Beech Tree News Network

In a version of “go big or go home,” the West Virginia legislature last year withstood teachers’ protests and union-forced strikes to pass the nation’s most inclusive Education Savings Accounts (ESA) policy after not being able to get through a smaller ESA program just two years earlier.

Enough Mountain State voters disapproved of the sharp-elbow tactics displayed by the teachers’ unions and their far-left allies during the past couple of years to elect lawmakers who support school choice policy.

And support it they did, passing the Hope Scholarship, an ESA program which will provide $4,600 – 100% of the state’s portion of education dollars – to all recipients in lieu of public schooling.

While the ESA dollars are usable for homeschool curriculum or other educational expenses, the fact that 90% of all West Virginia children are eligible to use those dollars for private school tuition is the program’s real game-changer.

Much of this was accomplished by some attrition and a lot of sheer grit.

As school choice supporters’ commitment and momentum increased, union opposition waned – especially remarkable given the riotous education showdowns of recent years.

But then the voters had made it clear: they support parents having educational opportunities for their children.

That should be good news for the Bluegrass State.

Kentucky’s already endured raucous rallies and heated rhetoric at the capitol.

Now, it’s the school choice movement that should have the upper hand.

Could the current legislative session be the one where Kentucky finally gets a funding mechanism for charter schools and maybe even improvements in legislation so watered-down and incomplete when it passed in 2017 that it put the commonwealth in the embarrassing position of being the only state with a charter school law but no charters?

Still, whether proposed school choice policies are big or small, bold or tentative, opponents’ rhetoric is always over the top.

For example, charter school critics mischaracterize charters as being private schools for rich people that charge tuition and cherry-pick the best students from traditional public schools.

But charter schools are publicly funded, cannot legally charge tuition and must take students – many of whom are minorities from low-income homes – on a first-come first-served basis.

House Bill 563, which passed during last year’s legislative session, creates a small school choice program with a miniscule $25 million cap while allowing students in only nine counties to use Education Opportunity Accounts to cover the cost of tuition at private schools.

Despite the limits in HB 563, opponents’ rhetoric was no different than if the legislation had been as broad as West Virginia’s.

A recent report by EdChoice, the national group based in Indianapolis, calls out opponents’ rhetoric nationwide, especially their excessiveness in relation to the size of school choice programs.

For example, it noted Lexington Democratic Sen. Reginald Thomas’ claim portraying school choice as placing “public education with its neck inside a guillotine, getting ready to have his head cut off.”

It’s obvious that he and his anti-school-choice allies don’t consider individual programs on their particular size or merit.

Rather, they become hugely alarmist about any and all educational liberty for parents.

As EdChoice notes, lawmakers “will sometimes propose more limited legislation in the hopes of reducing the rhetorical temperature of attacks on the proposal.”

However, there’s no evidence that offering smaller-scope programs reduces the verbal heat.

“Modest proposals are viewed as merely the proverbial ‘camel’s nose under the tent,’ that must be met with the same forceful opposition as the whole camel,” the EdChoice report observes.

Perhaps Kentucky lawmakers should flip their strategy, going big instead of small.

After all, opponents can’t get any louder while kids – especially those most at risk – continue to be denied better education alternatives.

Jim Waters is president and CEO of the Bluegrass Institute for Public Policy Solutions, Kentucky’s free-market think tank. Read previous columns at www.bipps.org. He can be reached at [email protected] and @bipps on Twitter.