If anyone needed reason to be leery about the “school choice” plan being pushed by Mississippi’s House of Representatives, the size of the bill alone should provide a large red flag.
When the legislation, co-authored by House Speaker Jason White, was filed, it came in at a whopping 553 pages. It has since been pared down in committee to a “svelte” 446 pages – still so large that we’d be surprised if many of those lawmakers who narrowly passed the bill last week in the House would have read much past its nine-page opening summary.
White’s acknowledged strategy, after failing to get his school choice agenda through last year, was to cobble all the proposed education changes into one piece of legislation, thinking that there would be enough in there to please a majority of members, rather than again trying to pass the reforms separately.
He’s mimicking the tactic used by Donald Trump and Republican congressional in getting the One Big Beautiful Bill enacted last summer. That 870-page piece of legislation included hundreds of provisions that, if handled in smaller bites, would have been less likely to survive. But by tying the permanent extension of tax cuts, which would otherwise have expired at the end of 2025, to other less popular priorities of the administration, it held the Republican majorities together to get the gargantuan bill passed.
House Bill 2, which its authors call the “Mississippi Education Freedom Act,” likewise covers a lot of ground. It would make it easier for students to transfer from one public school district to another, increase the number of communities where public charter schools could be established, reduce the amount of statewide testing in the elementary grades, expand the state’s successful literacy initiative and apply those reading strategies to math as well. Most controversially, the legislation would provide for the phased-in creation of Education Savings Accounts, funded by public education dollars, which could be used to pay for private school tuition, including for students who are already attending private schools.
Unlike the sweetener of tax cuts in the One Big Beautiful Bill, though, HB 2 does not contain much that would mute the opposition within the Legislature and among school superintendents. The legislation includes a pay raise, but only for teacher assistants. And it adds provisions that soften some of the changes to the state retirement system that were enacted a year ago for all new public employees, not just educators.
The Senate is likely to put the brakes again on the House’s ambitious plan. It should.
There are legal and financial concerns about Education Savings Accounts, not to mention valid worries about whether they would accelerate racial and socioeconomic segregation in the schools. But even putting that issue aside, there is too much packed into HB 2 to be comfortable that it is not also full of unintended consequences.
The bill, for example, would de-emphasize statewide tests in the elementary school years on the belief that students are overtested and that too much of the school year is spent on prepping for those tests. If Mississippi waits, though, until high school to objectively identify where students are receiving a substandard education, it will be too late to do much about it.
If Mississippi’s public schools were showing noticeable and rapid decline, there might be reason to gamble on some radical changes. Just the opposite has been happening. Public school performance, according to the metrics, has been improving, so much so that other states have been taking notice.
Even HB 2 supporters such as Jason White and Gov. Tate Reeves boast that Mississippi public education is on the right trajectory. Why, then, are they trying to disrupt what appears to be working?
