As National School Choice Week winds to a close on Saturday, Gov. Bobby Jindal says in a new guest column that Louisiana has much to celebrate.
“Since we removed the cap on charters in 2009, we’ve authorized almost 200 charter schools throughout the state—that’s 70,000 kids who now have a choice about where they go to school,” Jindal writes.
Jindal says National School Choice Week could just as well be called freedom week.
“On the most basic level, school choice represents the freedom to choose—empowering parents to select the best educational options for their sons and daughters,” he writes. “That could be a charter school, a private school, a religious school, home schooling, or even online learning. Governments should provide parents with the personalized and individualized tools they need to help their children excel academically. That freedom to choose in turn will provide children with the freedom to succeed.”
Here in Louisiana, Jindal says, data shows the state’s efforts to expand charter schools are netting better educational outcomes for students—and that parents overwhelmingly support the charter movement.
“We expanded our school choice scholarship program, which was initially confined to New Orleans, statewide. Parental satisfaction with the statewide scholarship program stands at a whopping 91.9%,” Jindal writes. “We went even further, though, and created a dollar-for-dollar rebate for donations used to fund nonpublic school scholarships [for] low-income students through our “school tuition organizations.” Between 2008 and 2013, the percentage of students in the Scholarship Program who are proficient in third-grade English language arts has grown by 20 percentage points and in math by 28 percentage points. Again and again, we’ve proven that giving more choice to parents is not only vital, but it gets results.”
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