Congress: Do Your Homework

An Education Reform Proposal

• Open enrollment policies that empower parents to send their children to the traditional public school they think is best, instead of bureaucrats assigning children to schools based on where their families can afford to live.
• The country’s strongest charter school law. Charter schools dominate the Arizona academic achievement rankings. [2] One in four Arizona public schools is now an independent charter school, educating more than 105,000 students statewide.[3]
• The country’s first tax credit scholarship program that allows residents to take a dollar-for-dollar state income-tax credit for donations to non-profit, charitable organizations that distribute private school scholarships. More than 145,000 scholarships have been awarded to students statewide in the past decade, and last year Arizona adopted a similar tax credit scholarship program so corporations can contribute as well.[4]
• The country’s first voucher program awarding private school scholarships to students who have been in foster care, enacted last year, along with Arizona’s first voucher program for students with disabilities.
• The state’s first higher education voucher program, the Postsecondary Education Grant Program, which awards full-time college students a $2,000 grant annually for tuition, books and fees charged at any public or private Arizona college or university.[5]
• Tax deductions for contributions to college savings accounts giving parents and their college-bound children more quality higher education options.
  

Congress should:

• Repeal NCLB, or at the very least, allow states to opt out of NCLB in favor of their own proficiency standards and strengthen parental control over education by reforming NCLB to include the A-Plus Act, which lets states replace rigid federal mandates with rigorous performance contracts holding them accountable to parents and taxpayers, not D.C. bureaucrats
• Expand education options, including supporting the Empowering Parents Through Choice Act (H.R. 1486), which would award scholarships worth up to $4,000 to students trapped in underperforming and failing schools so they could transfer to private schools.[9]
• Enhance personal responsibility over education by helping parents pay for their children’s education themselves—without having to rely on the Department of Education and other federal or state bureaucracies—by expanding existing tax-free K-12 and college education savings accounts (ESAs). [10]
• Enforce the rights of parents of students with disabilities under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) to choose schools they believe provide the best educational services, public or private, and eliminate arbitrary bureaucracy, administrative barriers, and costly litigation.[11]
• Encourage more states to follow Arizona’s tax credit model by passing the Children’s Hope Act authored by Congressman Trent Franks.
• Resist attempts to establish a national curriculum under the guise of “integrating” preschool through college programs. This could have the result of forcing home schools and private and religious schools to teach the mandated curriculum or face being unable to enroll students in the college of their choice.