Jason Bedrick, research fellow at The Heritage Foundation, says the new platform, introduced at the GOP's recent convention, sends a message to Republican candidates about what the party expects.
He notes that in the past, Republicans have generally supported school choice, "but this is the first time that the GOP platform has explicitly endorsed universal school choice, which is the idea that every single child in the state should have access to a school choice policy."
The platforms the Republicans adopted in 2016 and 2020 only mentioned school choice in passing and did not fully embrace making choice available to all families. With this new commitment, however, Bedrick predicts school choice will explode nationwide.
"36% of kids nationwide who are eligible for some sort of private school choice policy -- if they were all to go universal, including Texas, more than 50% of kids in this country would have access to education choice," the researcher explains.
Roughly 30 states have enacted a school choice program, and 11 of those have adopted universal school choice. Only 10 of 23 Republican-controlled states have universal school choice, but Bedrick expects to see more than a doubling in that number over the next several years as party discipline on this issue begins to be enforced.
