Private school choice is sharply on the rise. According the Neal McCluskey of the Cato Institute, 1.6 million new school choice slots opened up in 2021. A 2022 Arizona law opened up about 1 million more.
McCloskey writes:
To put that in perspective, in the 2020–21 school year, 660,085 students were using private choice programs. Add those to potential new ones, and the total could increase to almost 3.3 million. And early this year, Iowa and Utah passed new universal programs, with similar legislation filed in several other states.
Perhaps the most important news on this front is that school choice isn’t just for Republicans any longer. The first evidence of this came in the Florida governor’s race of 2018 which Ron DeSantis’ won by around 30,000 votes. According to an analysis cited by McCluskey, DeSantis collected roughly 60,000 more votes from black women than would have been predicted by black men’s votes for DeSantis and black women’s votes for Republicans in other elections.
Why? Probably because of the large number of low‐income students in Florida who either participated in the Step Up for Students program, which grants tax‐credit funded scholarships to attend private schools, or were enrolled in the state’s charter schools.
Most Step Up students are minorities whose mothers are registered Democrats. It looks like, party affiliation notwithstanding, many of these “school‐choice moms” voted for DeSantis to protect their ability to choose where their child goes to school.
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