It this the year of school choice or the decade of school choice? The answer is yes to both. Look at the statewide school choice plans that have been recently enacted.
Now we can add Indiana to the list.
The Wall Street Journal has a celebratory editorial about the big news from the Hoosier State.
…the latest good news comes from Indiana. Hoosier lawmakers passed the state budget last week, and it expands the school voucher program so nearly all students will be eligible. …The new law raises the income cap to 400% of the free- and reduced-price lunch income level, which is now about $220,000 for a family of four. The bill also removes the other criteria for eligibility so that any family under the income limit can apply. …“We would say it’s universal,” Betsy Wiley of the Institute for Quality Education told the Indiana Capital Chronicle. Early estimates suggest only 3.5% of families with school-age children in Indiana would not be eligible for the program under the new income limit… The principle at work here is that taxpayer education money for grades K-12 should follow the child, rather than school districts.
The new law doesn’t provide school choice to every family, but I’ll take a victory that provides choice to more than 96 percent of children.
This is great news for education.
What’s especially amusing is that this progress almost certainly would not have occurred if it was not for teacher unions. They got too arrogant and their leftist agenda has now backfired.
P.S. I can’t wait to see what this map looks like next year.
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Image credit: Gage Skidmore | CC BY-SA 2.0.
