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Commentary by Charles Hokanson
Special to the Herald/Review
Right before Thanksgiving 2007, voters in Utah voted against what would have become the nation’s first universal school voucher program — a program that hadn’t even had time to be implemented. A high-cost campaign waged by special interest groups worked to raise uncertainty and confusion about the program, and the measure did not prevail.
As a result, pundits and prognosticators from throughout the country came out of the woodwork. School choice was dead, they cried.
The same thing is happening in Arizona today. But pundits in Arizona should take heed of school choice momentum in 2008 before writing any epitaphs.
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What the opinion elite failed to recognize earlier this year was that the news of the setback in Utah didn’t depress America’s parents into putting aside their hopes and dreams for a better education for their kids. It emboldened them to fight harder.
In 2008, these parents fought, and they won.
Legislators from throughout the country — driven by the demands of families and community organizers — introduced a record number of school choice bills.
In fact, lawmakers in 44 states tried to enact school choice provisions during this last legislative cycle, a record number.
At the same time, as more and more parents became exposed to the opportunities provided by school choice programs, student enrollment in the nation’s 16 existing voucher and scholarship tax credit programs increased. In fact, student enrollment in school choice programs has grown by 86 percent over five years. That’s momentum!
The demand was so strong that one state, Georgia, enacted a new, $50 million corporate and individual scholarship tax credit program. This program, signed into law in May, will provide private school opportunities to an estimated 10,000 children.
In Florida, Sunshine State legislators recently approved a $30 million expansion to the state’s corporate tax credit program. This expansion will help more than 6,000 children, if the expansion is approved by Gov. Charlie Crist.
Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal — along with committed Democratic legislators from areas hardest hit by Hurricane Katrina — have managed to act swiftly and pass, in both legislative chambers, a $10 million opportunity scholarship program for New Orleans.
To top it all off, the first school choice victory in 2008 was in an unexpected place: Utah. The state’s existing school choice program, a voucher program for children with special needs, was expanded by $1 million and made permanent.
This year, we also discovered that the base for school choice was doing exactly the opposite of what opponents said it would. The base was expanding, not contracting or dissolving.
In Florida, even news organizations that previously viewed school choice through a veil of skepticism had to admit that Democratic support — and support among African Americans and Hispanics — was growing and growing fast.
And so it will be in Arizona. Sure, in mid-May, an appeals court tossed out two of the state’s voucher programs, initiatives that help children with disabilities and foster kids. But, we’ve been down this road before. Time after time, decisions like these, about school choice programs in the Copper State, have been overturned. Simply put, Arizona constitutional history is on the side of the families in these programs, not the special interests that oppose them.
It would be a mistake to count Arizona’s parents out of the equation. While the ACLU, the state’s teachers union, and the People for the American Way are trying to trumpet this recent decision as a “victory”, many parents see these groups for what they are — cowardly elitists who want to remove disabled kids and foster students from the schools they love.
Reality is reality, and Arizona’s parents simply won’t stand for this verdict.
Parents throughout the country stood on the side of school choice during our movement’s last setback, and parents throughout Arizona will stand, side by side, with their neighbors in this latest battle.
One way or another, I predict that Arizona’s parents, and the state’s most disadvantaged children, will ultimately win.
CHARLES R. HOKANSON JR. is president of the national nonprofit Alliance for School Choice, the country’s largest organization promoting school vouchers and scholarship tax credit programs. Previously, he served as a senior official at the U.S. Department of Education.
Skeptical wrote on Jun 21, 2008 5:56 PM: