School Choice Supporters Victorious in Iowa Primary
The following was originally published by Fox News. It can be found here.
School choice was on the ballot in the Iowa Republican primaries last week, and it won. It’s the latest in a series of state primaries where school choice has been emerging as a litmus-test issue for GOP primary voters.
Iowa stands out as a bellwether because of the high-profile battle over school choice between Gov. Kim Reynolds — a rising leader in the GOP who was recently tapped to respond to President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address — and fellow Republican lawmakers in the statehouse.
One of Reynolds’s top legislative priorities this year was a bill that would have created state-funded education savings accounts (ESAs) that families could use to customize their child’s education. Similar to policies in 10 other states, families could use ESAs to pay for private school tuition, tutoring, textbooks, online courses, and a variety of other education-related expenses.
Under Reynolds’s proposal, up to 10,000 ESAs worth about $5,000 annually would have been available to students with special needs or those from households earning up to four times the federal poverty line (about $110,000 for a family of four).
“If education truly is the great equalizer,” Reynolds declared, “we should create opportunities for more families to provide their children with the education choice that’s best for them. That’s exactly what this legislation does.”
Reynolds’s school-choice proposal easily cleared the Iowa Senate in a vote of 31 to 18, with only one Republican joining the Democrats in opposition, but soon encountered fierce opposition in the House. Although 60 of the 100 seats in the Iowa House were held by Republicans, whose state and national party platforms endorse school choice, the measure failed to garner majority support.
Reynolds, however, didn’t give up so easily.
In an effort to pressure state lawmakers into supporting her proposal, the governor held up the budget, even waiting until after the 110th day of the legislative session, beyond which legislators are no longer paid their per diem for meals and housing. Moreover, Iowa legislators are legally prohibited from receiving campaign contributions from lobbyists and political action committees while in session.
Nevertheless, legislators in the House held firm against it, citing concerns about the effects of school choice on traditional public schools.