Will Both Presidential Candidates Support School Choice?

​We recently reported on a poll from RealClear Opinion Research showing overwhelming bipartisan support for giving families the right to choose their schools. Some 77% of Democratic voters and 86% of Republican voters say they support school choice. Nearly 80% of Black Americans say the same.
 
This is happening because Americans see school choice as a natural extension of the guarantees of the First Amendment. School choice encourages true educational pluralism and eliminates top-down imposition of ideologies – which vary among the states – by monolithic, public-school systems. Choice allows all parents, religious or nonreligious, conservative or liberal, to find schools that best fit the values they want to pass on to their children. Competition for students is also demonstrated to improve educational outcomes, not just for private schools, but for public ones as well.
 
The Educational Choice for Children Act, which would provide tax credits for charitable donations to expand choices in quality education, recently picked up the support of House Speaker Mike Johnson. At least one of the two presidential candidates also supports school choice. Former President Donald Trump, echoing Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC), recently called school choice a “civil rights issue.” Lexi Lonas Cochran in The Hill reports that Trump “has hinted at a universal school choice policy and has adopted language used by the movement in states that have offered education savings accounts …”
 
Trump has also said: “We want federal education dollars to follow the student, rather than propping up a bloated and radical bureaucracy in Washington, D.C.”
 
As the Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, grapples for a way to capture the center, she might do well to see a late campaign opportunity here. In Illinois and Pennsylvania, Democratic governors have flirted with school choice vouchers, only to retreat after being threatened with political extinction by the most powerful lobby in the Democratic Party – the public teachers unions. This leaves many Democrats, especially Black voters in urban areas disgusted by the poor quality of public schools, increasingly disaffected by politicians who are more responsive to a special interests than to their constituents. This is the wedge that Donald Trump is driving deep into the Democratic polity.
 
If Vice President Harris were to at least support tax credits for private schools, she would close that wedge and prove to American voters that she is more of a centrist who can be trusted to be president. If Harris were to take that opportunity, then we would have two pro-school choice candidates for president. Given the growing support for school choice across the board, it is likely inevitable that national leaders in both parties will support school choice, in this election or the next.