Voters aggrieved by pandemic restrictions and a host of culture war issues are embracing school choice as a means to address their indignation. But that’s sparking a fight within the GOP.
Oklahoma’s Republican House Speaker Charles McCall, who hails from the rural southeastern county of Atoka, is the longest serving GOP member to hold the spot as top brass in the state’s history.
Over his five-year tenure, the fourth-generation family banker and fiscal conservative has secured cuts to personal and corporate income taxes, authored legislation restricting federal overreach into Oklahoma’s state affairs and oversaw an expansion of Republicans in the statehouse, from 72 members in his first term as speaker in 2016 to a record 82 members today.
His resume is one that any Oklahoma conservative could tout, and McCall has enjoyed enormous support at the ballot box, winning re-election in 2018 with 66% of the vote after dismissing a primary challenge in which he secured 65% of the votes and then running unopposed in 2020.
It may seem odd, then, that the Club for Growth, Washington’s cash-flush and powerful conservative group that often plays kingmaker in GOP circles, is running a five-figure ad buy against McCall, accusing the leader of “silencing parents.”
The attack is pegged to McCall’s opposition to a controversial bill that would allow any student to use state funds to attend private schools or be home-schooled. The legislation is backed by GOP Gov. Kevin Stitt, but McCall has argued that it would do little for rural communities like the ones he serves because there aren’t many – or any – other school options.
School choice has always been a major policy platform for Republicans, but the Club for Growth’s play on McCall’s seat is just the latest proof of how it’s becoming the ultimate purity test for conservatives in the run-up to the 2024 midterm elections. Voters angry about decisions to close schools and to require masks, resentful of discussions on critical race theory and the rights of transgender students are running toward the party with a new urgency, lured by its elevation of school choice as a means to address their indignation and take back control of school systems that they see as dominated by progressives and progressive ideology.
“Previously there were few repercussions to opposing school choice, but that has changed,” says David McIntosh, the president of Club for Growth PAC. “During the pandemic, more and more parents began paying attention to our public schools and they didn’t like what they saw.”
McIntosh is putting his money where his mouth is, peppering McCall’s district with $25,000 worth of TV commercials and mailers that say, say “Charles McCall just came out against school choice” and characterizing him as “supposedly a Republican.”
McCall’s name had been floated as a replacement for U.S. Rep. Markwayne Mullin, a Republican representing Oklahoma’s 2nd District who is running for the Senate seat being vacated by Jim Inhofe. Though he never officially announced a run for Congress, McCall reportedly backed off the idea in the last week.
“School choice is the new litmus test for Republicans,” McIntosh says. “Self-proclaimed conservatives who oppose school choice are nothing short of political whores, and we will find and support challengers to these RINOs” – an acronym for the pejorative “Republican in name only.”
The Club for Growth isn’t the only organization drawing the bright line.
When Sen. Rick Scott, Florida Republican and chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, unveiled his 11-point plan of conservative priorities should the GOP take control of the Senate, No. 1 on the list was the ability for parents to choose the school that best fits the needs of their children.
“Parents, not government, will choose the best schools for their kids,” the manifesto reads. “We will enact equal opportunity in education (school choice) so no child will be sent to a failing school simply because of their zip code.”
Iowa’s Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds made it a central theme when she delivered the GOP rebuttal to President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address earlier this week, saying conservatives are leading a “pro-parent, pro-family revolution,” and during last week’s Conservative Political Action Conference, the ultra-conservative wing of the GOP obsessed over the “threat” posed by public schools and pitched school choice as the solution to what they characterized as a morass of liberal brainwashing.
“Any parent who objects to the radical indoctrination in their children’s classrooms should be able to take their share of taxpayer dollars and spend it at the public, private, charter or religious school of their choice,” President Donald Trump said during his speech at the conference.
“We will never forget what they did to our children,” he said. “We will hold them accountable at the ballot box this November.”
Derrell Bradford is president of 50CAN, a national education advocacy organization that supports a diverse portfolio of policies, including the expansion of charter schools and private school choice policies. He says that while Republican support for school choice policies isn’t necessarily something new, its use as a remedy for perceived grievances from a host of culture war issues has led to groups like the Club for Growth strategically capitalizing on school choice as a way to drive voter turnout in a manner they hadn’t in recent election cycles.
“We saw these things at the start of the Trump administration and we’re seeing these things now in a different context.”
School choice is an umbrella term used to describe policies that allow parents options other than the school that their home address is zoned to – and that includes everything from public charter schools to programs like education savings accounts, education tax credits and school vouchers that provide private school tuition assistance for low-income students, students with disabilities or those zoned to low-performing schools.
The politics of school choice has always been messy, with Democrats generally in lockstep opposition to policies that support access to private schools – though that hasn’t always been the case in the past, especially for Democrats representing economically disadvantaged communities like Newark. For example, New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, before he was elected to the Senate, supported private school choice policies and worked alongside the American Federation for Children, the private school choice advocacy group that former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos formerly led.
The political lines are even less clear when it comes to Democratic support of charter schools, which experienced their largest expansion in history under the Obama administration but which the progressive wing of the party is increasingly using as its own purity test.
“Both parties have become increasingly about purity tests and the challenge is whether or not your issue is one of the issues on which people want to be proven pure on,” Bradford says.
The shifting dynamics have allowed for unusual strategic alliances between Democrats and Republicans – and Bradford has been living at the center of those alliances for decades. What he says he sees happening now is GOP strategists capitalizing on school choice as a way to drive voter turnout.
“Schools, writ large, issues about schools, are issues that right now are turning out voters,” he says. “They won the governorship in Virginia. They almost won in New Jersey.”
When political newcomer Glenn Youngkin defeated former Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe in Virginia’s gubernatorial race last year, it was widely seen as a referendum on how schools operated during the pandemic and the ongoing culture wars over things like critical race theory and rights of transgender students, which dovetailed with the pandemic during a moment in which many parents, frustrated by school closures, began demanding more accountability over schools.
In New Jersey, incumbent Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy, managed to fend off a challenge from Jack Ciattarelli by the slimmest of margins in a race that featured many of the same pressure points.
“What is less acknowledged is the fact that people are still pissed,” Bradford says. “They haven't had a chance to express it at the ballot box in a way that memorializes that pain or brings it out into the world. I think anyone who is acting like people still don't feel that way is out of their mind. People are pissed.”
Now, conservative groups like the Club for Growth are successfully channeling those frustrations into support for school choice policies, he says, and in doing so, driving up voter turnout.
“Parents right now, every day, are waking up and they have no idea what is going to happen,” Bradford says. “That is still with us. Is school going to be open or is school going to be closed. Am I getting a teacher or a substitute”
“And the one thing about choice,” he says, “is that it puts you in a position to solve these problems. Say I don’t like my school, or my school is not open and I want an open one. OK, well here is your money. Go do it. And that is incredibly powerful and necessary.”
That’s the exact narrative GOP strategists are attempting to use to energize conservatives and drive voters to the poll in the 2022 midterms. So far, it seems to be working.
During the Republican primary in Texas last week, Republican voters overwhelmingly backed Proposition 9, which states that “Texas parents and guardians should have the right to select schools, whether public or private, for their children, and the funding should follow the student.” Among the 1.8 million Republican votes cast on the issue, 88% voted to support the proposition, including in the state’s rural counties.
“Many politicians are starting to wake up to this new reality that parents are the key voting bloc in this election,” says Tommy Schultz, CEO of American Federation for Children.
Beyond the election results, at least 34 states have introduced legislation to expand charter schools or establish new private school choice programs, according to the federation. At this time last year, the count stood at 24 states, which then was an all-time high. And in 2021, 22 states passed legislation that generated $900 million in new funding to support school choice programs.
“Normally in election years we actually see a dip in the number of bills and legislation being introduced because lawmakers want to push uncontroversial things and want to get out on the trail as soon as possible,” Schultz says. “So I think it’s interesting that we’re actually increasing activity.”
Schultz, whose group is lobbying a bill in Georgia that would give families $6,000 to help cover private school tuition, recently employed the Club for Growth tactics by sending mailers across more than a dozen GOP-controlled districts that attempted to tie their Republican legislators to Stacy Abrams and other “radical left” politicians, including Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.
“The radical left want to cancel your right to choose your child’s school,” the mailer said.
The voucher bill has since been tabled, according to Republican House Speaker David Ralston, who said he was “livid” over the political attack.
“There’s always been this lukewarm, tepid support of saying, ‘Yes school choice is great,’ but then never feeling the consequence in the Republican Party of going against that or not pushing forward bold legislation,” Schultz says. “Now I think there’s been a total sea change.”
“Every politician should be aware and every voter should be aware of all the politicians that are going against them on this issue in this year of all years, which could be one with redistricting that sets the table for the next 10 years in these legislatures,” he says. “It’s disappointing that certain politicians, especially longtime entrenched incumbents, aren’t realizing this moment of opportunity they have to stand on the side of parents. And we’re letting our 1.3 million parent database know this.”
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