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Imagine if all the restaurants in your neighborhood were guaranteed the same revenue even if they managed to serve fewer customers? 

That’s pretty much how Mississippi has been funding public education for the past thirty years, under the so-called Mississippi Adequate Education Funding Formula Program, or MAEP system.

Under MAEP, taxpayer dollars are allocated in a way that suited education administrators and local bureaucrats.  Under the so-called ‘hold harmless’ provisions of the MAEP, they did not need to worry about loss of revenue, even if they lost students and underperformed. 

Last week, the Mississippi legislature finally voted to replace the antiquated MAEP system, with the new Mississippi Student Funding Formula.  HB 4130 passed unanimously in the House, and before sailing through the Senate on a 49-3 vote.

Under the new Student Funding Formula, Mississippi will fund actual students, not a self-serving system.  What does this mean in practice?

Every student will now be allocated a base amount of $6,695.  On top of that base amount, a weighted system will be used to allocate additional funds to each student depending on their individual circumstances.

MAEP treated every child as if they were an identical accounting unit on a bureaucratic spreadsheet.  As every parent knows, each child is different and has different needs.  The new Student Funding Formula recognizes this fact.  Children with special needs, or particularly gifted students, get more, as do those from lower income neighborhoods. 

The new formula has a specific weighting for career and technical education, too, which could be important for future workforce development. 

Also important is the fact that those crony ‘hold harmless’ deals, which reward mediocrity, will be terminated in 2027. 

Early on in this session, Speaker Jason White made it clear that he was 100 percent committed to getting this new funding formula passed.  Both he, and the Chairman of the House Education Committee, Rob Roberson, who authored the bill, deserve enormous credit for getting it though the legislature.  Kudos, too, to Jansen Owen and Kent McCarty.

Frankly, this bill would not have passed without a strong lead from the Governor, Tate Reeves, as well.  He made it clear that he was 100 percent behind this reform, and repeatedly talked about the need to fund students, not a system.

HB 4130 is really important for the future of education reform.  Perhaps, though, there is an even greater significance in its passage through the legislature.

What happened last week shows that Mississippi has leaders that are willing to spend political capital achieving the kind of change our state needs.  Do-nothing intransigence is not so powerful after all. 

When reformers in our state work together, they win. 

Ever wondered why there has been so little progress towards school choice in Mississippi? 

In a recent radio interview, Mississippi state Senator David Blount was asked by Paul Gallo if he supported school choice.  Senator Blount, who is Vice Chairman of the Senate Education Committee, made it clear he was against school choice. 

Blount criticised “taking taxpayer money and giving it to private schools”. 

Except it seems as if Senator Blount might have sent his own kids to private school. 

Corey DeAngelis, a school choice campaigner, picked up on Senator Blount’s comments, tweeting that Senator Blount sent his own kids to private school. 

If true, it means that Senator Blount’s position is to deny to other families in Hinds County, the district he represents, the school choice opportunities he had. 

It’s never right to criticise a politician over where they send their child to school.  We should support the right of every parent to seek the best for their kids.  In fact, it is great when parents, including state Senators, have those opportunities.  But those opportunities should be available for everyone.

Senator Blount makes it sound as though tax dollars belong to school boards.  Tax dollars belong to the taxpayer.  Tax dollars are there to provide children with an education. 

Why not allow Mississippi families to allocate their portion of education tax dollars to a school that best meets their needs?  This is what now happens in a growing number of US states.  Arkansas, Alabama, Georgia and – hopefully – Louisiana now all allow families to allocate their share to state education tax dollars to a school of their choice.

The idea that tax dollars must only be spent on public education providers is nonsense.  Public dollars get spent at private institutions when it comes to Head Start, Pell grants, and social security.  If we adopted Senator Blount’s logic, we would force low-income families to spend their food stamps at government grocery stores. 

Now are you starting to see why Mississippi has made so little progress towards school choice?

In a rock solidly conservative state, we somehow manage to end up with a Vice Chairman of the Senate Education Committee, David Blount, adamantly against school choice.  Why?  How does someone so opposed to the conservative position on education get appointed to that position? 

Seeing how Senator Blount responded to Corey, it strikes that perhaps those opposed to school choice just aren’t that accustomed to having to defend their opposition to change. They should get accustomed.  

Momentum for school choice in our state is only going to grow.  Mississippi will soon be surrounded by states that allow families control over their education tax dollars.  School choice is THE flagship policy that unites every wing of the conservative movement.

In this exchange between Senator Blount and Corey DeAngelis, we see the battle lines of the future being drawn.  In the coming months, it will take a very brave, or very foolish, lawmaker to oppose school choice if it turns out that they themselves sent their kids to private school.

Douglas Carswell is the President & CEO of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy.

This week, it emerged that the newly appointed head of America’s NPR (National   Public Radio) hates the US Constitution.  Speaking in 2021, she described the First Amendment which safeguards free speech as “a challenge.”

How could it be that the head of America’s public broadcasting service, established by an act of Congress, has such contempt for the US Constitution?

In her previous role running Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia, Katherine Maher rejected a “free and open internet” as a guiding principle.  Such principles are, in her words, a “white male Westernized construct,” according to reports.

Katherine Maher, reports say, support efforts to censor opinions that do not conform with her leftist world view.  She spoke of the truth as being “a distraction”.

Sadly, Katherine Maher is not a one off.  She is fairly typical of the sort of people now running many of America’s institutions, HR departments, government agencies and universities. 

Ms Maher’s social media posts might read like parody.  There is nothing funny about the way that people with Ms Maher’s outlook and opinions are subverting America’s Founding principles, and replacing them with a grim leftist dogma that risks destroying American and the West.

Conservatives need to push back, but how?

Until now, many conservatives have been better at identifying the problem than at tackling it.

To defeat DEI, we need to pass laws, reform institutions, appoint the right people and set the right incentives.  Most of all, however, we need to counter bad ideas with good ideas.

States can take a lead in the fight back.  Here in Mississippi, for example, there was a successful campaign two years ago for a bill to combat Critical Race Theory.  The new law goes some way to addressing the issue, but not far enough. 

If we are serious about restricting DEI dogma, we need to ensure that your tax dollars cannot be spent promoting this divisive ideology.

Florida’s Governor, Ron DeSantis, has shown that states can take the lead against DEI, signing an Executive Order, restricting the use of public money for DEI programs.  State leaders in Oklahoma, Utah and Texas have also done something similar.  We need to see similar action here in Mississippi.

Did you know that many public universities use your tax dollars to promote Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI) programs?

One of our leading public universities here in Mississippi has an “institutional diversity, equity, and inclusion plan” governing every aspect of campus life.  DEI shapes not only university admissions, administration and faculty hiring, but what young people are taught, with the development of an academic equity scorecard. 

Sunlight is the best disinfectant.  That is why conservatives need to expose how many of your tax dollars are being spent to DEI programs. 

Instead of more DEI hires, the University of Florida recently decided to eliminate all DEI employee positions.  Last month, the University of Texas at Austin fired dozens of employees who used to work in diversity, equity and inclusion programs.  Every state should aim for something similar.

The best way to defeat bad ideas is with good ideas.  Teaching young people the following truths about America will give them immunity against the ‘woke’ mind virus. 

This is a fight that we can win.  One day we will look back and think it absurd that someone with Katherine Maher’s outlook could be put in charge of producing public service broadcasting content.  But there is a great deal that we need to do right now in order to get there!

Douglas Carswell is the President & CEO of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy.

Mississippi is now entirely surrounded by states that have either passed, or are in the process of passing, laws that will give every family school choice.  A proposal to do something similar in our state never even made it to a full vote in the legislature.

How odd that there has been so little progress towards school choice in such a solidly conservative state.  School choice, surely, is the one policy that unites every wing of the conservative movement across America more than any other. 

School choice appeals as much to blue collar Trump conservatives as it does to the conservatives of the country clubs.  Donald Trump has spoken passionately in defense of universal school choice.  His Education Secretary, Betsy De Vos, has fought heroically – both in office and afterwards - for school choice. 

Universal school choice has universal appeal for conservatives – except it seems in Mississippi.

Even more odd, perhaps, is that it is not only school choice that has failed to advance in the Mississippi state legislature in 2024.  A whole raft of solid conservative measures have failed to advance during this session.

Two months ago, there were high hopes that the legislature give back to voters the right of initiative.  The measure died in the Senate. 

Most conservative, you might think, would oppose the DEI (Diversity, Equity & Inclusion) agenda that has run rampant across US university campuses.  A modest bill was put forward to prevent your tax dollars funding DEI programs at our public universities.  The measure was killed off in committee.

At the start of the session many leading lawmakers agreed that something needed to be done to deal with the mismanagement of Mississippi’s Public Employee’s Retirement System (PERS).  A modest proposal to change the way PERS was overseen was shot down in the Senate.

Most people accept that healthcare in Mississippi is not as good as it needs to be.  HB419, which could have removed some of the intentionally restrictive red tape that limits the number of healthcare providers able to treat patients.  The measure was killed off. 

At some point, I put it to you, the voters might start to notice.  It is not long term sustainable to have voters repeatedly vote conservative but to get so little conservative policy in return.

The US South is flourishing.  For decades now, there has been what you might call the Southern Success Story.  Texas, North Carolina and Florida have taken off.  Tennessee, Alabama and even Arkansas are seeing strong, sustained growth, too.  Why not Mississippi?

To be fair, we are starting to see signs of the kind of growth we need.  Our Governor has helped attract so much inward investment there is a danger we grow blasé about yet another billion dollar announcements.  It seems that there are now more people moving to Mississippi than leaving.  Every time I visit Hattiesburg, Laurel, Starkville, Oxford or the Coast, I see evidence of growth all around. 

Nor is there anything pre-ordained about Mississippi being ranked 50th out of 50 states.  It is a choice if we do not do more to emulate the kinds of reforms that have helped transform other southern states for the better.

If a conservative were to run for office today against tax cuts, they’d be unlikely to get very far.  It wasn’t always that way until people like Grover Norquist and Americans for Tax Reform helped make being a conservative synonymous with wanting lower taxes.

We need to do something similar when it comes to school choice.  We need to make it unthinkable to run as a conservative unless you favor universal education freedom accounts.

The good news is that this beginning to happen.  In Texas, for example, a few weeks ago, almost all anti-school choice conservatives lost out in their primary elections.  It would be impossible that anyone could run as a conservative in that state to be Governor or Lieutenant Governor without being unequivocally in favor of universal school choice. 

Why stop with school choice?  I doubt it will be possible to run as a conservative unless you oppose spending tax dollars on divisive DEI or favor giving citizens back their right of initiative either. 

America is now six months away from a Presidential election.  If current polls are correct and Donald Trump comes out ahead in the key battleground states, we could soon see a conservative in the White House, and a conservative-controlled Senate and House.

It is one thing to gain power.  It is quite another to know what to do with it.  Conservatives who try to run the federal government without a clear strategy in place soon end up being run by the federal government.  Why is this so?
 
The administrative state, with its vast alphabet soup of federal agencies, is fundamentally un-conservative.  Some might even say anti-conservative.
 
That is not to say that there is some sort of Deep State conspiracy against conservatives.  (Federal officials struggle to issue visas or approve new medicines on a timely basis. I highly doubt they are competent enough to engage in conspiracies). 

No, the problem is the mindset of those that work for the administrative state.  Or, what the French call “déformation professionnelle.” 
 
Those that work for big government bureaucracies tend to favor more government.  If your career is spent working for a federal agency, you will perhaps see federal fiat as the answer, whatever the question.
 
Many of those that work for the government are very smart.  Smart enough, in fact, to fall for the conceit that you can successfully engineer social and economic outcomes from above. 

Now that Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion has become the official ideology of America’s public institutions, federal officials likely find it easier to implement “diversity strategies” and talk about “microaggressions” than deliver competent government.

Being part of a national bureaucracy in Washington makes you more inclined to want to work closely with supranational bureaucracies such as the UN, WHO, or the EU.
 
What can an incoming conservative administration do about all this?  It is not enough to instruct the administrative state to govern differently.  We need a plan to re-wire the administrative state itself.  Here’s how:

1. Find the Right People.
 
Donald Trump’s decision to appoint Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court proved to be one of the most consequential things he has done.  As a result, the US Supreme Court now has a conservative majority for the first time in over half a century. 

Trump did not appoint the right people to the Supreme Court because he happened to know them.  It was the Federalist Society that identified and vetted suitable candidates for him.
 
I am delighted to be (a small) part of a project run by the Heritage Foundation and others to help identify the right people not so much for judicial appointments, but for positions across government.  Unless conservatives find the right people to install in the myriad of federal agencies, those that work in those agencies will nominate their own and little will change.

2. Shrink the Federal Machine. 
 
Argentina’s new President Milei almost halved the number of government departments in the week after he took office.  U.S. conservatives should do something similar. 

Do we really need a US Department of Education (created in 1980) or federal Housing department (1965)?  Surely education and housing are matters that can be left to each state? 
 
Why stop there?  There are currently 438 US federal agencies and sub-agencies.  Conservatives should go full Milei on them.

3. Control the spending.
 
What is the single biggest threat to the United States?  It’s not China or Islamism.  It is the ballooning national debt.  The US national debt is now growing by $1 trillion every 100 days.
 
Conservatives urgently need to bring federal spending under control. 

Remember that kerfuffle a few months back when Rep Kevin McCarty tried and failed to be elected House Speaker dozens of times?  One of the objections that the conservative refuseniks had was the fact that Congress did not seem to control federal spending.
 
The process by which Congress approves federal budgets is far too convoluted.  One committee approves agriculture budgets, another defense, and so on.  This makes it easier for various vested interests to ensure that their preferred spending items get approved.
 
We need to return to the principle that there is some form of unified Congressional budgetary oversight.  This is the only chance of restoring Congressional control over the administrative state’s spending.

4. Return authority to the states.
 
The 10th Amendment clearly states that “powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
 
Since the days of Woodrow Wilson, there has been a creeping coup that has seen federal agencies, abetted by the Supreme Court, usurp the primacy of the states. Until now.

In a little noticed ruling in 2022, in West Virginia v. the Environmental Protection Agency, the Supreme Court essentially said that a federal agency could not presume to make policy the way the EPA was trying to.  The ruling puts a question mark over the presumption that Congress has delegated major political and economic questions to executive agencies.
 
Conservatives need to build on this, and other similar rulings, to push back against decades of self-aggrandizement by federal agencies. 

How often do conservative voters vote for conservative leaders, but end up with more soft-left statism?  I would argue that this has been a constant feature of U.S. politics for over half a century, with a brief break from business as usual when Ronald Reagan was in the White House for 8 years in the 1980s.
 
Unless we are to see more of the same, we need to ensure that if and when conservatives gain control of the federal government, they use their one chance to achieve fundamental, strategic change to the way America is run. There may never be another.
 
Our aim must not be just to oust liberals, or even to install a particular leader.  Our goal should be to renew America by overturning the incremental coup that has created in Washington DC an administrative state that our Founders never envisioned and never sanctioned.

Beware of politicians who want to ban things.

What would you most like to see Mississippi’s elected lawmakers do during the current legislative session? 

Action to eliminate the reams of red tape holding our state back, maybe?  Further tax cuts, perhaps?  With so many other southern states moving ahead with school choice, you might wish that our lawmakers would do something similar.

I doubt that a bill to ban “squatted” trucks is your top priority. Yet, that is precisely what one bill in our state legislature aims to do. 

I’m not about to invest a lot of effort into opposing this bill, but I do think we should be wary of politicians in the business of banning things. 

Typically, politicians resort to banning things when they don’t have any other ideas.  The impulse to ban things is driven by their search for validation and purpose. 


Those in favor of a ban on “squatted” trucks are quick to tell us that action is urgent given how dangerous these trucks are.  I can think of a lot of things that could be deemed dangerous. 
 
Do conservatives really want to get into the business of banning things because they are dangerous?  Once you start, where do you stop?  If trucks are to be banned for being dangerous, wait ‘til you hear what progressives have to say about guns.
 
Under this proposed law, anyone caught driving a vehicle whose front ends are raised more than four inches above the height of the rear fender faces a $100 fine.  Will police officers pull people over to measure their fenders?  Should the guy with a truck raised a mere 3 inches expect to get pulled over every time?  

As the parent of a teenager, I’ve discovered how adding a young person to your insurance policy can make your premiums soar.  This is because the insurance system is good at assessing risk.  Higher risk = higher premiums. 
 
If squatted trucks really were the danger that the detractors claim, surely it would be reflected in raised insurance premiums to the point where they became prohibitively expensive.
 
In a free society, there must be an overwhelmingly good reason to use the state’s monopoly of force to restrict something.  It is not enough to ban something because we disapprove of it.  Or. as I fear, disapprove of the people that drive “squatted” trucks.  

Once politicians form the habit of seeking out things to ban for the benefit of the rest of us, they won’t stop.  Next will come a ban on certain types of vapes.  Or, as in California, certain food additives and Skittles.  If they can ban one type of truck, why not another?
 
If you want to see where relentless banning leads, take a look at my own native Britain.  Despite having had notionally conservative governments, politicians across the pond have relentlessly banned things from certain breeds of dog to plastic drinking straws.  From the ability to use email lists for marketing to self-defense pepper spray.  From disposable cutlery and gas water heaters to the internal combustion engine (from 2035).

On their own, none of these restrictions have proved to be a catastrophe (although the ban on internal combustion cars, once it comes into force, may yet prove to be).  Collectively, however, the blizzard of bans has been devastating by infantilizing British society.  
 
Treated like children, more and more people behave like children.  Denied responsibility, society grows irresponsible.  Britain today feels utterly demoralized as a consequence.  This is what happens when you put politicians in charge of deciding what’s best for everyone else.
 
Banning tilted trucks won’t be the end of the world for Mississippi.  It will be the end of a little bit more liberty.

The impulse to ban things, I believe, comes from what H.L. Mencken called “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be having a good time.”  Let’s leave Mississippi truck drivers alone.

Douglas Carswell is the President & CEO of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy.

The University of Florida just fired all their DEI (Diversity, Equity & Inclusion) staff.  The University closed the office of the Chief Diversity Officer, and terminated DEI-focused contracts. 
 
Florida is not alone in taking decisive action against the ‘woke’ mind virus that has been running rampant on US college campuses for years.  In Alabama, a bill (SB 129) to ban DEI programs in all state institutions, including colleges, was recently voted through the state legislature.  The University of Arkansas has decided to eliminate its diversity, equity and inclusion division. 
 
Here in Mississippi, meanwhile, crickets…...  No executive orders.  No legislation.   Why? 
 
Senator Angela Hill presented a bill to eliminate DEI programs in any state-funded institution (SB2402).  So, too, did Representative Becky Currie in the House (HB127).  Yet both bills died in committee.

Saying that the bills “died in committee” makes it sound like they were victims of some freak accident.  Neither bill, of course, was struck by lightning or afflicted by some random misfortune.  The bills failed to come out of committee because those that chaired the relevant committees to which each bill had been referred decided not to allow the bills to proceed. 

In the Senate, the two committees in question were Accountability, Efficiency & Transparency, and Universities, chaired by Sen David Parker and Sen Nicole Boyd respectively.  I doubt that Parker or Boyd would have killed the anti DEI bill without approval from Senate leader, Delbert Hosemann. 

In the House, the committee out of which the bill failed to emerge is chaired by Rep Donnie Scoggin. 

“But is an anti DEI bill actually necessary?”, I hear you ask.  “Is there really that much DEI here in Mississippi in the first place?”   
  
If any member of the legislature spent more than a couple of minutes browsing the University of Mississippi’s website, they would see that it is an institution run by people 100 percent committed to DEI.  Do those lawmakers that killed the anti DEI bill approve? 
 
DEI dogma not only influences the way Ole Miss is run.  DEI seeks to shape what young people are taught there.  Ole Miss’s “Equity in Action” plans, for example, increasingly touch upon almost every aspect of university life.  

Concealed behind innocuous jargon in the university’s “Pathways to Equity” strategic plan, Ole Miss has an active DEI program that impacts everything from teaching practices, course content and student evaluation.  The way I read it, Ole Miss even seems to endorse the hiring of some faculty on the basis of race, rather than merit. 
 
Without any action from the state Senate or the IHL, this is all being done on your tax dollar.  We know this thanks to Shad White, our State Auditor. 
 
Shad White is one of the few leaders to actually show leadership on this issue, and he has tried to calculate how much all this is costing Mississippi taxpayers.
 
White’s recent report showed that Mississippi universities spent over $23 million on DEI from July 2019 to June 2023.  Nearly $11 million of state taxpayer funds went to DEI programs, most of which was spent on salaries for DEI employees.  Without any action from our state leaders, DEI spending soared almost 50 percent since 2019.  

In case anyone needs reminding why DEI needs to be rooted out of our public universities, here’s a quick reminder.
 
The United States is founded on the revolutionary idea that all Americans are created equal.  America might have produced some laws and leaders that failed to live up to that high standard.  But as a principle, it has never been bettered.
 
DEI overturns America’s founding principle, promoting instead the idea that each of us is defined by our immutable characteristics.  This is not just profoundly un-American.  DEI ideology takes us back to a pre-modern, pre-Enlightenment idea that we are defined by what we are born.  It is a profoundly anti-Western ideology.  

It is not a coincidence that the ‘woke’ mobs that appeared on Ivy League college campuses after the Hamas terror attacks last October seemed to side with America’s enemies.  DEI proponents are hostile to America and the West.
 
DEI demoralizes Americans.  It teaches the young to believe that their country is always in the wrong.  It demands that history be rewritten to press the past into a narrative of exploitation. 
 
How regrettable that conservative leaders in this conservative state should do so little about it while leaders in states all around us take action.

Did you know that Mississippi spends a higher share of our overall wealth on healthcare than almost any other state in America?  Yet despite this, we still have some of the worst health outcomes in the country.

Source:  AFP Mississippi report on Certificate of Need, James Bailey

Some believe that the answer is to spend an even larger amount by expanding Medicaid.  Mississippi’s House of Representatives has just voted to do precisely that.

The debate over Medicaid expansion now appears to hinge on whether under the expansion scheme there will be any realistic work requirement.  Critics fear that without a robust requirement for recipients of free health care to be in work, Medicaid expansion is little more than a something-for-nothing system of soft socialism.

It remains to be seen if the Senate will support the House’s bill – and if it will do so by a large enough margin to overturn any future gubernatorial veto. 

There is, however, another proposal that has attracted far less attention that really would improve healthcare in our state.

Healthcare in Mississippi is deliberately restricted by a set of laws known as Certificate of Need, or CON, laws.  These laws require anyone wanting to expand existing services or offer new services to apply for a Certificate of Need permit.  By not issuing permits to new operators, competitors are kept out of the market - which suits the existing providers. 

Our recent report on Certificate of Need reform shows how harmful this red tape can be.  If we removed this protectionist red tape, we would get far more bang for our buck, however much the legislature decided to spend on Medicaid.

Florida, Tennessee and both North & South Carolina have all recently removed their CON laws – and they each have significantly better healthcare as a consequence.

Now there is a chance that Mississippi might do something similar.  Rep Zuber’s excellent bill (HB 419) opens the possibility that some CON rules could be repealed. 

Of course, now that the bill is before the House, every sort of parasitic vested interest is frantically lobbying to kill the bill.

Why?  CON confers on existing providers a means to legally exclude the competition. 

Imagine in the search engine Yahoo! had been able to use CON laws to shut down Google?  Or if Friends Reunited could have used CON laws to prevent Facebook?  Or if the folk that made DVDs could have used CON to prevent Netflix from taking off?  CON laws have been doing precisely this to healthcare in our state. 

CON laws in Mississippi are one of the last vestiges of the good ole boy system that has held Mississippi back.

Conservatives have a massive majority in the Mississippi state legislature.  Are they about to deliver real conservative policy?  Or will we see the implementation of a soft-left, progressive-but-slower agenda to expand government?

When it comes to education, a blizzard of bills has just appeared which suggest that we might actually see something authentically conservative soon. 

The Mississippi Student Freedom bill (HB 1449) is the most exciting piece of legislation I have seen in the House in three years. 

It would give families the right to have their child’s share of state education tax dollars paid into their child’s own Magnolia Scholarship Account.  Each family would then be free to allocate that money to meet their child’s needs.

Think how transformative it would be if every mom and dad were allocated $8,000 - $10,000 tax dollars to spend on their child’s education, be it public, private, charter school or home school? 

The Mississippi Student Freedom bill would establish a system of school choice similar to what Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders has implemented over in Arkansas.   Eligibility would be phased in over time, but the end goal would be to allow universal school choice. 

“But what if lots of students from failing school districts tried to move to successful school districts?” some will ask.

The bill anticipates precisely this concern.  School districts will not be compelled to take kids from out of area if schools in those districts are already full. 

Unsurprisingly, various vested interests that currently get to spend your education tax dollars are bitterly opposed to allowing families to have control.  No prizes for guessing why.  Turkeys might not vote for Christmas, but that does not stop Christmas from happening. 

A second bill in the House, the Opportunity Scholarships bill (HB 1452) proposes a similar system of school choice, but one that would only be available for those in failing school districts.  Good, if not quite excellent. 

Then there is the INSPIRE bill (HB 1453), which offers a complete overhaul of our antiquated school funding system.  

Mississippi's current school funding formula, the MAEP, was created in 1997.  MAEP stands for Mississippi Adequate Education Program Funding, but it has proved to be anything but adequate.

The MAEP funding system is Soviet in its complexity.  Over the past quarter century, it has proved pretty useless at getting your tax dollars where they are supposed to go: the classroom.  We ought instead to have a formula that funds students, not a system. 

This is precisely what the INSPIRE bill would do.  Every child in Mississippi would get an amount weighted to reflect their own needs. 

For years, policy makers have talked (and talked) about change.  Now, there is a plan to make it happen.

What is so significant about all these bills is that they have been sponsored by the House’s new education committee chairman, Rep. Rob Roberson.  He has made a remarkable start in the role. 


It is clear, too, that Speaker Jason White is also a driving force behind these excellent reforms.  If he is successful, Mr. White will transform our state’s education system for the better.  Every family in the state should rally behind him.  Indeed, every Mississippian who wants to see our state doing better should be with him 100%. 

Mississippi is now surrounded on every side by school choice states that have either implemented or are implementing these kinds of changes.  Here is our chance to be a leader, not a laggard. 

Mississippi voters have elected an overwhelmingly conservative legislature.  It ought to be possible for them to make these mainstream conservative policies happen.

Douglas Carswell is the President & CEO of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy.

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