President stands with blacks in state who support school choice

For years, Florida’s public schools have been overcrowded and underfunded. Bogged down by the former Obama administration’s Common Core standards, public education turned into glorified test prep sessions. Floridians were right to demand change. School choice offers low-income African Americans in Florida an effective way to break the cycle of poverty and provide their children with a better future.

President Trump has made school choice a priority for his administration, spearheading federal reforms that dovetail nicely with those Florida has enacted at the state level in recent years.

With our rapidly growing population, Florida’s public school system often lacks the infrastructure to handle new waves of residents — and all too often, the black community has been forced to shoulder the worst of the consequences. Overcrowding got to be such a problem in Florida schools that voters passed a constitutional amendment capping class sizes. This short-term fix certainly helped reduce the most egregious cases of overcrowding, but it fell short of the structural change the Florida school system needs.

Sunshine State Republicans correctly viewed the failures of the public school system as a disaster for Floridians. Instead of simply throwing more money into a broken system, though, they experimented with new and innovative approaches. The result was one of the country’s most successful school choice programs, which is widely popular across the state.

Since Florida enacted the Scholarship Tax Credit in 2001, 784,000 low-income Floridians have been able to send their children to private schools. With Trump’s encouragement, Gov. Ron DeSantis has now taken action to expand the school choice voucher program even further, allocating $126 million to enable 18,000 low-income students in failing public schools to attend private schools instead.

African Americans across the country support school choice because they see the opportunity it provides their children. In a national poll commissioned by the American Federation for Children, a pro-school choice organization, 66% of African American respondents said they support expanding school choice. Yet, do-nothing Democrats still call the policy racist because they’d rather that public school teachers win with lifetime employment while black children lose with a lifetime of underperformance and missed dreams.

School choice was a winner for DeSantis in the 2018 election, leading to his strong performance among black women who know how important programs such as the scholarship tax credit are to helping their children thrive.

The Trump administration has spearheaded school choice reform nationally, as well. The president’s tax cuts, for instance, expanded the popular 529 college savings plans so that parents can use the tax-free accounts to pay for K-12 tuition at private schools. The administration has also proposed other innovative ways to fund school choice without detracting from federal public school investment, such as federal tax credits worth a whopping $5 billion per year for groups that provide scholarships for private educational programs.

These are the sorts of initiatives that will continue to empower African Americans for generations, and that’s something we should all celebrate. It’s one of the many reasons I’m so proud to be part of the Black Voices for Trump movement. We’re going to spend the next 13 months spreading the message of “Promises Made, Promises

Kept” to the black community.

If we want to keep our access to opportunity, we cannot rely on big government. We must raise our voices and stand with President Trump.