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Over the past few years, Mississippi lawmakers have passed some critical conservative reforms. Last year, Mississippi became the first state in America to legislate to eliminate the income tax in 40 years. In 2022, we implemented flat tax reform. A few years before that, we passed important labor market reforms. In 2024, we reformed school funding to get more money into the classroom.
It is thanks to these flagship conservative reforms that Mississippi has enjoyed more economic growth in the past five years than over the previous fifteen combined.
Yet every single time one of these flagship conservative reform was being considered, I noticed a similar pattern. Those opposed to flagship conservative policy are too wily to come straight out and say they don’t want conservative policy in a conservative state. What they do instead is offer less substantial alternatives, which might be perfectly good policy, but don’t really change much at all.
On school funding, for example, those opposed to the new funding formula offered a few tweaks to the old system. Those that did not want income tax to be eliminated proposed a handful of performative tax reductions here and there. Now that Mississippi has a real chance to achieve universal school choice, we are seeing the same distraction strategy.
Speaker Jason White’s Mississippi Education Freedom Bill (HB 2) is the most consequential education legislation seen in a generation.
It establishes Magnolia Student Accounts as education savings accounts to enable universal school choice in Mississippi. Families would receive roughly $7,000 per child deposited into a dedicated account. Parents could use these funds for tuition, curriculum materials, or other approved education expenses at the school of their choice—public, private, charter, or homeschool.
The program is due to begin in the 2027-28 school year with 12,500 accounts. Half of those (6,250) are reserved for students currently enrolled in public schools, while the remaining half are awarded via a first-come, first-served lottery to any eligible student.
Speaker White’s bill goes further by dismantling outdated, self-serving bureaucratic restrictions. It eliminates school districts’ ability to block student transfers: If a receiving district is willing and has capacity, students can freely switch. The bill also removes barriers to charter school growth. HB 2 allows charters to open wherever operators see demand and viability, enabling statewide expansion.
You would have to be a socialist to oppose this – which is why it was so disappointing to see some Republicans listed at the bottom of this message vote against parent power.
Having failed to kill HB2 in the House, the socialists are now trying another tactic. They are offering up far less significant reforms that appeal to conservative ears, but fall far short of giving parents power.
This week the Senate approved a cluster of such education bills. There’s a bill that will require financial literacy lessons, another that will insist on civics. One of the bills approved by the Senate will try to improve math outcomes, another that will require 8th graders to reach a certain reading standard before advancing.
All of these things may be desirable, but they fall far short of parent power.
The danger is that some misguided voices big up these bills as something more substantial than they really are – and in doing make it easier for those opposed to flagship conservative reform to quietly kill off the important bits in HB2.
HB2 has now passed out of the Mississippi House and is on its way for consideration by the State Senate. If enacted, this would represent the pinnacle of conservative education reform in the United States. Most importantly, it shows a deep understanding that truly successful education reform requires parental involvement.
The Magnolia State has made great progress in recent years on the education front. Mississippi’s fourth graders now read better than those in New York, California, or Minnesota, according to National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores. You read that correctly: A state that barely a decade ago ranked near the bottom for fourth grade reading now sits near the top of the NAEP tables.
But despite Mississippi’s stellar progress, almost half of fourth graders still are not proficient in reading and math, and roughly one in four elementary students continues to be chronically absent.
The solution to that is not to micromanage how teachers teach in every classroom in our state, but to give families the power to choose the education for their child. Mississippi needs to give parents – not politicians – the ultimate oversight of what happens in the classroom.
You cannot credibly claim to be a conservative in the legislature if you oppose HB2. Here, incidentally, is a list of the Republican members of the House that sided with the socialists against parent power.
Who sided with progressives to try to block school choice?
- Richard Bennett
- Andy Boyd
- Billy Calvert
- Carolyn Crawford
- Becky Currie
- Jill Ford
- Greg Haney
- Stacey Hobgood-Wilkes
- Timmy Ladner
- Clay Mansell
- Kent McCarty
- Missy McGee
- Dana McLean
- Gene Newman
- Fred Shanks
- Troy Smith
- Lance Varner
Douglas Carswell is the President and CEO of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy.
MageeNews.com is the online news source for Simpson and surrounding counties as well as the State of Mississippi
