Oklahoma tax dollars at center of school voucher debate

Across the nation, politicians, educators, parents and celebrities such as Bill Cosby spoke out about the need to financially support and expand the options parents have for their children's education.

“We are told school choice is controversial,” John Fund, a Fox News pundit and former Wall Street Journal columnist, recently told a crowd at the University of Central Oklahoma. “Choice is not controversial unless you are trying to take something away from the adults who are getting something from the system.”

School choice advocates are pushing for a smorgasbord of reforms: more charter schools, tax breaks for donations to private school scholarship funds, access to virtual schools, support for homeschoolers and easier transfers in public schools.

But the most controversial of the school choice policies is a voucher system that allows taxpayer education funding to follow a student and to be used toward tuition at a private school.

“We really believe that everybody should be able to attend the school that they want to and that they can, but what we don't believe is that taxpayer money should foot the bill for private, religious or any kind of for-profit school,” said Linda Hampton, president of the Oklahoma Education Association, the statewide teacher's union and state branch of the National Education Association.