Wall Street Journal Celebrates School Choice Advances

The Wall Street Journal editorial board celebrated “a banner year for school choice” after four state budgets in the last two weeks increased funding to school choice initiatives, including tax-credit scholarships, vouchers, and charter schools. The recent developments build on a year of momentum for school choice advocates as the pandemic challenged public schools across the country.

The paper praised New Hampshire’s new Education Freedom Accounts, a voucher program available to families earning up to 300 percent of the federal poverty line that “could save the state at least $360 million over a decade.” 

Reaching Higher New Hampshire, a non-profit education policy center and advocacy group, estimated that the program will cost the state $70 million in new spending and cause local school districts to lose $15 million in funding in its first three years.

In Pennsylvania, Democratic Governor Tom Wolf approved a budget that includes a $40 million expansion of the Educational Improvement Tax Credit, bringing its cap to $175 million and providing for 13,000 additional scholarships for K-12 students seeking private education.

Ohio’s Governor Mike DeWine signed a budget last week that “packaged several school-choice provisions” together, according to the Journal. The budget increases state funding for “high-performing charter schools” and “higher scholarship values for the state’s voucher program,” and also creates a new K-12 Education Savings Accounts (ESAs), which function like debit cards allowing parents to spend funds on a range of educational services.

Arizona’s legislature passed a budget that raises the funding cap for a “special-needs tax-credit scholarship program” and allows “low-income students at struggling public schools to switch to the state’s ESA program without a waiting period,” reported the Journal. However, the editorial board criticized Arizona’s failure to expand the availability of ESAs to 600,000 more low-income students, an initiative they encouraged in a February editorial. The state’s vouchers are “used by fewer than 10,000 students in a set of narrow categories,” the board lamented in February.

In sum, the editorial board noted, the choice movement has achieved significant momentum over the pandemic year: “seven states have created new tax-credit scholarship or ESA programs this year, and more than a dozen have expanded programs.”