On February 27, Idaho Governor Brad Little signed a private school choice bill passed by the legislature earlier in the month.
Kevin Richert of Idaho Ed News sat down with SPR's Owen Henderson to talk about it and some of the other education policies the legislature has been considering.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
OWEN HENDERSON: Kevin Richert is the senior reporter covering education politics and policy for Idaho Education News. Kevin, thanks for being here.
KEVIN RICHERT: Oh, thanks for having me.
OH: Let's just start with the basics. What does this school choice bill do?
KR: What this bill basically would do, it creates a tax credit program for parents who want to pursue education outside of the public school. So the tax credit could be applied towards private school tuition.
That's the big, that's the big item here. It's capped at $50 million and that is a contentious point because the sponsors of the bill are saying this is a $50 million program in the context of a $3 billion plus public school budget. So this is not a big chunk of money and doesn't take money out of the public school budget.
Opponents have said, look, other states have tried this. Caps have been set. Caps have been lifted.
These programs grow and spiral out of control. That's been one of the big talking points against this proposal. What passed right now, what was signed into law is for now a $50 million program.
The big debate is whether it would stay a $50 million program.
OH: So school choice has been a contentious issue for years in Idaho. What do you think shifted in the political discourse that made the passage of this bill possible?
KR: I think one of the things that shifted was Governor Little. Governor Brad Little is now in his seventh year as governor. And for the first six years as governor, he really tried to distance himself from the whole debate over private school choice.
Whenever the topic came up, he would point out that Idaho has a lot of school choice already in place. If you're a parent, you can send your kid to charter school. You can send your kid into an online school. You can homeschool.
We have a fairly large homeschooling community and have had a homeschooling community for decades. He always had kind of couched school choice in the context of those options.
This year, he started the legislative session. He laid out his budget proposal and he earmarked $50 million for a private school choice program. So that set the guidelines and set kind of the parameters of what he wanted in terms of the cost of a private school choice program.
And this was the first time that Little had actually set money aside to pay for private school choice.
I think for a lot of folks who've been watching this debate for several years, that was a surprise. That was a departure. And it kind of set the tone for the fact that this was most likely going to pass this year.
Now you zoom out and you look at what's happened since January and since Little made that $50 million proposal, you've had President Trump go on social media urging the Idaho legislature to pass this private school choice bill. We don't see that very often.
You don't usually see a president weighing in on state legislative policy. I don't know how much of a factor that turned out to be in terms of what happened with this bill passing the Senate a couple of weeks ago. It passed fairly narrowly. It was a 20 to 15 vote.
Did Trump's public support of this bill sway any of those senators? It's possible. I mean, it might have been a factor. It certainly put added pressure on Governor Little.
Would have been really difficult for him to veto this bill when it at least hit his parameters in terms of cost. It was at least consistent with what he had laid out in the start of the legislative session. And you now have the president of the United States weighing in, endorsing this.
OH: So then outside of the legislature, outside of the governor's mansion, what are people saying about this? How do constituents and educators seem to feel about the bill?
KR: Well, it depends on which metric you use. In terms of the public testimony that was submitted, overwhelmingly, people were opposed to this bill. Our Ryan Suppe has been covering this issue very closely for us.
And he tallied it up. He looked at like 1,200 pages of emails that were sent into the House committee, 10 to 1 ratio of folks writing in saying that they were opposed to this bill.
Governor Little opened up the phone lines. They set up hotlines after the bill reached his desk. And they said that about 86% of the calls and emails that they received urged the governor to veto this bill.
So in terms of which side was more mobilized to speak out on this issue, clearly the opposition was highly motivated, highly mobilized. They spoke out. Ultimately the bill passed and the governor signed it.
Boise State University has done statewide surveys looking at where the public stands on this — more of a scientific survey. Idahoans are pretty split on the idea of private school choice and have been for quite a while.
This is a fairly polarizing issue when you get down to the general electorate, when you get down to everyday people, not necessarily just folks who would take the time to call a hotline, send an email to a legislative committee. A polarizing issue, but when you look at what unfolded in the days leading up to the passage of this, a lot of opposition, a lot of vocal opposition.
OH: There have been a number of other education related issues to come up this legislative session. What are some of the things that you're watching?
KR: I'd point out a couple of higher education issues that we've been watching. There are competing bills in a senate committee that haven't been heard yet on diversity, equity and inclusion — DEI.
The state has already taken several steps to rein in DEI. There's a state board policy that has basically restricted what universities can offer in terms of student support. You have two competing bills that would legislate on the DEI issue.
There's also a looming debate over medical education in Idaho and how does Idaho train its next generation of doctors.
Right now Idaho largely uses a partnership with the University of Washington. Some legislators want to phase that out over a variety of concerns with UW, including capacity.
How many students will UW take from Idaho? And concerns about whether UW has used Idaho tax dollars to support abortion classes and abortion courses. UW has signed a statement saying that they don't do that. That would be in violation of Idaho's anti-abortion law.
But there's a good deal of pushback about whether Idaho should continue to stick with this partnership with UW.
As it stands right now, Idaho is last in the nation per capita in physicians. So we've already got a shortage and we've got an aging physician population. A lot of our doctors are 60 years old or older.
So a lot of the debate about what to do here with medical education is, ‘Okay, if you sever your ties with the University of Washington, which has been training 40 students a year for several years and has been a partnership that the state has cultivated for over half a century, if you get rid of your partnership with UW, where do you get the training options? What fills the void?’
Is it the University of Utah perhaps? Is it other schools in the Mountain West? Is it a private for-profit university right now, for-profit medical school that's operating in Meridian, Idaho? It's hard to say. And I think that's part of the debate is, ‘Okay, if we get rid of our partnership with UW, what fills the void?’
OH: Well, I'm sure you'll be keeping an eye on all of these things and quite a bit more as the legislative session continues.
Kevin Richard is the senior reporter for Idaho Education News. Kevin, thanks for your time.
KR: Thank you.
OH: I'm Owen Henderson reporting.
