Conflict over a voucher bill in Oklahoma, described a month ago in an NCSPE commentary, has led to a bitter feud among Republicans over school choice, reportedU.S. News & World Report.
At issue is opposition by Charles McCall, the House Republican speaker, to the proposed Oklahoma Empowerment Accounts, vigorously supported by the two other Republican leaders of the state, Governor Kevin Stitt and Senate President Greg Treat. The proposed program would allow students throughout the state to use public dollars to attend private schools or be home-schooled.
To McCall the legislation does not serve his constituents in the rural southeastern county of Atoka and many similar counties across the state where private school options do not exist.
In objecting to the legislation, McCall has exposed a fundamental reality of school choice: it's too difficult to achieve economies of scale in sparsely populated areas. This explains why charter schools as well as vouchers are largely urban phenomena.
In addition, McCall’s opposition underscores the importance of public schools to rural communities across the country. As hubs for football, basketball, and baseball games as well as dramas and musicals, rural public schools serve a vital civic function. Competing schools, whether in the form of charter or private schools, pose an existential threat to not only public schools but also rural communities defined by them.
McCall’s Republican credentials are beyond question. “Over his five-year tenure, the fourth-generation family banker and fiscal conservative,” reported U.S. News & World Report, “has secured cuts to personal and corporate income taxes, authored legislation restricting federal overreach into Oklahoma’s state affairs and oversaw an expansion of Republicans in the statehouse, from 72 members in his first term as speaker in 2016 to a record 82 members today.”
McCall has nevertheless become a target of the Club for Growth, Washington’s deep-pocketed conservative political action committee, which, according to U.S. News & World Report, “is running a five-figure ad buy against McCall, accusing the leader of ‘silencing parents.’”
“Previously there were few repercussions to opposing school choice, but that has changed,” said David McIntosh, the president of Club for Growth, reported U.S. News & World Report. “During the pandemic, more and more parents began paying attention to our public schools and they didn’t like what they saw.”
McIntosh made clear in visceral terms that in his opinion there is no room in the Republican Party for McCall and other opponents of vouchers, education savings accounts, tuition tax credit scholarships, or charter schools: “School choice is the new litmus test for Republicans. Self-proclaimed conservatives who oppose school choice are nothing short of political whores, and we will find and support challengers to these RINOs,” the defamatory acronym for “Republican in name only.”
U.S. News & World Report noted that Florida’s Senator Rick Scott, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, made school choice the top objective of his 11-point agenda. That primary goal of his manifesto reads: “Parents, not government, will choose the best schools for their kids. We will enact equal opportunity in education(school choice) so no child will be sent to a failing school simply because of their zip code.”
- S.E. Abrams