School choice teaches Iowa Republicans a big lesson
Fox News
School choice won big in Iowa primaries with eight of nine challengers unseating opponents. Gov. Reynolds showed Republicans voters care about the issue.
Corey A. DeAngelis is National Director of Research at the American Federation for Children and Adjunct Scholar at the Cato Institute.
One of Reynolds’s top legislative priorities this year was a bill that would have created state-funded education savings accounts (ESAs) that families could use to customize their child’s education. Similar to policies in 10 other states, families could use ESAs to pay for private school tuition, tutoring, textbooks, online courses, and a variety of other education-related expenses.
Under Reynolds’s proposal, up to 10,000 ESAs worth about $5,000 annually would have been available to students with special needs or those from households earning up to four times the federal poverty line (about $110,000 for a family of four).