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The Daily Signal
The Idiocy of
the ACLU’s Lawsuit Against a New School Choice Option
Ed Feulner
September 07, 2015
Another school year is underway, and more parents than ever are using
school choice to ensure the best education for their children. Or
should I say trying to use it? Some groups, after all, are trying to
thwart them.
Who, you ask? Just ask parents in Nevada. The Silver State is one of
five nationwide (along with Arizona, Mississippi, Florida, and
Tennessee) to have Education Savings Accounts (ESAs) that enable
families to deposit their children’s state per-pupil funding in an
account that can be used for a variety of education options.
No longer will students there have to put up with one-size-fits-all
education. If the neighborhood public school provides the best fit for
a child, fine. But if parents want to use the money that would’ve been
spent at their child’s “assigned” school for a different education
option, they can do that instead.
Unless the American Civil Liberties Union gets its way. The ACLU
recently filed a lawsuit to stop Nevada’s ESAs from taking effect.
This despite the fact that Gov. Brian Sandoval signed the program into
law this spring and that it began accepting applications a few weeks
ago. More than 2,200 parents have applied, and who can blame them? They
know they’ll be able to use ESAs to pay for a host of education-related
services, including private-school tuition, online learning,
special-education services and therapies, textbooks, and curricula.
“As the name implies,” writes education expert Lindsey Burke, “parents
can also save unused funds, rolling dollars over from year-to-year to
pay for future education costs.”
In short, they have high hopes for their children. They want the best
possible future for them, and they know that a good education is key to
that. ESAs can help them get there.
So why does the ALCU object? Its lawsuit alleges that Nevada’s ESA
program “violates the Nevada Constitution’s prohibition against the use
of public money for sectarian (religious) purposes.” Yet the ESA funds
go from the state to parents, not from the state to religious schools.
The parents are the ones who can then use the funds to choose the right
education option for their children, which may or may not include a
religious school.
As the Foundation for Excellence in Education told the Arizona Court of
Appeals in a similar case in 2013:
The ESA does not result in an appropriation of
public money to encourage the preference of one religion over another,
or religion per se over no religion. Any aid to religious schools would
be a result of the genuine and independent private choices of the
parents. The parents are given numerous ways in which they can educate
their children suited to the needs of each child with no preference
given to religious or non-religious schools or programs.
That’s been a godsend to students such as Max Ashton. Max is legally
blind and used an ESA prior to finishing high school. According to
Max’s father, Marc, a blind student in Arizona gets about $21,000 a
year, which represents what the state spends to educate a student such
as Max in the public school system.
“We took our 90 percent of that, paid for Max to get the best education
in Arizona, plus all of his Braille, all of his technology, and then
there was still money left over to put toward his college education,”
Marc explains. “So he is going to be able to go on to Loyola Marymount
University, because we were able to save money, even while sending him
to the best school in Arizona, out of what the state would normally pay
for him.”
So on top of everything else, ESAs save taxpayer money, even as they
expand opportunity for children. And opponents of school choice want to
stop this?
That completely defies logic. Somebody is truly blind here, all right,
and it’s not Max Ashton. We need more school choice, not less. You
don’t need a diploma to see that.
Originally published in The Washington Times.
Read this and other articles at The Daily Signal
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