Kansas, Missouri Republicans push ‘school choice’ amid classroom clash over race, gender

When Kansas lawmakers last week weighed a plan to allow donors to scholarship programs for low-income private school students to deduct 100% of their giving from their state taxes, state Rep. Mari-Lynn Poskin couldn’t hide her frustration.

Donors to the programs, which help pay for students to receive private education, can currently deduct up to 70% of their donation from their state income taxes – up to $500,000 a year. A new proposal would make donations 100% deductible, effectively allowing donors to potentially wipe away their entire state tax bill through donations.

“Holy tax scams,” Poskin, an Overland Park Democrat, exclaimed during a committee hearing, “that is a masterful shell game.”

Kansas and Missouri are among numerous states where lawmakers are pushing a wave of legislation this year seeking to aid families who want to send their children to private schools or allow students to easily switch between public schools.

Kansas Republicans have offered bills to expand tax credits for donations to help students attend private schools and create education savings accounts to give families access to thousands of taxpayer dollars each year to pay for private school tuition. In Missouri, Republicans want to make it easier for students to change schools and exempt some districts from state-level performance requirements, raising fears of school consolidation.

“If you have a poor school, and you’ve got people wanting to get out of your school district, then you really need to evaluate, why did they want to get out?” Missouri state Rep. Brad Pollitt, a Sedalia Republican, said.

The measures come as schools and students continue to recover from the pandemic, which severely disrupted education in 2020. Remote learning and other restrictions fueled parent frustration that at points played out in raucous school board meetings.

Republican lawmakers are also seeking to aid private schools following rising anger at classroom instruction in public schools, especially over how race and sexuality are discussed.

Conservatives have seized upon the supposed dangers of critical race theory, a college-level academic concept that examines the role of institutions in perpetuating racism, and have also sought bans on transgender athletes in girls’ sports.

The Kansas and Missouri legislation comes in the wake of Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law and bills in other states championed by GOP legislators fighting what they perceive as an overly liberal educational establishment.

“COVID woke a lot of people up and they said, ‘This is what they’re doing in my school or no my school didn’t take care of my student when they needed to be,’ so they’re saying, ‘Hey, there’s got to be alternatives,’” said Kansas state Rep. Brenda Landwehr, a Wichita Republican.

Mark Tallman, a longtime staff member of the Kansas Association of School Boards, said support for the concept of “school choice” has increasingly become a Republican litmus test. Tallman, whose organization often opposes such legislation, said GOP dominance in some states has coincided with “the idea this is a core Republican point.”

The reaction to COVID policies, as well as questions about critical race theory and other social issues, has accelerated the push, Tallman said. “The backlash against some of the things that were happening further fueled this idea of people being able to have a choice,” he said.

Lawmakers in at least a dozen states are considering taxpayer-funded programs for private education, according to an Associated Press tally that includes Kansas and Missouri. Bills have been introduced in Iowa, Illinois, Nebraska, Oregon, South Carolina, Texas and Utah, among others.

Sixteen states already have some form of a voucher program, meaning students are allowed to use public money to attend private school, according to the Education Commission of the States, a nonpartisan organization that tracks education policy. Six states currently have education savings account programs.

“Especially when it comes to education savings account and to some extent tax credit scholarship programs, we’ve seen across especially a lot of red states, a lot of growth in those kinds of proposals and those kinds of programs,” said Jon Valant, director of the Brown Center on Education Policy, which conducts research on schools and education, at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.

Critics of the GOP-led proposals say the measures would further erode hard-won state support for public education and in some instances allow individuals to avoid taxes through generous deductions for donations. Taken together, they say, the bills would pave the way to move tax dollars out of public schools even as conservatives insist on greater control over what happens in schools as classrooms turn into a political flashpoint.

“They don’t even understand what institutional racism is,” Kansas state Rep. Valdenia Winn, a Kansas City Democrat, said. “They’re following Florida blindly.”

A pair of Florida laws restricts classroom instruction surrounding sexual orientation, gender identity and race. The College Board, which oversees Advanced Placement courses, has also watered down the curriculum of an African American studies class in response to objections from Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican who is expected to run for president.

“It’s not even dog whistles. They’re just screaming and hollering,” Winn said. “It’s offensive and it just means that those that do not agree need to work harder.”

But supporters of the Republican measures say the tax credits have allowed private schools to dramatically expand the financial assistance they offer student families, who are sometimes seeking alternatives to frustrating public school environments. Some remain troubled by how public schools responded to COVID-19 and want state funding linked to individual students, not schools. At the very least, they say it should be easier for parents to get their children out of a struggling school.

Even the descriptions of these programs are subject to intense dispute, with proponents of additional aid for private education framing their ideas as “school choice” while opponents label them “vouchers.”

“We want high quality classical education that focuses on academic excellence, preparing our kids for a successful future, not the sexualized woke agenda we see permeating the system today,” Kansas Senate President Ty Masterson, an Andover Republican, said in response to Kelly’s State of the State address last week.

Kansas bill would boost private schools

A Kansas bill to create a sweeping education savings account program introduced Monday is already attracting significant attention ahead of a Monday hearing.

Parents who want to send their child to a private school would be allowed to apply the base amount of state aid a school would receive if their child was enrolled toward the cost of attending a private school. Currently, the amount is roughly $4,800 per student per year, but will increase in line with inflation in the future.

The proposal will likely eventually receive a vote in the House. But even if it passes the Republican-controlled House and the Senate, Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly would likely veto it.

“You know, I am firmly opposed to school voucher programs— always have been,” Kelly told reporters last week. “I do believe that taxpayer dollars ought to be focused on our public school system, and I’ve always believed that. I continue to believe that so, no I will not enthusiastically sign any school voucher program.”

Kelly has instead called on the Legislature to provide an additional $72 million each year for special education for the next five years. That’s enough to bring Kansas into compliance with mandatory funding levels for special education that the state hasn’t met in a decade.

Republicans are also considering aggressive education measures that would still stop just short of direct taxpayer support of private education. Under the tax credit scholarship legislation that Poskin condemned, most families with annual incomes up to 250% of the federal poverty level – $75,000 a year for a family of four – would be eligible.

“School choice is necessary for families to match learning environments with their child’s needs so they can be academically successful and they can learn,” said Delia Shropshire, president of Holy Savior Catholic Academy in Wichita, the location of Kansas’ largest school district.

Enrollment at Holy Savior, which teaches kindergarten through eighth grade, has grown from 146 students in 2018 to 219 last year, Shropshire said.

But Olathe Public Schools Superintendent Brent Yeager emphasizes that private schools are exempt from many of the financial accountability requirements that public districts must follow, such as transparency rules surrounding budgeting and audits by the Kansas State Department of Education.

“The funds being directed to nonpublic entities are taxpayer dollars, and we believe they should be held to the same level of accountability as our district,” Yeager said in written testimony to lawmakers.

Missouri weighs open enrollment

In Missouri, lawmakers are weighing implementing open enrollment – allowing students to transfer between public schools.

“My goal for open enrollment is to give parents a choice within the public school system, being taught by public school teachers who pay into the public school retirement system,” Pollitt, the Sedalia Republican, said. “I believe this bill strengthens public education.”

Todd Fuller, a spokesperson for the Missouri State Teachers Association said that if students are allowed to leave schools, then some schools will likely lose money and eventually close. With school consolidation would come longer commutes and potentially larger class sizes, Fuller said.

“I think that we forget a lot of times how important a school district is to a local community,” Fuller said. “It’s something that they can support, it’s something that they can rally around.”

Missouri lawmakers are also considering a bill that would exempt schools with 60% local funding per student from requirements from the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education like the Missouri School Improvement Program, which reviews and accredits schools, and the agency’s performance reviews. The bill would also allow the schools to utilize any other nationally-recognized assessment program instead of the Missouri Assessment Program.

Missouri state Sen. Jill Carter, a Neosho Republican sponsoring the bill, said public schools are currently under state regulations that charter and private schools are exempt from.

“What we’re trying to do is level the playing field so that teachers feel like they have the same choice, parents have the same choice, no matter what sector of education you’re in,” Carter said.

Heather Fleming, director of the Missouri Equity Education Partnership, a coalition of groups opposing the GOP-led legislation, said the proposal represents “inequity built into our laws.”

“If we’re going to make significant changes,” Fleming said, “it needs to be changes that impact and improve all of the schools, and not just some of the schools.”

The Star’s Katie Bernard contributing reporting