Education

On school choice, voters reject class warfare argument

March 11, 2025

Ray Carter

When it comes to school-choice programs that allow parents to use tax dollars to pay for private school tuition, opponents often resort to class-warfare arguments, claiming the programs only benefit “the rich” while working-class families are left out.

A recent poll in Texas, which substantially duplicates similar polling in Oklahoma, shows that parents aren’t buying that argument.

The poll, conducted by the Barbara Jordan Public Policy Research and Survey Center at Texas Southern University, was fielded between Feb. 6 and Feb. 16. It found that 63 percent of Texans support the creation of a universal Education Savings Account (ESA) program that would be open to all parents, regardless of income, while only 37 percent are opposed.

In contrast, a strong majority opposed the creation of an ESA program that would benefit only lower-income families, defined as a family of four with income of $50,000 or less. The poll found that 55 percent of voters opposed legislation that would restrict school-choice access based on income.

Members of the Texas Senate recently passed legislation that would provide $1 billion to create an Education Savings Account program that would allow families to use up to $10,000 in tax funds per child to pay for private-school tuition. All Texas children would be eligible for the proposed program. A similar bill has been filed in the Texas House of Representatives.

The legislation represents the efforts of Texas lawmakers to catch up with Oklahoma, where state lawmakers have already launched the Oklahoma Parental Choice Tax Credit program.

Under the Oklahoma program, all families can receive refundable tax credits of $5,000 to $7,500 per child to pay for private-school tuition, so long as the number of credits issued does not exceed $250 million.

The Oklahoma program has five income brackets with the largest credits going to families with the least income, and families with incomes below $150,000 are given priority.

In the first year of the school-choice tax-credit program, families sought credits for 38,756 children.

School-choice opponents have often relied on class-warfare rhetoric when attacking the program.

At a press conference in early February, state Rep. Andy Fugate dismissed Gov. Kevin Stitt’s call to eliminate the cap on the school-choice program.

“All of the money, the vast majority of that money, went to those whose kids were already attending those (private) schools who could already afford to attend,” said Fugate, D-Oklahoma City.

John Thompson, a former lobbyist for abortion provider Planned Parenthood as well as a former teacher in the Oklahoma City school district, made a similar claim in a column, writing that Oklahoma’s school-choice program was “helping subsidize the private school education of wealthy families.”

Those claims are undercut by the real-life participation figures generated during the Oklahoma Parental Choice Tax Credit program’s first year.

A report by the Oklahoma Tax Commission showed that the number of children from lower-income families who attended private school thanks to the program was 35 percent greater than the number of beneficiaries from the highest income bracket.

The Texas poll indicates the class-warfare argument has another problem beyond its lack of basis in reality: Voters also react to class-warfare arguments with an indifferent shrug.

Not only did Texas voters reject calls to limit ESAs to lower-income families, but they also did not buy into arguments that a universal program is a problem.

The Texas Southern University poll tested several anti-school-choice messages, including claims that ESA programs only “benefit wealthy parents with kids already in private schools.” Just 9 percent of Texans found that claim to be the most persuasive argument against school-choice programs.

While Oklahomans have not been polled specifically on the class-warfare argument, the findings of the Texas Southern University poll are otherwise very similar to the results of polling done in Oklahoma.

An ongoing monthly tracking poll, commissioned by EdChoice and conducted by the firm Morning Consult, has long shown strong support for school choice among Oklahoma adults and especially among Oklahoma parents.

The most recent update for that poll, released Feb. 12, showed that 68 percent of all Oklahoma adults support ESAs and 62 percent support vouchers, even when a voucher is described as a system in which “tax dollars currently allocated to a school district would be allocated to parents in the form of a ‘school voucher’ to pay partial or full tuition for the child’s school.”

Support among Oklahoma parents was even higher with 76 percent supporting ESAs and 74 percent supporting vouchers.

Similarly, a poll of 500 registered Oklahoma voters conducted in January 2022 by Cole Hargrave Snodgrass & Associates on behalf of the American Federation for Children found 65 percent of all respondents said they favor school choice. That poll described school choice as giving parents “the right to use tax dollars associated with their child’s education to send their child to the public or private school which better serves their needs.”

Numerous polls in recent years have found similarly strong support for school choice among Oklahoma voters.

And Oklahomans have not been shy about expressing their appreciation to policymakers who supported the creation of the Oklahoma Parental Choice Tax Credit program.

At a late February press availability, Stitt noted that 79 percent of the children who benefited from the program in its first year were from families with earnings below the program’s top income bracket, and he said a parent had expressed appreciation that very day.

“I spoke to the Moore group, and a guy came up to me and said, ‘Thank you for allowing my children, my three kids, to go to a better school. We were in a different neighborhood, and we think it’s a better opportunity for our kids,’” Stitt recalled. “So I love that. I don’t care if you’re rich or you’re poor, it was really important that everybody gets it.”