Big Beautiful Bill gives Walz a beautiful opportunity to help kids

There’s a pretty good federal parental choice provision in the Big Beautiful Bill that provides a tax credit for donations to scholarship-granting organizations. The tax credit, capped at $1,700, is much more valuable than the current charitable contribution deduction. Gifts can be made to nonprofits who provide scholarships to families making less than 300% of the area median gross income. The scholarships can be used for private school tuition and other educational expenses. Since it’s a federal tax credit, the program has no impact on federal education spending, let alone state education funding. One of the best parts of the new credit is its permanence — there is no built-in repeal like the income tax cuts that were just extended in the same bill.

There’s just one small catch for families hoping to use a scholarship to get their child out of a persistently failing school: Gov. Tim Walz must opt Minnesota into the program. In a not so beautiful way, the Big Beautiful Bill gave discretion to governors to participate in the federal tax credit program.

On behalf of all students stuck in Minnesota schools with abysmal math and reading instruction and dangerous bathrooms, let me be the first to urge Gov. Walz to opt-in. It’s a no-brainer.

It would be very cynical and mean-spirited to not allow Minnesota nonprofits to take advantage of the tax credit and provide scholarships to families in struggling schools. But cynical and mean-spirited are adjectives we’ve used to describe Walz before.

At his core, Tim Walz is a union teacher. And the teachers’ union that helped get him elected and reelected would never condone an expansion of parental choice in Minnesota, even if it didn’t involve state money. What if choice worked? What if parental choice became popular? What if parents demanded choice from the Minnesota legislature? That would be the education cartel’s worst nightmare.

Today that cartel monopolizes the K-12 landscape, serving 870,566 students. Private schools serve just 73,143 students and homeschools just 29,062. It will take a year for scholarship granting organizations to get set up and meet new federal guidelines. Even the most optimistic projections for the new program won’t result in a massive shift from public to private schools.

But when enough families use a scholarship to make a different choice for their kids, eventually, the public school system will wake up and say, “What are they doing down the street that’s attracting so many of our kids? How are they achieving with the same students we are failing?”

That’s the dual purpose of parental choice: immediately rescue children from persistently failing public schools and use market forces to improve the entire system statewide.  

If Tim Walz won’t sign a parental choice bill himself, the least he can do is get out of the way and allow Congress to rescue Minnesota kids from his failing schools. How can he look those families in the eye and say no?