All Wyoming Families Should Have School Choice

Guest Piece By Jason Bedrick & Ed Tarnowski

There are three certainties in life: death, taxes, and scaremongering that school choice will destroy public education.

Whenever a state legislature is considering a measure to create a new education choice policy, or expand an existing one, the proverbial Chicken Littles inevitably start squawking that the sky is falling.

Take Wyoming's popular K–12 education savings accounts (ESA) policy. State legislators are considering a bill to expand eligibility for the ESA, which empowers families to use their child's portion of state funding to choose the learning environments that work best for their children. Seven in ten Wyoming residents and more than 75% of Wyoming parents say they support ESAs.

The legislation would also raise the appropriation from $20 million to $30 million. That might sound like a lot, but it's less than 2% of the $1.8 billion spent by Wyoming's K–12 district schools, even though the expanded ESAs would serve about 5% of Wyoming students.

Predictably, opponents of education freedom are predicting utter ruin.

Left-wing columnist Kerry Drake screeched that making ESAs open to all children would "dismantle public education." Likewise, the Wyoming Education Association wailed that universal ESAs would "destroy public education in our state."

The Chicken Littles should take a breath. The sky isn't falling.

There are now 33 states with a school choice policy, including 11 with universal school choice policies that make every K–12 student eligible. Yet there is no good evidence that school choice harms public schools, let alone "destroys" them. In fact, the best available evidence shows that—like in nearly every other area of life—more choices and healthy competition lead to better outcomes.

Researchers at the University of Arkansas found a "strong and statistically significant association" between education freedom (including the robustness of a state's school choice policies) and "both academic scores and academic gains." Indeed, 26 out of 29 empirical studies on the effects of education choice policies on the academic performance of students who remain at their traditional public schools find statistically significant positive effects. One found no visible effect, and only two found a small negative effect.

But evidence doesn't matter to the Chicken Littles. Nor do they have any sense of proportionality. As we detailed in a new EdChoice report, there is no correlation between the size and scope of school choice proposals in states nationwide and the rhetorical intensity of school choice opponents.

In other words, opponents of education freedom tend to throw everything they have against such proposals, regardless of their size and scope. It doesn't matter whether the proposal would offer school choice to all students or to very few students—opponents of school choice will claim that the proposal will harm public schools, and some will even claim that it will destroy public schools, regardless of the evidence to the contrary.

If President Donald Trump's victory teaches us anything, it is to ignore the Chicken Littles. President Trump's "Ten Principles for Great Schools Leading to Great Jobs" noted that he "supports universal school choice so that parents can send their children to the public, private, or religious school that best suits their needs, their goals, and their values."

State policymakers should follow President Trump's lead. Policymakers should resist calls to scale back the ESA expansion. There is no reason to expect that reducing the size and scope of the ESA expansion will reduce the intensity of opposition. Instead, they should stay the course, be bold, and ensure that every child gets access to the quality education they deserve.

Jason Bedrick is a board member at the Education Freedom Institute. Ed Tarnowski is a Policy and Advocacy Director at EdChoice.