The new Republican Party platform adopted last month at the Republican national convention in Milwaukee contains a section on education with nine paragraphs. The second paragraph endorses universal school choice:
2. Universal School Choice
Republicans believe families should be empowered to choose the best Education for their children. We support Universal School Choice in every State in America. We will expand 529 Education Savings Accounts and support Homeschooling Families equally.
At the convention, Florida governor Ron DeSantis gave a speech in which he said: “We believe schools should educate, not indoctrinate. We stand for parents’ rights, including universal school choice.” Rep. Byron Donalds — one of the few black Republicans in the House — likewise made the case for school choice at the convention.
Writing for The Daily Signal, which was launched by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, but is now an independent organization, Jay Greene and Jason Bedrick, both fellows in the Center for Education Policy at the Heritage Foundation, are ecstatic about the Republican Party platform’s embrace of universal school choice:
For the first time, the Republican Party is signaling to voters and its own politicians that they should pursue policies that enable all families to choose the educational options that align with their values and work best for their own children — whether public or private, religious or secular.
That’s a dramatic departure from the platforms the Republicans adopted in 2016 and 2020, which only mentioned school choice in passing and did not fully embrace making choice available to all families.
Before now, Republican politicians could say they were adhering to their party’s platform if they were only willing to support school choice policies that were limited to specific populations, like families with low-incomes, students with special needs, or those enrolled in failing public schools.
Greene and Bedrick point out that 11 states have now enacted universal school choice, and they maintain that “backing universal school choice is becoming the new standard for Republican state policymakers.” They also believe that universal school choice is the new GOP litmus test.
The old GOP litmus test was abortion, but that was before the repeal of Roe v. Wade (1973) returned the abortion issue back to the states.
With universal school choice, students from virtually all families, regardless of income, are eligible to use public money to attend private schools, including religious schools. So, when Republicans say that they “believe families should be empowered to choose the best Education for their children,” what they really mean is they should be “given money by their state government.”
And where do state governments get the money to institute universal school choice? They can’t just print money, like the federal government can, so that money must come from income, sales, and other taxes collected from residents of, and visitors to, the state. This is in addition to the taxes already collected and used for state and local education budgets, which are never cut no matter how many children leave the public schools.
There is nothing special about the business of education that necessitates that the government be involved in it, and it is not a proper function of government. Since no American should be forced to pay for the education of any other American or their children, and since parents are the ones solely responsible for their children’s education, and since vouchers merely give some Americans the choice of where to spend other Americans’ money, libertarians have a better litmus test when it comes to education.
All vouchers should be private. Any individual, business, corporation, foundation, or organization that wants to give parents a voucher to use for their children’s education is certainly welcome to do so.
Abolish all government departments of education. This includes not only the federal Department of Education but also all state departments of education.
All education should be private education. Education is a service that should be provided on the free market by private entities just like hair styling, car repair, pest control, and landscaping services.
Completely separate education from the state. Neither the federal nor the state governments should fund or regulate education in any way.
The truth is that once Republicans accept government-funded educational vouchers as legitimate, they can put forth no reasonable or logical argument against the government funding universal car choice, universal food choice, universal housing choice, universal clothing choice, universal entertainment choice, universal recreation choice, universal vacation choice, or any other privately provided service or product.