- Several states are looking to propose legislation expanding education options next year, while others are facing lawsuits claiming school choice voucher programs are unconstitutional.
- While school choice had many wins in 2023, Oklahoma, Wisconsin and South Carolina are all facing lawsuits after passing policies and legislation creating more options for student education.
- “It just baffles me that we are pro-choice on so many things, but we still struggle with freedom of choice when it comes to schools,” Republican state Rep. Mark White told The Tennesseean.
(Daily Caller)—School choice is going to be a hot-button issue next year as several states are set to propose legislation expanding education options, while others are gearing up to defend against lawsuits claiming voucher programs are unconstitutional and an “existential threat” to public schools.
School choice advocates passed legislation in Nebraska, Florida, Ohio and other states in 2023, with a major victory in Oklahoma as well after the Statewide Virtual Charter School Board approved an application for a Catholic online school in June, the first religious charter school in the country. Several states are looking to follow their lead in 2024 and expand education options for parents, while others have become the target of lawsuits by public education advocates, who argue that voucher programs are unconstitutional.
In Tennessee, Republican state Rep. Mark White, who is a former teacher, is hoping to put legislation on the agenda in January that would expand the state’s current voucher program from just three counties to all 95, according to The Tennesseean. White co-sponsored legislation for the original program back in 2019 but said that “it’s time” to bring school choice to the rest of the state.
“It just baffles me that we are pro-choice on so many things, but we still struggle with freedom of choice when it comes to schools,” White told The Tennesseean.
The original program received significant pushback from both Republicans and Democrats, eventually going to the state’s Supreme Court to settle the issue in 2022 after a lawsuit was filed, according to The Tennesseean. Over 3,400 students have applied to the program this year, but Democratic state Sen. Jeff Yarbro said that there is not enough data to show the program has been successful enough to justify expanding it.
A “good education is not a luxury or a one-size-fits-all solution” and parents need more choices now than ever after many children suffered from significant learning loss during the COVID-19 pandemic, White argued in an op-ed for The Commercial Appeal in Memphis.
Lawmakers are also going head to head on the issue in Texas, where Republicans recently failed to pass school choice legislation despite Gov. Greg Abbott calling four special sessions, according to the Austin American-Statesman. The House voted 84-63 Friday to take a proposal for an education savings account program out of a $7.6 billion education funding bill, with 21 Republicans joining the Democrats on the issue.
Abbott, however, promised to continue “advancing school choice in the Texas Legislature and at the ballot box,” in a statement to the Austin American-Statesman. He also said that he is “in it to win it” and “will maintain the fight for parent empowerment until all parents can choose the best education path for their child.”
In July, Ohio passed a budget for 2024 and 2025 that extended the state’s current voucher program to families making up to 450% of the poverty line or $135,000 for a family of four, according to the Dayton Daily News. The state is expected to spend an estimated $2 billion on the voucher program and families who are accepted will receive 12% more funding than they had in years prior, with high school students able to get up to $8,407, and kindergarten through eighth-grade students getting up to $6,165.
Despite this, a lawsuit filed in January 2022 by the Ohio Coalition of Equity & Adequacy of School Funding (OCEASF) is set to go to trial next year regarding the state’s voucher program, and nearly a third of public school districts have joined the lawsuit as of this year, according to the Cleveland Scene. OCEASF argues that the program “poses an existential threat” and has been taking away vital funding from public schools, according to court documents.
Republicans claimed, however, that the program allows parents to choose what is best for their child and dismissed arguments that it takes funding from public schools, noting that the program created a separate funding apparatus for those who choose private education, according to NBC4 Columbus, a local news station.
“That money doesn’t get taken from the public schools now, so that’s the great thing about it,” state Rep. Jay Edwards said.
Oklahoma, Wisconsin and South Carolina are facing lawsuits as well after state officials adopted school choice policies. The Wisconsin Supreme Court is set to hand down a ruling any day now on whether or not the state’s 32-year-old program that gives parents vouchers for their children to attend private schools is unconstitutional since it funds private entities, according to The Associated Press.
On Oct. 26, a group of parents, teachers and advocates filed a lawsuit in South Carolina, arguing that the state’s new school voucher program, which was passed in April, violates the “no aid” clause in the constitution barring the state from funding religious and private schools, according to The State.
“Our constitution reflects a binding commitment that the resources of our state be used to fully fund our public schools, which serve all students,” said Sherry East, president of the South Carolina Education Association. “Instead of private school vouchers, we should invest in our public schools by reducing class size, addressing the teacher shortage crisis and increasing parental involvement.”
In July, public school advocates in Oklahoma made a similar argument in their lawsuit, claiming that the state could not approve a charter for the St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School because the school will discriminate based on sexual orientation and gender identity that is not in line with Catholic doctrine. They also claim that the charter violates the state’s constitution because it will be funding religious indoctrination.
Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt previously told the Daily Caller News Foundation that he hopes to “unlock more private” options for education in the future.
OCEASF, White and Abbott’s office did not respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.