, shoves them aside or dictates their choices.
This doesn’t mean public money should be exempt from public accountability, but it does mean public money that carefully boosts parental choice is desirable.
The school choice movement writ large is a response to what had become a stultifying system in which children were assigned to public schools regardless of individual needs. And, it must be said, a number of public school boards across the country essentially told parents to shut up and butt out when parents objected to curricula or other policies. The election of Republican Glenn Youngkin as governor of otherwise Democratic-leaning Virginia in 2021 owed much to a parental backlash against heavy-handed school boards there while Democratic former governor Terry McAuliffe, trying for a comeback, was pilloried by Republicans for repeatedly saying “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”
In asserting maternal and paternal prerogatives (in general, not just with regard to school choice), parents are acting in concert with a long common-law history incorporated into original understandings of the U.S. Constitution. That’s why in the 1923 case of Meyer v. Nebraska the Supreme Court recognized “the right of parents to control the upbringing of their child as they see fit,” and why the high court followed in the 1925 case of Pierce v. Society of Sisters by ruling that parents have a natural right to direct their children’s education.
Of course, nobody yet knows if LA GATOR will turn out to be a good choice for thousands of Louisiana parents. Parents, though, deserve the option of seeking better discipline via one school, or better foreign-language instruction via another school, or a greater focus on the arts via a third — or whatever.
Nationwide, the success of both public-school and private-school choice, including of voucher-like programs, depends on a wide variety of factors including program design and local customs. Louisiana parents, however, can look at the success stories and see hope. On April 22, for example, researchers at the Urban Institute — far from a conservative enclave — reported that students who used Ohio’s voucher scholarship program were “substantially more likely to enroll in college” and “earn four-year degrees.”
Moreover, the beneficial effects “were strongest for male students, Black students, students with below-median test scores before leaving public school, and students from the lowest-income families.”
Louisiana legislators should embrace the hope that nearly 40,000 Bayou State families are expressing by applying for LA GATOR. Nobody is suggesting that the state lacks important, competing priorities. Among all the options, though, LA GATOR should be near the top of the list.
Quin Hillyer can be reached at quin.hillyer@TheAdvocate.com.
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