When it comes to school choice, Minnesotans are increasingly hopping on the bandwagon of support. According to EdChoice, 63% of Minnesotans and 69% of Minnesotan school parents support school vouchers, an option which allows parents to take tax dollars to pay for tuition at the school of their choice.
Those numbers of support rise when Minnesotans are asked about charter schools, a form of public schooling not subjected to many of the regulations with which public schools must deal. According to EdChoice, 68% of all Minnesotans support charter schools, while 72% of Minnesotan school parents support them.
But the form of school choices with the largest support in Minnesota is Education Savings Accounts (ESA). As the chart below explains, ESAs are a “government-authorized savings account” which parents can use to pay for any number of school-related items. Almost three-quarters of Minnesotans support ESAs, while a whopping 76% of Minnesotan school parents support this form of school choice.
So if so many parents want school choice, why isn’t the State of Minnesota giving them the opportunity to have it?
Perhaps it’s because it’s all about control. Way back in Minnesota’s early years of statehood, a man named Zach Montgomery delivered an address to a convention committee on education in California. In that speech, he said something quite revealing:
One of the most direful effects of taking from the parents and transferring to the general public the power to control the child’s education, is the weakening, not to say the entire destruction, of that filial love, respect, honor, and obedience which the child owes to its father and mother, along with that, the sapping of the very foundations of the family government; and, finally, the ruin of society itself.
In other words, school choice and parental control of education strengthens families, remedies discipline problems, and restores society, while government control of education does the opposite.
Perhaps that’s why Minnesota’s elected leaders seem so slow to enact meaningful school choice in the state. Doing so would mean ceding their control back to the parents to whom it rightfully belongs.
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