The new Education Freedom Scholarships proposed Thursday by Education Secretary Betsy DeVos are an absolutely wonderful idea.
I know, because I’ve seen them work at a very personal level here in Alabama.
The bill creating the scholarships will be introduced in the House by my local U.S. House member, Republican Bradley Byrne, and in the Senate by Republican Ted Cruz of Texas. As DeVos, Cruz, and Byrne explained in a USA Today column announcing their initiative, “the program would offer a dollar-for-dollar federal income tax credit for contributions to [state-based] nonprofit organizations that provide scholarships for individual elementary and secondary school students. … This program won’t take a single cent from local public school teachers or public school students. In fact, some states may choose to use the scholarships to enhance and improve already existing public school options.”
The proposal is based on several, almost-identical state-based programs, including one here in Alabama that Byrne closely has been able to observe. The Alabama Accountability Act has been both effective and widely popular, with its recipients often outspokenly grateful.
Please forgive the first-person testimony (and the necessary admission of bias), but I’ve served for years on a board of a little school whose students have benefited immeasurably from the Alabama program.
Prichard Prep School is a small private school funded overwhelmingly by outside contributions. (Parents or grandparents do chip in a small portion of tuition so they will have “skin in the game.”) It sits in the middle of an impoverished community, in a municipality that has been in and out of bankruptcy several times in the past 15 years. Its student body is 99 percent African American, and (last I checked) about 65 percent federal “school lunch eligible.” Yet, its students consistently test about a year-and-a-half above grade level.
A remarkable faculty, an atmosphere of love and discipline, and high expectations all join to provide a school setting where these students can learn, thrive, and achieve. The school runs from pre-K through fifth grade; most of its graduates go on to other private schools (on scholarships) or public magnet schools, and they keep performing well once there.
Prichard Prep, using grants and donations, predated the Alabama Opportunity Scholarships. But the scholarship program has allowed it to serve nearly twice as many students as before, from less than 100 six years ago to about 170 now. And the great thing is that the Mobile County Public School System sees Prichard Prep as an ally, not a competitor, in educating children. The cooperative relationship between Prichard Prep and the public system is real and warm and beneficial to both.
Throughout Alabama, thousands of individual students are likewise benefiting from the state’s opportunity scholarships. This sort of success story (a success of faculty and families) is exactly the model for the national program DeVos, Byrne, and Cruz are proposing.
When families are given choices for their children’s educations, they invest in it emotionally. When schools compete for extra education dollars, they focus better and produce higher levels of achievement. When schools are free to innovate, their students flourish.
Those are the principles behind the new federal initiative. Alabama’s successes with its relatively small program should be duplicable elsewhere. Prichard Prep already benefits from a scholarship program. (So, as far as I understand, the new law won’t actually help the school, on whose board I sit.) If DeVos, Byrne, and Cruz have their way, then across the nation, hundreds of other Prichard Preps may bloom.
Correction: A previous version of this piece misstated the name of the Alabama law that set up grant-making organizations. It is the Alabama Accountability Act, not the Alabama Opportunity Scholarship Fund (which is only one of the grant-making organizations set up by the law).
