Late last week, Alabama Republican Gov. Kay Ivey signed legislation making universal school choice a law.
Going forward, families in Alabama will have access to Education Savings Accounts (ESAs) worth $7,000 per student, beginning with lower-income students. In 2027-28, the program will be open to everyone, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The bill went through the state House (69-34) and the Senate (23-9) (via WSJ):
ESA money can be used for private-school tuition or other education expenses, and homeschoolers will be eligible for $2,000. The law funds the system initially at $100 million a year, enough to serve a multiple of the roughly 3,000 students in Alabama’s current tax-credit scholarship program.
The tax-credit scholarships are open only to families making up to 250% of the federal poverty level. But everybody will be eligible for an ESA, which widens the opportunity for students, as well as the political constituency to support it and to add funding if needed over time.
“While our state has a strong public education system, all Alabama families will soon have the right to choose their children’s schools,” Ivey reportedly said on Wednesday.
"Our plan will not only work for Alabama families – it will work for the state and will be effective and sustainable for generations to come," Ivey added. "With the CHOOSE Act, Alabama will now be a leader when it comes to school choice."
Predictably, the Alabama Education Association teachers union was against the legislation, WSJ noted.
Alabama is following in the footsteps of states like Florida and Iowa, where Republican governors signed off on school choice expansion.
In response, American Federation of Teachers (AFT) President Randi Weingarten said that school choice “undermines democracy.”
“[School choice proponents] have not one thing that they offer as a solution other than privatizing or voucherizing schools, which is about undermining democracy and undermining civil discourse and undermining pluralism, because 90 percent of our kids goes to public schools still. They just divided. Divided, divide, divide, divide,” Weingarten claimed.
As Townhall covered, many Democrats are against school choice initiatives, though some of them have benefited from it themselves.