As Congress considers a bill to create a federal school choice program, the Early Childhood, Elementary, and Secondary Education Committee held a hearing on Capitol Hill to examine the benefits of school choice. Witnesses Michael McShane of EdChoice, Jenny Clark from Love Your School, and Walter Banks, Jr., with the American Federation for Children, all spoke about the successes of school choice.

McShane provided facts from the many studies showing the positive effects of school choice on student achievement, parental satisfaction, community safety, and even area public schools. Clark shared how an education savings account program provided necessary help to her sons with special needs, and Banks testified how the Florida school choice program offered him hope as a student when he was on a path of failure. In contrast, Jessica Levin from the Education Law Center charged that school choice programs only created problems and hurt public education and students. In her testimony, she claimed that school choice programs take away the rights of special needs children, allow private schools to discriminate without any accountability, and defund public schools of essential funding. However, her claims were challenged repeatedly by Republican lawmakers who pointed to research and real-life examples, including the other witnesses, which contradicted her claims.

In one telling exchange, Rep. Burgess Owens (UT) called out Levin’s opposition to school choice when she was the beneficiary of a private school education. When she responded that her education was her parents’ choice for her, he noted that they exercised this choice because they believed it was the best education for her over the public schools. “What gets me is how people like yourself, I would say this, across the board, parents who have an option, they put their kids in the best school because they know that’s an investment for their kid’s future. And yet you come here and say how well it doesn’t work.”

The chair of the subcommittee, Rep. Kevin Kiley (CA), pointed out in his closing remarks that opponents of school choice don’t just oppose a certain type of program, “They oppose school choice in general. . . . That is the troubling theme that comes out of this is that the opposition is really to anything that disrupts the business model of keeping kids trapped in failing schools. And it is that business model that has led to this education decline in our country.” He added, “What we are seeing emerge is a new model where the money follows the student. This is what extends opportunities to families who have no other options and it’s what catalyzes system-wide change.”