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Dear Jack,


Local mom, Amanda Kibble, is celebrating an important win for her family, and for school choice!

Earlier this year, Governor Tate Reeves signed HB 1341 into law. This new law gives military families in Mississippi the right to transfer their children to any traditional public school around the state, assuming that the receiving school has capacity. Early indications suggest this is extremely popular, with lots of military families using school choice to switch schools.
Local Mom, Amanda Kibble, with Douglas Carswell.
Amanda, and her family, found out the hard way that the law might not apply to those who serve their country in the National Guard. There was a real risk that Amanda’s son might lose his place at his preferred school.

That’s when Amanda approached MCPP, and we took up her case. MCPP has a long history of fighting for school choice, and our legal arm, the Mississippi Justice Institute has successfully litigated in defense of school choice.

I am delighted that Attorney General, Lynn Fitch, has now issued an opinion that the new school choice law for military families also applies, at least in part, to those in the National Guard. Three cheers for the AG!
Lynn Fitch, Jason White, Michael Watson, Shad White: Conservatives support school choice!
If military families now have public-to-public school choice, why shouldn’t everybody? That is exactly what our Move Up, Mississippi ([link removed] ) campaign aims to achieve.

This week’s win for school choice makes it all the more disappointing that the new State Superintendent for Education, Lance Evans, took a sideswipe at school choice in front of the press on Monday.

Speaking at a lunch in Jackson, Evans criticized school choice, suggesting that if a single dollar of public money went into private schools, those private schools should be subjected to the regulatory oversight that public schools are subject to.
Lance Evans, on the left, attacked school choice this week. Donald Trump supported school choice this week.
Those that oppose school choice, and indeed I suspect Mr Evans, know full well that extending state oversight across the private school sector would be untenable – which is why they suggest it. But it is not the clever argument against school choice that they might imagine.

Giving every family in our state the right to choose a public school, as military families are now able to do, would not transfer public dollars into private schools.

Amanda Kibble and those military families that now have school choice are not taking money out of public schools. Does Lance Evans oppose their right to choose a school for their child?

MCPP proposes that under a separate program, families that attend private schools, or who home school, could get a tax credit reflecting the fact that they are already paying for a place at a public school that they are not taking.

Evans attack on parent power was not the worst of it. More disappointing was the plodding presentation that preceded it about how amazing education is in our state.

Evans trumpeted the fact that about a third of districts were rated D or F in 2016. Now only a handful are rated D or F. This, he implied, was evidence of progress, rather than a reflection of a broken accountability system.

When officials invoke the broken grading system as evidence of improvement, it is not just the credibility to the grading we should question.

How bizarre, that in a solidly Republican-run state, we have somehow ended up with an anti-school choice official in charge? Are the nine-member State Board of Education aware of Evans anti school choice position? Are the various state leaders that appointed those members of the Board?

Here is some data that Mr. Evans might have presented instead. Over the past two decades, we have had an explosion in the number of administrative staff in education. Think of all the fat cat education bureaucrats in Mississippi who earn more than our Governor …

The number of students has hardly changed.
Parent Power Is the Solution to the Bloated Bureaucrats

No wonder the education bureaucrats don’t want mom and dad to have control over where their child’s share of the education budget goes. They might start to demand that it goes into the classroom.

Lance Evans talked about making private schools accountable. Private schools already are accountable to every fee paying parent. The issue is how to ensure that public schools are made similarly accountable, too.

We need to give every family in our state the public-to-public school choice that military families now have.

Have a wonderful weekend!
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Warm regards,

Douglas Carswell
President & CEO

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