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Today the Louisiana legislature passed the LA GATOR program, offering an Education Savings Account (ESA) to all Louisiana students. The law now goes to Governor Jeff Landry, who is expected to sign. With his signature Louisiana will become the twelfth state in the nation to pass universal school choice, joining Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Utah and West Virginia.
As EdChoice President and CEO Robert Enlow declared “This is an exciting moment for Louisiana families, who are no longer constrained by zip codes, but empowered to seek the best educational path for their children.”
ESA amounts will be set by Louisiana’s state board of education. Families will be able to use the funds in their ESAs to pay for tuition, curriculum, textbooks, testing fees, educational services and therapies, and more. ESAs in other states range from $4,600 to $8,000 per student.
School choice made other headlines in the last two weeks. Primary contests held in Texas and Idaho show that school choice wins votes. Governor Greg Abbott of Texas, for example, declared that results from the May 28th run-off primary gave him the votes he needs to pass school choice in the next legislative session. And in Idaho, House Education Committee Chair, Julie Yamamoto R-Caldwell, a staunch opponent of school choice, lost her seat to a school choice supporter.
School choice took off after the extended school shutdowns during COVID. Families felt abandoned. They noticed private schools were open while their public schools remained shut. They started seeking other ways to educate their children.
As Milton Friedman said in his famous book Capitalism and Freedom:
“Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.”
Louisiana children will soon benefit from Milton Friedman’s idea, an idea he proposed in the 1950’s. Over seventy years later, Friedman’s idea is now reality for all children in twelve states, and for deserving groups of children in 32 states. His idea is bringing real change to public education. Millions of children now have public funds to pay private school tuition, and some of them will be LA GATORs.