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Donald Trump wants school choice.  The GOP adopted school choice as part of their 2024 platform.  Most important of all, parents in Mississippi overwhelmingly support school choice.
 
So why do some Mississippi ‘conservatives’ oppose school choice?

Republicans have held the Governor’s mansion in this state since 2004.  They have held the Senate since 2011 and the House since 2012.  In all that time they have made remarkably little progress towards giving families control over their child’s share of education tax dollars.  Why?

Firstly, too many lawmakers in our state have been unwilling to pick a fight with local education bureaucrats.  Just as turkeys don’t vote for Thanksgiving, local education bureaucrats tend not to support the idea that families should have control of their tax dollars. 

Once families in our state are given control of between $7,000 – $9,000 per child each year, those families will be able to allocate the money to a school of their choice.  School superintendents, many of whom are paid more than the Governor, would lose the power to allocate that money the way they want. 

If we are to overcome these kind of vested interests, Mississippi needs leaders who will lead on school choice.

Instead, many officials in our state prefer to indulge the myth of the Mississippi education ‘miracle’ – the fantasy that we are seeing spectacular gains in education outcomes.

We aren’t.  One in four students in our state is routinely absent from the classroom.  Four in ten fourth graders cannot read properly at even basic level.  It is nonsense to pretend that there has been a dramatic improvement in education standards in our state. 

The Mississippi education ‘miracle’ is a narrative born of convenience, not fact.  It suits elected leaders who want us to believe that on their watch things are improving.  It flatters those in the public policy space to imagine that this or that reform they helped implement years ago, before today’s fourth graders were even born, is somehow helping young people learn.

What the myth of the Mississippi education ‘miracle’ actually does is reduce the chance that we make the changes our state needs.

To be fair, many politicians pay lip service to school choice in various speeches.  They like to cite their support for Charter Schools.

Although a law was passed a decade ago to allow Charter Schools, the administrative state in Jackson has done all it can to stifle the growth of Charter Schools.  The Charter Authorizer Board has rejected 80 percent of new school applications.  Fewer than 1 percent of schools in Mississippi are Charter Schools. 

The question needs to be asked why officials have done so little to change this?

 
The only significant progress made recently was the 2024 school funding reform which gives every student a personalized education budget that reflects their needs (and in which MCPP was heavily involved).  But what good is a personalized budget for students if they cannot spend it at a school of their choice?

Arkansas, Louisiana and Alabama have made more progress on school choice in the past 12 months than Mississippi has managed in the past 12 years.  Our neighbors did so because their state leaders were honest about the true state of education, and the need for change.

Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders of Arkansas made school choice her priority, not just a name check item in her speeches.  Louisiana managed to pass school choice legislation a few weeks ago despite only having had a Republican governor for a year.

Due to their honesty about the true scale of the task, all three neighboring states now have universal school choice programs that give mom and dad control over their child’s share to education funds. 

Parents in Mississippi will start to notice once they see families in neighboring states using school choice. 

Team Trump might start to notice those opposing school choice at a state level, too. 

Failing to make progress on school choice won’t just harm the careers of Mississippi students.  It could damage the careers of any ambitious local leaders wanting to find favor with a future Trump administration in Washington DC. 

Real conservatives support school choice. 

Mississippi is almost surrounded by states that have school choice.  Why don’t we? 

Last week Governor Jeff Landry of Louisiana signed into law the Gator Scholarship program.  From 2025, Louisiana families can receive state funds to pay for educational expenses to meet their child’s individual needs. 
 
Alabama passed similar legislation a few months ago.  Arkansas did something similar in 2023.
 
In Mississippi, nothing.  Why?
 
It is not as if Mississippi doesn’t have a conservative majority.  Conservatives have been in charge of the Mississippi House, Senate and Governor's mansion since 2012. 
 
Conservatives in Alabama and Arkansas have had control for about the same length of time as in our state.  Somehow, they seem to have done something with it.

Louisiana conservatives have achieved more school choice in 12 months than Mississippi conservatives have managed in 12 years.  Gov Landry only won back the Governor’s Mansion last year and he signed school choice into law last week. 

A major part of the problem is that many leaders in Mississippi refuse to see the need for reform.  They want to believe that education standards are improving and that there’s just not much need to change.
 
Here’s why they are wrong:

How many Mississippi politicians would be willing to send their kids to a school with those standards? 

Reform is difficult.  If you are a conservative, overhauling anything involving the public sector means stirring up a hornet’s nest of opposition.  It’s easier to buddy up to the absurdly misnamed “Parent’s Campaign” and defend the status quo.  I get all that.
 
Here’s why Mississippi conservatives absolutely have to use the majority they have to achieve school choice. 
 
Over the past thirty years, we have seen the ideological takeover of much of America by the far left.  If you had told me at the time of the Iraq war or even when Obama was in the White House that American students would be protesting in support of Hamas in 2024, I would not have believed you.  Today it happens frequently.
 
A generation ago, corporate America did not demand to know your preferred pronouns.  Today you can hardly apply for a job at a big firm without doing so.  Where do you think this ideological extremism came from?  It has been made possible by the influence of critical theory ideologues on our education system.

Of course, not every school is a hotbed of ‘woke’ intersectional ideology.  But the only way to stop the advance of ‘woke’ ideology in America is to give parents back control over their child’s education.

The lesson of the past 30 years is that unless conservative America has a plan to take back control of the education system, the left will win.  It is not enough to run for office as a conservative because you happen to hunt or have the right bumper stickers on your truck. 

Conservatives in office who do nothing to advance school choice are assisting, however unwittingly, the radical left in their capture of this country.

We cannot afford another decade of wasted opportunities to achieve school choice. 

Mississippi’s Department of Education was quick to trumpet signs of an improvement in education standards.  According to a gushing press release they put out, Mississippi has risen up the national education rankings from 48th to 30th over the past decade.
 
“Great!” you might think.  “It’s wonderful to see an improvement in education standards in Mississippi”.  But has there really been an improvement? 
 
The Department of Education pronouncement was based on a recently released report from the Annie E. Casey Foundation, which itself used data from the US Department of Education’s National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP). 

 
I took a closer look at the NAEP data behind what was being claimed, and it is clear that any improvements in Mississippi’s education ranking owe more to a decline in standards in other states, rather than to any substantive improvements in our own.

 
Between 2015 and 2022, Mississippi went from 46th for fourth grade reading to 18th. Progress, yes, but the average fourth grade NAEP score in reading only rose from 214 to 217.
 
In other words, the improvement in ranking in fourth grade reading scores since 2015 is almost entirely a reflection of the fact that standards fell in other states. 

The data also shows that while there has been an improvement in the percentage of fourth graders who are proficient in reading in Mississippi, the improvement happened before 2019.  It almost certainly reflects the enactment of a package of literacy laws in 2013, which shifted the way Mississippians teach reading towards phonics, rather than any change in policies since. 
 
There has not been progress in the past five years, and any change in our ranking reflects the fact that other states have just done worse than we have.
 

In 2022, Mississippi ranked 44th in eight grade NAEP math, compared to 46th in 2015.  Not only was there little relative improvement, the state’s average NAEP eighth grade math score actually fell from 271 in 2015 to 266 in 2022. 

It is profoundly misleading to present evidence of Mississippi’s relative improvement as evidence of any kind of absolute rise in standards. 
 
Here are some facts that the Department of Education could have included in their press release, but didn’t:

Instead of propaganda, the Department of Education could take a look at its own data which shows that almost one in four Mississippi students — 108,000 children — are chronically absent from school.
 
The rate of chronic absenteeism has in fact skyrocketed from 70,275 in 2016-17 to 108,310 in 2022-23.
 
“So what?” you might say.  “Of course, officials are going to present what they do in the most positive light”.
 
It matters deeply because until we have an honest conversation about the true state of education in our state, we aren’t going to see the changes Mississippi desperately needs. Mississippi is now surrounded on three sides by states that have embraced universal school choice.  In Arkansas, Alabama and Louisiana, the money will follow the child.  Families in those states will get control over their child’s share of state education funds.

Change only came about because there was a recognition of reality, and realization that reform was urgent and essential. 
The reason there has been so little progress towards school choice in our state is because too many policy makers believe our education system is doing better than it actually is.

A school choice revolution is sweeping America.  Mississippi is now sandwiched on either side by states that give families control over their child’s share of state education dollars.


In Arkansas and Alabama, the state government will pay between $7,000 - $9,000 into a dedicated Education Savings Account for each individual child.  Mom & dad will then be able to allocate that money to a school that best meets the needs of their child. 

Almost of dozen states have done something similar, but not Mississippi.  Why?

Despite having a solid Republican majority for over a decade, Mississippi has made ridiculously little progress towards school choice.

Right now our state has a total of nine Charter Schools, less than 0.8 percent of the total, and fewer than one might find in a single suburb of New Orleans.  Our school choice program for Special Needs students has hardly grown at all. 

According to one of the leading figures of the school choice movement, Corey DeAngelis, whose new book “The Parent Revolution” has just been released, COVID lockdowns were the great catalyst for change in other states. 

Before COVID, many parents meekly assumed that education meant sending their kids to whichever government school people in their zip code were assigned.  Along came the lockdowns, and millions of Americans got to see how many government schools are run in the interests of teacher unions and school board bureaucrats, rather than their kids. 

Teacher Unions were quick to call for schools to be closed, and fought to keep things that way.  They attacked suggestions schools reopen as “rooted in sexism, racism and misogyny”.  The vice president of the Chicago Teacher Union attacked proposals to return to in-person teaching - while on vacation in Puerto Rico!  

So why didn’t COVID lockdowns help shake things up in our state?  Lots of government schools in Mississippi were closed for extended periods.  How come that not led to more pressure for school choice in the Magnolia state? 

The biggest barrier to change in our state is that fact that not enough of our elected politicians see the need for change.  Many prefer to believe that standards in government schools are better than they are, and if things aren’t bad, they reason, why change? 

Advocates for school choice need to be prepared to present some uncomfortable facts about education standards in our state:

If you want to young Mississippians to get a better start in life than this, you need to support fully fledged school choice. 

School choice advocacy organizations, like MCPP, have often made the case for change in terms of social justice.  School choice, we like to say, would give every American child opportunities that today only rich families have.  This isn’t enough.

Nor is it enough to keep publishing white papers nobody reads and drafting legislation that never gets passed. 

We need to demonstrate that school choice is the only effective response to the ‘woke’ takeover of government-run classrooms by the ideological left.

Many government schools in America have clearly been promoting Critical Race Theory, an off shoot of Marxist academic theory.  Often this has been done innocuously, under the banner of promoting equity, diversity or inclusion. 
 
Sometimes the mask slips.  We know, for example, that here in Republican-run Mississippi, our own Department of Education has recommended that teachers use social studies resources calling for the abolition of Christopher Columbus Day and the payment of racial reparations.  
 

There are no shortage of vested interests - teacher unions, education bureaucrats, federal officials - determined to do everything they can to keep your kids captive in government-run classrooms.

To overcome that opposition, we must first address the anti-school choice politicians who indulge them. 
 
In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbot was a fully-throated champion of universal education savings accounts.  He threw his weight behind change, only to have a dozen or so “conservative” members of the legislature scupper the plan.
 
When Texas voters saw those anti-school choice “Republicans” vote to deny them school choice, they helped make these “Republican” lawmakers ex-lawmakers.  School choice, I suspect, will sail through the Texas legislature in the next session. 

Either you are a conservative and support school choice, or you aren’t. 

House Speaker, Jason White, addressed a packed lunch time meeting hosted by the Mississippi Center for Public Policy in Jackson.

Speaker White talked about what had been accomplished during his first session as House Speaker, and shared his priorities for the future.

Notably, under Speaker White’s leadership the House:

The Senate might have subsequently blocked the restoration of the ballot initiative and Certificate of Need reform, but both school funding reform and the SAFER Act have since passed into law.

“There was enormous interest in what Speaker White had to say” said Douglas Carswell, MCPP CEO.  “Rather than skating over subjects, the Speaker went into tremendous detail.”

“While praising public schools, Speaker White talked about the need to allow money to follow the student within the public school system.”

“He also talked about Certificate of Need laws and the need to review the impact of such laws of restricting access to health care in certain areas.”

“MCPP loves hosting conservatives, and there was real warmth towards Speaker White and what he had to say.”

Many university degrees produce a negative return on investment, according to a report out this week.  Data from the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity shows that the cost of many college degrees is not offset by increases in lifetime earnings.

This prompted me to take a look at some separate Mississippi-specific data from the State Workforce Investment Board on graduate earnings.  I discovered an extraordinary variance in the future earning potential of different degrees. 

Here are the earning averages for fifteen different degree types for Mississippi public universities:

So what?  Demand for engineers and insurance professionals is far greater than for actors and anthropologists.  Some degrees require more rigor than others.

But then I took a look at data on what happens to Mississippi high schoolers.  Approximately 6 in 10 of those that do complete public high school in Mississippi fail to either start any form of college education, or start but fail to complete any kind of college education.

Of those public high school graduates that do go into any kind of post-secondary education, about 1 in 3 drop out. 

Pointing out awkward facts about education in Mississippi can be a sensitive subject.  Much has been said about the relative improvements in Mississippi’s reading and writing scores in recent years.  To be fair, our state is no longer 49th out of 50, but 30-something-or-other.

Great, but the data also shows that only 31 percent of 4th graders were at or above proficiency in reading in 2022.  In other words, more than two in three Mississippi 4th graders were not proficient in reading.

The data also shows that a mere 32 percent of 4th graders were at or above math proficiency in 2022.  Forgive me if I don’t rush to celebrate a system that fails to produce proficiency for two thirds of public school 4th graders. 

In the worst school districts, a student has the odds of achieving proficiency overwhelmingly stacked against them.  But even in the best performing school districts – the ones they keep telling us are good – nearly 4 in 10 students are not proficient. 

These are the hard facts about public education in our state, and facts do not care about politicians’ feelings.  Neither should you if you want to improve the life chances of young people in our state.

Poor proficiency rates in primary education help explain why one in three public high school graduates are dropping out of college education later on.

The underperformance of our education system helps explain the low rate of workforce participation in our state.  Unless we acknowledge the underperformance of our education system and address it, we will see our state held back. 

If our private school system was producing these kind of outcomes, I suspect politicians would have acted yesterday.  Instead, the inconvenient facts are brushed under the carpet.

If we are to change Mississippi for the better, this has to change.  Policy makers must not keep going along to get along.  That is a recipe for yet more mediocrity. 

The time for taking false comfort in marginal improvements is over.  The implementation of phonics reading in primary schools might indeed have raised reading standards, but on its own, it is not the strategic change in education we need.

If we want an education system that prepares young people for the life they might live, we need action to ensure:

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

This has been a good week for education reform in Mississippi.  Our lawmakers might not agree on much, but last Saturday, they finally voted to replace the old education funding formula with the new Mississippi Student Funding Formula. 

Under the old funding formula, your tax dollars were spent in the interests of the education bureaucrats.  Local administrators were guaranteed the same amount of revenue even when they lost students or underperformed. 

Mississippi will now fund students, not a system.  Every student will now get a base amount of $6,695, on top of which they will then receive additional amounts based on their own individual circumstances.

This is a major win for Speaker Jason White and Chairman of the House Education Committee, Rob Roberson, as well as for Jansen Owen and Kent McCarty.  The bill would not have passed without a strong lead from the Governor, Tate Reeves, as well. 

Now that Mississippi will personalize the amount of funding each student gets, the money might just start to follow the student.

Will this happen?  Thanks to a ruling by the Mississippi Supreme Court on Thursday, one of the key objections against it happening has been removed.

Lawmakers opposed to school choice in our state often suggest that while they personally might agree with school choice, sadly, you can’t put government money into private schools. 

Thursday’s Supreme Court ruling shows this excuse to be bunkum.

During Covid, when large sums of federal money were provided to Mississippi, our state legislature, in turn, authorized a state agency to distribute some of those funds to private schools for infrastructure improvement.

This prompted an activist group, Parents for Public Schools, to challenge allocating public money to private schools as unconstitutional.  Had Parents for Public Schools been successful, we might have found ourselves in a situation now where public dollars could not follow a student into the private sector. 

Thursday’s ruling is a defeat not just for anti-school choice activists.  It means that those in the legislature looking for a ready-made excuse not to support school choice can no longer hide behind the claim that school choice is unconstitutional.

As our legal division, the Mississippi Justice Institute argued when we filed a ‘friend of the court’ brief, alongside the Institute for Justice, the Mississippi Constitution does not prevent school choice.

You might have noticed that despite there being a supposedly conservative majority in our state legislature, not a great deal of conservative legislation was passed this session.

A bill to tackle DEI (Diversity, Equity & Inclusion) dogma in our public universities was killed in committee.  Efforts to restore the Right of Initiative fizzled out, as did proposals to remove restrictive laws that intentionally limit the number of health care providers. 

Our lawmakers weren’t even prepared to pass a law that might have allowed Mississippians to buy wine online.  They only just managed to pass the SAFER Act to protect women’s rights at the eleventh hour. 

The forces of do-nothing intransigence are powerful.  But as the success of education funding reform shows, inertia can be overcome. 

When Speaker White played hardball and Governor Reeves gave a clear lead, the intransigent folded.  Maybe this is the way to achieve change? 

Mississippi desperately needs change.  Reformers need to be prepared to ruffle a few feathers in order to achieve it.

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

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.

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