Democrats Declare War on School Choice

Stephen Moore on Jun 23, 2026

Why are Democrats and their teachers union masters trying to shoot down parental choice in education even when we now have so many examples of these programs working?

Choice and competition are two of the hallmarks of the American economy. When stores compete, customers win. Turns out this is also true for schools. That's an inviolable law of economics. A corollary is that monopolies tend to put customers last.

This is all happening at a time when public monopoly schools are showing flat or negative performance despite more funding than ever before.

This is one reason why so many states are turning to the new model of school choice, with public funds going to scholarships and charter schools, and tax incentives for charitable donations to private and Catholic schools.

About 23 mostly red states are experimenting with such programs, and so far the results in test scores and parental satisfaction are mostly positive.

Today about 1.5 million kids are taking advantage of these programs. In Florida, the biggest program of all, with more than 1 million kids enrolled in these school choice voucher programs, the kids are racking up better test scores than their peers in the public schools. This is incentivizing public schools to up THEIR game.

That's the idea. But Democrats, acting as if school choice is the bubonic plague, are trying to shoot it down across the country.

No one has been more of a disappointment than Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, whose 2027 budget would slash $500 million from charter schools and gut education tax credits.

This could put 30,000 kids at risk of losing their scholarships. Already there are about 70,000 kids who want to go to a private school, but the scholarship money isn't available because of program caps. Once again, a prominent Democrat places the unions ahead of the kids.

Then there is Arizona: Dems and teachers unions have put an initiative on the November ballot to roll back one of the nation's largest school voucher programs, which has exploded to more than 100,000 students. Parents can get $7,000 per student to use for private and charter school tuition and homeschooling.

Even worse is the Florida Education Association, which has filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the state's school choice and charter school programs, which provide education for 1.4 million kids. The Florida Constitution guarantees a "uniform" system of free public schools but does not prohibit the legislature from expanding educational options beyond the traditional public school model.

In Rhode Island, Democratic Gov. Dan McKee wants to cap funding for popular charter schools even as the school budgets expand.

Why the barriers to these educational opportunities?

Let me be loud and clear on this point: The Dems and their union puppet masters don't want to get rid of these programs because they are failing the kids. They want to abolish them because they are getting better results than the public schools. Florida's public charter sector maintains an aggregate grade of "A," outperforming traditional public school counterparts in 55 of 77 metrics.

Maybe the unions define a "uniform education system" as one that is uniformly bad.

What is sad is that even with a robust school choice program, probably two of three kids will still be enrolled in public schools for the foreseeable future. But with alternatives, school boards, teachers and principals will have to prove their value to the customers -- the parents.

Even worse is that kids already attending charter, Catholic or special ed schools may have to return to the very classrooms that didn't work for them in the first place.

It used to be that unions could claim to parents that alternative schools would be WORSE for their children. But that's proven not to be the case for these new private choice schools. I know firsthand that in private schools, kids are challenged, disciplined and taught to learn that failure is not an option. In public school, you get kicked into the next grade through social promotion, and the learning deficits are allowed to linger.

The Trump tax cuts will allow potentially millions of disadvantaged kids to get scholarships from tax filers who put money in the schools. It costs the states NOTHING to allow kids into the program. Amazingly, more than half the states with Democratic governors are passing up the FREE money to the parents in their states.

That's just plain dumb. Maybe these politicians and school administrators have had too much social promotion.

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.Stephen Moore is a former Trump senior economic adviser and the cofounder of Unleash Prosperity, which advocates for education freedom for all children.