Louisiana’s fight for education freedom has been long and weary, but the end may be near. From public schools’ systemic suppression of Cajun French nearly a century ago through its history of poor academic outcomes, Louisianans have long recognized that the state’s education will not improve until parents can choose what’s best for their children.

As early as 1985, Louisiana thinkers like novelist Walker Percy were making the case for modern school choice policies, years before other states began adopting them. Louisiana lawmakers eventually followed suit, passing a voucher program—albeit one crippled by burdensome regulations—in 2008. In the wake of elections driven by concerns over Louisiana’s low quality of education, and in which school choice advocates won handily, lawmakers should correct past blunders and restore parents as the primary educators of children.

Almost 40 years ago, contributing to a Times-Picayune symposium on Louisiana’s future, Percy explained why improving public education required expanding school choice.

As many reformers set their hopes on raising teachers’ salaries and standards, Percy warned that regulations would do little as long as public schools retained a monopoly over K-12 education.

Policies that allowed public funding to follow the student rather than the school, on the other hand, would break up that monopoly, benefiting public and nonpublic schools alike.

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“Why are GM cars getting better?” Percy quipped at a time when foreign competition was prompting General Motors to refine the quality of its vehicles. “Not because of increased government subsidies or higher salaries. Because of Toyota.”

Empowering parents with freedom to choose the best education for their children would similarly strengthen public schools, Percy argued, forcing them to innovate and improve to compete for students.

A Tragic History

Allowing parents to choose schools and curricula that support their principles strengthens the integrity of the family, moreover, thereby better facilitating the preservation of Louisiana culture.

As Cajun and Creole descendants know well, the loss of Louisiana French can be traced to the successful attacks that district schools made on Cajun and Creole culture throughout the 20th century, undermining values taught at home.

School teachers and administrators humiliated children who spoke French through corporal punishment, such that within just a few decades, children were no longer speaking their parents’ native tongue.

Nor is this tragic piece of history simply a relic of the past. When COVID-19 lockdowns sent students home to learn remotely, parents across the U.S. were shocked by the subversive content schools were teaching, spurring widespread support for school choice expansion. Policies that put parents back in the driver’s seat of K-12 education protect the family bonds and values that preserve unique cultures like ours in Louisiana.

School choice has grown popular not only in theory but in practice, particularly in Louisiana, where parents opt for private schools at the third-highest rate in America. Louisiana’s home-schooling population is also on the rise, up by 51% since 2017, according to a Washington Post dataset. While all states saw home-schooling surge during the pandemic, Louisiana remains one of only four states in which it has continued to expand.

Voters Speak

Hence, it’s unsurprising that Louisiana voters this fall elected a slate of school choice proponents, sending supermajorities to the Legislature and Board of Elementary and Secondary Education. With a pro-school choice superintendent of education and a governor-elect who appointed school choice advocates to his transition team, Louisiana has the opportunity to embrace education freedom, reversing its history of imposing onerous regulations on school choice participation.

Central to the history of school choice has been the Louisiana Scholarship Program. Signed into law by former Gov. Bobby Jindal in 2008 and expanded in 2012, the LSP seemed promising, providing low-income families with vouchers to send their children to nonpublic schools of their choice.

Yet in practice it has helped few: Only 1% of students—or 3% of those eligible—participate in Louisiana’s scholarship programs, in part because nonpublic school participation remains low, with just over one-third participating.

A Case Study

In their case study of the LSP, Lindsey Burke and Jason Bedrick, policy experts at The Heritage Foundation, traced Louisiana’s low participation rates to costly regulations, like those requiring participating schools to adopt open-admissions policies and administer state tests, rather than any nationally norm-referenced test.

These requirements discourage high-performing schools concerned with maintaining rigorous academic standards and mission-oriented curricula from participating. Consequently, participating students often land in low-quality private schools not much better than their public counterparts.

Indeed, research published in 2015 showed many participating private schools experienced attrition prior to entering the program, suggesting that poorer-performing and less competitive schools were willing to incur regulations to reap financial benefits.

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That likely explains why, of the many randomized control trial programs studying the effects of school choice on academic achievement, only two—both on the LSP—have ever found negative effects.

Call to Action

Incoming lawmakers can remedy the LSP’s problems by removing its burdensome regulations and extending eligibility to all families, regardless of income level. Lawmakers attempted to pass such legislation in 2022 and 2023, but were thwarted by opposition from Gov. John Bel Edwards. House Bill 98 in 2023 would have improved Louisiana’s school choice offerings in crucial ways, shedding requirements that interfere with participating schools’ admissions policies or curricula, while extending eligibility to any student entering kindergarten or enrolled in a public school.

More importantly, HB98 would have increased the choices available to parents by administering the program through education savings accounts rather than vouchers. While vouchers must be used for tuition, ESAs allocate some of the school districts’ per-pupil spending to accounts that parents can use for tuition, home-schooling curricula, personal tutors, special needs therapy, and more.

Furthermore, ESAs incentivize fiscal responsibility by allowing parents to save unused funds from year to year. They thus invite parents to assume greater discretion over their children’s education, customizing curricula to their particular talents and needs, and planning ahead for their future. Louisiana lawmakers should champion this discretion, modeling future legislation on HB98’s original text, and avoiding the late amendments last session that attempted to exclude home-schooling families from ESA participation.

In another one of his essays on education, Percy lamented that standardization of American schooling had eliminated the student’s opportunity for “sovereign discovery of the thing before him.”

No genuine education can occur without individual initiative and ownership on the part of the student, he argued, elements that passive acceptance of “educational packages” tends to foil. Universal ESAs, by contrast, would liberate parents and students alike to take charge of their education in new and ambitious ways.

As lawmakers approach a fresh legislative session this spring, they should prepare to extend this freedom to all students in the state. Louisiana families have waited long enough.