DeAngelis: School choice revolution gets supercharged
President Trump recently signed an executive order that puts wind in the sails of the school choice movement.
The executive order directs the Department of Education to prioritize discretionary federal grants for school choice and to issue guidance on allocating funding for elementary and secondary school scholarships.
The order also directs the Pentagon to examine how military families could use federal funding to select the school that best meets their children’s needs. The Interior secretary is also directed to submit a plan on how families with children in Bureau of Indian Education schools could use federal funding to attend the school of their choice.
The timing could not be better. The National Assessment of Educational Progress — known as the “nation’s report card” — shows reading scores dropped by 5 points for fourth- and eighth-grade students from 2019 to 2024. Math scores declined 3 percentage points for fourth-graders and 8 percentage points for eighth-graders.
These disappointing results come as the public school system has primarily drained the $190 billion it received in federal emergency funding beginning in 2020.
School choice competition is the rising tide, and we need to lift all boats. Public schools generally improve when families can vote with their feet.
For example, Florida’s public schools drastically improved as the state expanded school choice over the past two decades. Florida has since jumped to the top of the national rankings after adjusting for differences in student demographics across states while spending 27% less than the national average per student.
There’s been more advancement in school choice in the last four years than in the preceding four decades. And the momentum isn’t slowing down.
In fact, Tennessee recently became the 13th state to pass universal school choice since 2021. Six more states — Idaho, New Hampshire, North Dakota, South Dakota, Texas and Wyoming — could also go all-in on school choice this year.
Indeed, school choice advocates expect that most K-12 students will reside in states with universal school choice by the end of 2025.
Trump’s new executive order supercharges the school choice revolution. However, the Department of Education’s discretionary federal funding is limited. Congress needs to take action for more meaningful change.
The good news is that there’s a proposal in Congress to expand school choice nationally. The Educational Choice for Children Act is a bill that would make a federal tax credit scholarship program. It would create a federal tax benefit for contributing to K-12 scholarship-granting organizations, and the program would be neither run nor regulated by the Education Department.
The bill passed the House Ways and Means Committee on a party-line vote last September. The bill has been reintroduced by Republican lawmakers for the 119th Congress.
House Speaker Mike Johnson supports the legislation, and Trump said he would sign it.
Corey A. DeAngelis is a senior fellow at the American Federation for Children and a visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution/InsideSources
