The policy gives Pelican State families
the freedom and flexibility to customize their child’s education. Families can use their GATOR scholarships to pay for private school tuition, textbooks, curricular materials, special-needs therapy, and more.
As the name implies, the intent of the GATOR Scholarship program was to expand education choice
to the families of all K—12 students in Louisiana.
Landry
made that intent clear when the bill reached his desk, exclaiming that the LA GATOR Scholarship Program “puts parents in the driver’s seat and gives every child the opportunity for a great education.”
However, unless the Louisiana legislature appropriates the funding for the GATOR scholarships, very few Louisiana children will get access to a better education.
On Monday, the Louisiana House Appropriations Committee
is set to consider whether to fully fund the GATOR Scholarship Program or leave some stuck on a waiting list. More than 39,000 students applied for a GATOR scholarship, which Landry called
an “astounding number” that shows “just how vital the GATOR Scholarship is to Louisiana families.”
However, Landry requested $93 million for the program, which is barely 1.1% of Louisiana’s $8.2 billion in K—12 spending. That’s only enough to serve about 12,000 students, fewer than one-third of the applicants, or about 1.8% of K—12 students.
The GATOR scholarships are more cost-effective than traditional district schools. The scholarships range from about $5,200 to $7,600, depending on household income, compared with more than $15,000 per pupil
spent on average at Louisiana’s district schools. Students with special needs can receive scholarships worth about the state average for all students, with and without special needs.
Getting access to a GATOR scholarship could be life-changing for a child, but the Louisiana Illuminator
recently reported that state legislators are “likely to eliminate funding for Gov. Jeff Landry’s signature education initiative,” which would “scuttle one of Landry’s most significant legislative accomplishments since taking office last year.”
The article reports that Senate President Cameron Henry, a Republican from Metairie, supports removing $50 million from Landry’s $93 million GATOR Scholarship request. That request included $43 million for the roughly 5,300 students who had been participating in the now-defunct Louisiana Scholarship Program—meaning that it would be unlikely that a single new student would be able to receive a scholarship.
If the state legislature fails to fund the Louisiana GATOR Scholarship Program, it would derail a lifeline for tens of thousands of children in need of a better education—kids like Jah’Derrick, who was profiled on Sunday at NOLA.com
:
Jacqueline McCardie wants badly to put her grandson in a new school.
The public elementary [school] that 11-year-old Jah’Derrick attends is crowded and outdated, and the baby-faced fourth grader says he gets bullied.
But McCardie, 62, is a single guardian on a fixed income, so her only real option [without a GATOR scholarship] is the local public school in Winnfield, the small town in north-central Louisiana where they live.
Although the article states that McCardie “isn’t sure where she’d spend” a GATOR scholarship, given that there are no private schools in her rural parish, there are more options for rural families than most people realize.
As a Louisiana Department of Education spokesperson observed, there are online courses and tutoring available statewide, as well as homeschool co-ops and a growing number of microschools
.
Moreover, the number of private schools and other learning options in rural areas is not static. Education choice policies like the GATOR scholarships increase demand, which leads to an increase in supply.
As my Heritage Foundation colleague Matthew Ladner and I observed in a 2023 report
, private options in rural areas in Arizona and Florida increased dramatically after those states adopted robust education choice policies.
In Florida’s 30 rural counties, the number of private schools grew from 69 to 120 in the two decades since enacting school choice
, with private-school enrollment in those counties more than doubling. Likewise, the number of scholarships awarded to private-school students in rural Arizona more than doubled in the past decade.
Louisiana has a chance to lead, to show that it values educational innovation and trusts families to make the best choices for their children.
But leadership requires action. The time to act is now.
For the sake of Louisiana families, and especially the children whose futures hang in the balance, the GATOR Scholarship Program must not be allowed to get stuck in the swamp.
If Louisiana lawmakers really want to give all the opportunity to rise, they must ensure that all Louisiana students can get access to the GATOR scholarships.
An alligator head was among the decor in the lobby of then-Rep. Jeff Landry’s office in the House Cannon House Office Building 14 years ago this month on May 3, 2011. Landry is now the state’s governor and supports the Louisiana Giving All True Opportunity to Rise (“LA GATOR”) scholarship program. (Bill Clark/Roll Call via Getty Images)
President Donald Trump delivers the Commencement address at the graduation ceremony for the University of Alabama, Thursday, May 1, 2025, at Coleman Coliseum in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. (Official White House photo by Daniel Torok)
If the U.S. Department of Education suddenly went away, what would change for local families and communities? Not much.
For starters, the Department of Education (ED) doesn’t educate anyone. It’s a middleman. Americans send their taxes to Washington, D.C., the bureaucracy takes a big chunk of it to pay staff and overhead, and the rest is sent to states and local communities with a bunch of red tape. Reducing that bureaucracy should save money, which could mean schools could actually receive more funding.
Furthermore, there’s no evidence the federal involvement has improved education. Since the department was created in 1980, federal per-pupil spending has skyrocketed, but results on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the Nation’s Report Card, have been largely stagnant
.
Yet a recent Fast Company article
declared ending the Department of Education “would be disastrous for Title I schools,” with a special emphasis on Greater Johnstown Public Schools. And who is making that claim? Not surprisingly, it’s largely people who benefit from the current system, including the head of the local and state teachers’ unions, the director of the law firm that’s led efforts to increase school taxes, and the director of a policy center that has historicallyreceived
substantial funding from unions.
When your only arguments are nothing more than fearmongering, you’ve ceded the debate.
For better or for worse, ending the Department of Education will not end Title I funding, which is supposed to help low-income students. Title I existed before the Department of Education and would likely be administered through a different department if the ED is shuttered.
Plus, as with other federal involvement, there’s no evidence that Title I has been effective overall. For example, the Nation’s Report Card has for decades shown a consistent achievement gap
between economically disadvantaged and non-economically disadvantaged students.
There has been talk of changing how Title I is distributed to improve its effectiveness. One option is converting the funding to block grants that states could administer with fewer strings. This would put decision-making power closer to the students who are impacted by these decisions and enable state leaders to direct funds where they see the most need. It would be an improvement over the current Washington-based system.
Better still would be to bypass the states and convert the funding to scholarships, enabling parents to choose the educational support that their children need. Ultimately, there’s no constitutional role for the federal government when it comes to education, which makes sense given the impossibility of bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., knowing what’s best for children in, say, Pennsylvania.
One of us was formerly a teacher and principal in Johnstown public schools and is now the principal of Bishop McCort Catholic School, also in Johnstown. He has dealt with Title I first-hand in both environments and seen the problems caused by the red tape and lack of flexibility with the funding. He’s confident that dismantling the Department of Education – and making any federal funds portable so parents could choose the best environment for their children—is the best way to support the students served by Title I.
And that’s the bottom line when it comes to education. Parents are better at making decisions for their children than federal bureaucrats. Pennsylvania public schools spent nearly $22,000 per student in 2022-23 (the latest data available). In the Greater Johnstown School District, per-pupil spending was more than $23,000. Yet 82% of students scored below proficient
in math and 77% scored below proficient in English. Imagine what parents could do if they could direct even half of that funding to the educational option that worked better for their kids.
Dismantling the U.S. Department of Education will not destroy education, but it may put a dent in the public schooling bureaucracy. Despite the fearmongering of people who work in the system, less bureaucracy and more freedom for parents and students are good things.
This article was originally published by RealClearPennsylvania and made available via RealClearWire.
For months, headlines have chronicled conservative efforts to purge library shelves. But the “Tuttle Twins,” the children’s book series I authored that champions free markets, was recently and briefly yanked from one in upstate New York.
Will the supposed defenders of free speech rise up to condemn this censorship?
With six million copies sold, the “Tuttle Twins” series has a demonstrably large, mainstream audience. The book series — which teaches about free markets, personal responsibility, entrepreneurship and more — was recently stripped from the shelves of libraries
in upstate New York on grounds that it “promotes a specific political and economic perspective.”
The decision contradicts the library’s own policy manual
, which promises not to ban books merely because they offer a “one-sided representation of opinions” or provoke “vehement debate.” It also flouts the American Library Association’s Library Bill of Rights, which the library adopted: “Materials should not be proscribed or removed because of partisan or doctrinal disapproval.”
When librarians forget their guild’s cardinal rule, they convert the reading room into an ideological checkpoint. In fact, they also run afoul of constitutional precedent. In the 1982 case Island Trees v. Pico, the Supreme Court held that officials “may not remove books … simply because they dislike the ideas contained in those books and seek by their removal to ‘prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics.’” Chemung County’s act is precisely the sort of viewpoint purge the court was condemning.
The stakes extend far beyond any one county or one book. PEN America records more than 10,000 school-library bans
in the 2023-24 academic year, the highest tally on record. From Florida to Iowa, volumes featuring transgender protagonists or racial-justice themes vanish under conservative pressure. President Trump has vowed to yank federal funds
from schools that refuse to excise critical-race or gender-ideology texts.
Progressives and liberals readily condemn these actions when the targets of the purge are books they want children exposed to. But why are they silent, and even complicit in purges, when the target is a topic with which they disagree?
The truth is that each side of the political aisle swings the same censorial hammer, merely trading targets. The result is a national game of literary whack-a-mole in which libraries become battlegrounds and children are collateral damage.
A republic confident in itself should aspire to something more than alternating censorship. Perhaps most can at least agree on a broad-based principle: Minors should be shielded from sexually explicit material, but they are perfectly capable of encountering and questioning competing economic and political ideas.
The “Tuttle Twins,” like the many books geared toward left-wing policies that crowdChemungCounty’scatalogue
, is an invitation to debate, not a seduction into dogma. We can ban the pornographic and also free the politically provocative.
Maintaining some viewpoint diversity on the shelf is not a concession to conservatives; it is insurance for progressives, too. The rule that kicks out a free-market “Tuttle Twins” book today can just as easily dump “Phenomenal AOC” tomorrow. Once we agree that libraries can trash certain ideas, the only question left is whose turn comes next — and who gets to pick the target.
Years of writing for children has shown me that kids prosper when ideas collide. Students who meet robust disagreement and grapple with unconventional ideas early develop sharper critical-thinking skills
and broader tolerance for people different from themselves. Introduce them to Adam Smith and Karl Marx, Glenn Beck and Greta Thunberg, and they will emerge better armed to navigate the messy marketplace of adult opinion.
By suppressing half the political spectrum, we do not protect innocence — rather, we manufacture fragility.
Fortunately, Chemung County librarians have begun to repair the damage, compelled by the community’s backlash. After a flood of polite but pointed emails from parents and patrons, the district acknowledged
that, “After internal review, the books in question are being returned” to the library’s shelves. This course correction serves as a timely reminder that sustained public engagement still moves institutions.
Thomas Jefferson reminded us that “error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.” A public library exists to furnish the weapons of that combat. When it withholds a book because of its ideological content, it abandons its mission and, worse, teaches the next generation that uncomfortable ideas are objects to be plucked from sight, not examined.
Keep the “Tuttle Twins” and “Phenomenal AOC” alike. Shelve them, spine by spine, and trust young readers — moved by their own curiosity and guided by parents and teachers — to wrestle with competing visions of the ideal society. In that contest of thought lies the real lesson of a free country, and it starts on the lowest shelf a child can reach.
