This week, Iowa Senate President Amy Sinclair joins Students Over Systems to discuss the whirlwind passage and implementation of the state’s new universal education savings account (ESA) program. Iowa’s state legislators set an example that many states followed this year by funding students, rather than systems. We discuss Senator Sinclair’s support for education freedom, the impetus behind the Students First Act that Governor Kim Reynolds signed into law in January, and the high demand for the program.
TRANSCRIPT
Ginny Gentles:
Today on Students Over Systems, we’re celebrating Iowa’s commitment to putting students first. Iowa Senate President Amy Sinclair joins us to discuss her state’s education freedom leadership. Welcome to Students Over Systems podcast that celebrates education freedom. I’m your host, Ginny Gentles. At Students Over Systems, we talk with the creators, advocates, and beneficiaries of education freedom. On today’s episode, we’re joined by Iowa State Senator Amy Sinclair. Senator Sinclair has represented the 12th district of Iowa since 2013 and currently serves as the Iowa Senate President. Senator Sinclair, thank you so much for joining us.
Senator Amy Sinclair:
Thanks for having me.
Ginny Gentles:
Well, before we jump into the amazing story of the Students First Act and its passage earlier this year, I’d love to get a sense of why you support school choice and education freedom. What led you to be an advocate for education freedom?
Senator Amy Sinclair:
So, you live your life and don’t really think about becoming an advocate for something like this. I think it’s something that just happens through the course of life. So I was first elected to the Iowa Senate in 2012, and so I’ve served since then, but I came into the Iowa Senate with a couple of really strong champions already in place for school choice. Senator Jerry Behn and Senator Brad Zaun were both already here and I would say they had a lot to do with it, but there’s some backstory that also makes sense that I think probably led up to where I was when I met those two guys. I’m a mom of three boys. They’re exceptional boys, they’re smart kids. My oldest son was very precocious. We didn’t realize that. A teacher told us that he needed to be accelerated and advanced in mathematics.
And so they started that process within our public school. We have great public schools. I can’t complain about them at all. My third child is the only one still at home and he’s still enrolled in public school with, in our local community. We don’t even access Iowa’s open enrollment system. We love our public school. That being said, our oldest child was advanced and he was accelerated and doing a couple of years of math for every school year for a couple of years. It wasn’t until he got to, I believe it was fifth grade, and the teacher was clearly not comfortable with him being accelerated. And so we went ahead and bought him the learning aids he needed so that he could continue to work at his pace without having to add extra burden to her schedule.
We understand that teachers have a lot when they have big classrooms, and as his mom and dad, we wanted him to be challenged, but at the same time be okay with letting him continue at his pace. At one point he did struggle with the question that the resources we got him were not helping him with. And so he asked his teacher for some assistance and in front of his classroom full of 26 peers, she said, oh, so you’re not as smart as you thought you were. We tried to work through the channels on that. That was totally inappropriate. I think, I’m hopeful that everybody in your audience just gasped a little, right?
Ginny Gentles:
I sure did.
Senator Amy Sinclair:
Because it’s not okay. That isn’t how you treat students, especially not students who are largely not your problem in the classroom. Why would that be the place you go? And so we tried to follow the correct channels. We spoke to her and she refused to acknowledge that it wasn’t part of something that, she didn’t acknowledge she did anything wrong. We went to the principal, nothing was done. My son was coming home from school crying regularly. He was just stressed out. He felt isolated and he asked me if he could homeschool and he was going to have that same teacher again the following year. And so we chose to homeschool him for a couple of years, probably the best choice we made.
We were able to get him where he needed to go. We have a great homeschool assistance program through our local public school. It was a super option for us. So I came into the Senate and met these two school choice champions with that experience resonating in the background. Right. And so when I meet these two guys, I went into the Senate not thinking about school choice being necessary. We had school choice. We were given the opportunity to homeschool our child. We did. We have district open enrollment. So for me, it never occurred to me, and again, I mentioned we have great public schools, whether it’s onsite instruction, whether it’s that homeschool assistance program that supported us when we made that choice. We have really great public schools. Even 12 years ago, wow, would’ve been longer than that, probably 15 years ago here in Iowa, we still had a great public school system and choice options.
It wasn’t until I was elected and met these two guys who talked about their students, who talked about the kids that they represent, who talked about the broader picture. What about those moms who don’t, they’re working all the time and they can’t homeschool their children? What about those families that simply don’t have the money to provide for transportation to get to an open enrolled school about? I realized upon talking to both Senator Zaun and Senator Behn, that school choice was allowed in Iowa, but it wasn’t encouraged and it wasn’t supported.
And so school choice, even though all of the laws were the right laws that allowed for homeschooling, that allowed for open enrollment, that allowed for attendance at non-public schools. And we have a great STO program that allows for a tax credit for scholarships for non-public schools, but it’s still not actually choice for families who need it the most. We had choice in Iowa. We had school choice, we had parental choice for people with the means to choose it. And it was that realization that I had that choice because I had the ability, the skills, and the means to do it. But most families don’t have that. And so when we look at a choosing students over systems, we weren’t choosing students over systems. We created systems that allowed people to have a choice, but we didn’t enable them to make the best choice for their student. We were still just operating a system.
Ginny Gentles:
Right. And the system was prioritized. The adults and the systems were prioritized, and the adults, the parents who were able to wrangle their kids out of it and make it work could do that. But what we’re looking at right now in 2023 in Iowa and beyond is more of a universal option, which of course, plenty of parents love their public schools, just as I’ve heard you say a number of times. So there isn’t going to be a universal take up of these options, but we’re seeing a shift from these choice at the margins or choice if you can navigate it to here you go, the option exists.
Senator Amy Sinclair:
Have your choice.
Ginny Gentles:
Yeah. You’ve got it. If this is what your child needs, if this is what is a good fit for your family. So we’re seeing 2023 is shaping up to be one of the biggest years in school choice history. We thought 2021 was, we called that the year of school choice, but Iowa led the way earlier this year with passing the Students First Act and Governor Kim Reynolds signed that bill during National School Choice Week at the end of January. You made it look easy.
Senator Amy Sinclair:
It was not easy, let’s be honest. So again, I said I was elected 2012, took office 2013. I didn’t really take up the mantle of, and we call it school choice. Do you know what I want to tell you? It is parental choice for a child’s education. We aren’t choosing a school over another school, we’re choosing a child. So when we say school choice, let’s be clear in what we’re saying. We’re saying it’s the parent’s right. It’s the parent’s responsibility to choose the best option for their child. And so that’s what I talk about when I talk about school choice. It’s not school choice, it’s child choice. It’s a choice for a parent to do what’s right for the child. That being said, it hasn’t been an easy go of it. We circle clear back. Senator Behn, Senator Zaun have been working on this so much longer than I have, and I wasn’t automatically a champion when I walked in.
As I said, as I’ve said a lot, I’ve been heavily involved in public schools, in public education, both working and volunteering in our local schools all of my adult life really. I believe wholeheartedly that connection that the communities have in their local public school, especially in rural areas, is a solid connection that we need to protect. When we start undermining the pillars of our community, if you will, we kind of lose touch with each other. And so I wholeheartedly believe in our schools, in our churches, in our local governments, in our hospitals, I believe in those things, in those institutions. They matter to a society. So it wasn’t an automatic step that I took to start looking at kids, right, at the student and not the system. But Jerry Behn and Brad Zaun really, really started after me immediately because they knew I had connections within our public school systems.
And so we started talking and I think I went to a training with one of them, and it just opened up my eyes really to make that connection that while Iowa had a lot of choice options, we weren’t really focusing on the child, we were focusing on a system and we were only doing it for folks with the means to do it. And so we introduced, I was in the minority for the first four years I was in office. So I’ve been in office 11 years. And in the minority, what you do is you talk about your agenda. And so every year we would find a place to add on a students over system type bill, a school choice, a parental choice and education bill, an amendment to some other bill.
So we would always talk about it. Every year we were talking about it even in the minority, just because we wanted to set up that conversation. We wanted to start talking about, yes, we have a great system and we want to keep that system intact. It will continue to educate the bulk of children in Iowa, but we also want to talk about those kids who are falling through the cracks in a system because there are those who happened, just the two years I took my son out. It’s not that the system was broken, but it was broken for my child.
Ginny Gentles:
So for the last however many years that you’ve been engaged in this, you mentioned going to training, but generally to get a bill across the finish line, there’s a lot of coalition work, there’s a lot of ensuring that constituents are engaged with legislators. Can you tell us a little bit about the process that built to this great success?
Senator Amy Sinclair:
Absolutely. And we have some great coalitions for those non-public schools here in Iowa. We have, the organization that has the Christian schools, we have the catholic school organization, we have just other mom groups. A lot of people came together to talk about, we have the STOs also, those scholarship granting organizations that work with the tax credits. And so all of those interested parties came together and formed a coalition around what it meant to really choose students over systems. And so in the background, the non-governmental organizations were coming together and saying, what do we need and how can we make it better? And how can we work with the legislature and our communities to really serve these kids and families? And so that was happening in the background. Within the legislature, I think one of the hardest parts for the legislature is the rural folks.
And I’m a very, very rural legislator. So convincing rural legislators that we needed an ESA option, that we needed a students over systems option was hard because as I said, my local school district is one of the most important institutions in my community. I don’t want to do anything that undermines that. And so convincing other like-minded legislators that what we were doing, because we have good rural schools, what we were doing was not going to impact them. Parents will choose to stay there with them. And so it was some of that, making sure that the misinformation wasn’t coming in over the top of the reality of the situation. Sure, we passed an ESA bill that will ultimately allow any student to choose another district, to choose a non-public school, to choose something else. Most moms and dads in most school districts will not choose anything else and it will have zero impact on their community school.
Ginny Gentles:
Well, there’s some financial benefits that you built into the Students First Act this year that I felt could likely be a model for other states who are addressing this very same issue of concerns from the rural legislators. Can you talk a little bit about the provisions of the Students First Act? It does have this education savings account or ESA program.
Senator Amy Sinclair:
Sure.
Ginny Gentles:
But what else is in there?
Senator Amy Sinclair:
So I’d love to talk about that. A lot of the conversations surrounding education is that we’re administrative top-heavy, that we aren’t spending enough on teachers’ salaries, that we have too many siloed funds that aren’t getting at the real educating of children, that budgets were tight with where inflation was because of printing money like drunken sailors. So what we did was took away some of the chains around some of the siloed dollars, if you will, so that those dollars could be used for teacher salaries. So first of all was granting flexibility to local districts on how they use moneys they already have. If indeed you want to give more money to your teachers to pay your teachers more, you may. If you want to leave it in those siloed programs, you may do that as well. But there is no reason that we should have millions and millions and millions of dollars sitting in fund balances that aren’t being used for any purpose if teacher salaries are a problem, we should address that.
The second thing we did was also took those categoricals. We have a teacher salary supplement categorical and a couple of other categoricals won’t go into them. Every state’s funding system is different, but we have some designated funds that would go to certain things. Well, the amount to about $1,200. So even though a school might lose a student to an non-public school through an ESA, they’re going to get to retain $1,200 in categorical funding that can be used for teacher salaries. And they get to maintain any of their local property taxes that are levied, such as a management fund or an instructional support, that there are local property tax funds that regardless of the student, regardless of your certified enrollment, it’s based on your property valuation. So any local property taxes you’re also keeping. That’s separate from this.
So they’re not having to educate a child and they’re getting to keep the $1,200 in categorical funds for not educating the child because we hear you. You can’t just get rid of a teacher because you lose one student out of a classroom. And we also hear you that local property taxes in Iowa, they’re locally levied by the local school boards and they’re not a state function. And so we hear you that you want to maintain your local control over those. All of those things were granted. So the flexibility with categorical funds as well as getting to keep that $1,200 in categorical funds regardless of whether you have the student. There was a larger school district, I won’t mention the name of the school district, but I met with an administrator from there and he quietly said that they would have to lose goodness, it was in excess of 300 students to break even.
Ginny Gentles:
So that doesn’t sound like a lot to people who might be used to giant school districts, but I,
Senator Amy Sinclair:
It’s Iowa. We only have 3.1 million people in the entire state, half a million students in the state.
Ginny Gentles:
Right. And quite a few small students,
Senator Amy Sinclair:
320-odd school districts. And one of our school districts that spoke to me about it would have to lose over 300 students to even see a dollar’s-worth of loss.
Ginny Gentles:
Those numbers need to be put out in front, not just in those whispered conversations. Right. Let’s be real and factual rather than getting carried away with the rhetoric. And,
Senator Amy Sinclair:
There’s a lot of dishonesty in the rhetoric here in Iowa. Now, again, not all states have done it the way we did it, but we wanted to put a protective backstop in place because we do believe in the system we have. We do believe that by and large, our educators are doing the best job they can with the resources that they have with the students coming to them. So this was not about undermining our public system. This was about parental choice and education and acknowledging Pierce v. Society of Sisters, that a parent has the right and the responsibility to educate their child as they see fit. And so balancing those two, balancing the fact that we believe in the institution that is our state public school system, as well as believing that parents have the final authority in what that looks like. And so marrying those two, we tried to do a really good job of that.
It took us several years. You mentioned this is third year in a row, that the governor had introduced a priority bill that would get at a students over systems type of approach to education. So this is our third actual attempt that we’ve sent a bill out of the Senate that dealt with students over systems, and it took a lot of work and some hard campaigning this last year to get to a point where we were able to step up, say, this is the first bill we’re going to pass, and we are going to acknowledge that parents have the right to educate their child, and we are going to acknowledge that our public system matters and we’re going to take those both on and really just work to make it a better place for kids.
Ginny Gentles:
All right. So let’s talk a little bit about that word campaigning. We’ll step out of this policy wonk conversation that we’ve had about the provisions of the bill and talk about the legislative campaigns that might have been impacted by support for education freedom for a student’s first approach. Can you tell us a little bit about what happened in Iowa to some legislators who did not support this approach?
Senator Amy Sinclair:
I can, and I’ll admit I’m a political junkie, so what happened made me a little nervous. I’ll just be honest. I loved Ronald Reagan and I believed wholeheartedly in the fact that we shouldn’t fight amongst ourselves. But sometimes you have an issue arise that matters so much that it’s time to draw that line in the sand. And this for the governor really became that line in the sand. She wanted for moms and dads to be in charge of their child’s education. And she didn’t feel like it was happening in every instance. We had a handful of legislators in the house that roadblock continually year after year, passage of student-first types of programming, those student first types of bills. And the governor actually waited into primaries and she waited into really tough primaries and was successful in all but one. It was genuinely a mandate for parental rights in education, our primaries last year.
So we got through the primary season. Those candidates then went on to win the general elections, and we came in this year with truly the votes to pass what became probably the strongest bill that had been introduced in the state since those amendments that we try to draft back in the minority to just start raising awareness. We have what will ultimately become a universal school choice program that puts dollars into our public system to make sure the teachers are being well paid and the classrooms are being well served. And that gives local folks flexibility both at the school board level, but also at the parental level to make the right choices for the kids that they serve.
Ginny Gentles:
Right. So we saw the vote turnout in favor of the Students First Act with the Senate at 31 to 18 and the House 55 to 45. So that change in the House membership,
Senator Amy Sinclair:
So we’re actually, so the results after the election in 2022, the House is actually now 64 Republican members. We did lose some of those. We still lost some votes and the Senate having 34 Republican members and we lost some of those. It didn’t end up being a bipartisan vote. And I have to tell you, it should. Most of the students who will be impacted by this live in urban areas and those urban areas are largely represented by Democrats and it’s baffling to me that the students who will benefit the most are not being properly represented here at the State House.
Ginny Gentles:
Sometimes it takes a little while for legislators to realize of the impact of these programs, the positive impact, and then they start hearing from families. And we certainly see some bipartisan support in Florida because of that. The constituents come and say, this has been life changing and do not touch or harm this program. So I hope that that same thing happens in Iowa too. Let’s talk a little bit more about the role that the governor played, and I also want to talk about the role that the teachers unions might have played. They haven’t come up yet. We’re 21 minutes to our conversation, and I have to say, typically in these conversations, unions come up a little bit earlier. What’s the role of the unions in Iowa and did you see them coming out strong against this proposal?
Senator Amy Sinclair:
We can get into the conversation about teachers unions. Iowa is a little different. Iowa is a right to work state. We don’t necessarily have a strong of a teacher’s union in Iowa as some states do, and not that we don’t have great teachers who want to be engaged in an organization. There are a lot of teachers who are members of the Professional Educators of Iowa, which is not a union. It is an organization that can in some terms act as a bargaining unit or just as a support organization for a teacher. But it’s not what you see with the NEA and the Iowa affiliate, the ISEA. And so they did make a lot of sound. They made a lot of noise. They spread a lot of lies. They talked about how rural schools would, in one sentence, they would talk about how they would be decimated by the passage of an ESA, and in the next sentence they would talk about how no student from a rural area would benefit because there are no non-public schools in rural areas.
And those two cannot both be true. Those are mutually exclusive statements. You cannot say both. But it doesn’t matter to the ISEAs communications folks. They don’t care if they’re telling lies or not. They said both were absolutely 100% true and all of it would happen. And they tried to scare the rural legislators into not supporting us based on that. They got teachers wound up in rural areas. It will not impact rural Iowa one way or the other. Most students will not see a benefit from this in rural areas even if they wanted to.
Ginny Gentles:
Well, I’ve heard that the unions actually helped school choice legislation in Iowa because the governor was pretty displeased by how the unions conducted themselves during the COVID closures, and that could just be school choice, education freedom, rumors. But I’m wondering, as we talk about the role that the governor played, would you say that the school closures or any actions on the part of the unions did animate her and activate her?
Senator Amy Sinclair:
So you asked, did the union’s behavior during COVID help? 100%. Without question 100%. When you are having teachers carry mocked up coffins around the capitol saying that Kim Reynolds is going to kill them,
Ginny Gentles:
Oh my gosh.
Senator Amy Sinclair:
That’s a problem. When you’re having teachers, and I won’t use the words that they used, but F Kim Reynolds, calling her COVID Kim. No one, no one was trying to kill teachers. In fact, as we were transitioning back into school and Iowa was probably the first state to get transitioned back into full-time in-person instruction, we prioritized any teacher who wanted to get the vaccine first to have it. We prioritized them so that they would be safe if they chose to go that route. Now, we didn’t make any mandates, but we did prioritize them in that process. So to say that Kim Reynolds was harming anyone with the way that she handled the COVID incident, everybody knew that was false. It just didn’t even ring true. So yes, I’m sure that activated the governor. I will tell you, it activated moms and dads and grandmas and grandpa’s.
Ginny Gentles:
They saw the rhetoric for what it was.
Senator Amy Sinclair:
I recall door knocking in a district, in a suburban district, and the last house I went to knocked on a grandma’s door, and she was there with her four grandchildren. Her daughter and daughter-in-law were both nurses. Her son was, I believe, a police officer and her son-in-law a firefighter, they were all essential employees. They were all showing up at work every single day, but the school district they were in had a hybrid system, and so the kids were at home half the time and somebody had to instruct them. They had to be cared for. Childcare wasn’t available to them, their older kids.
That grandma came to the door and when she heard who I was, she was in tears. She started sobbing. She said, I never signed up for this. I never signed up to be my grandchildren’s teacher. And that was at the conclusion of a day where I had knocked on so many doors where either I saw a sweet little face in the window of a child who wouldn’t answer the door because they were there alone or a 10-year old answering the door when they shouldn’t have to a stranger. Yes. The closure of schools, the behavior of some of the teachers, and again, some, definitely spurred action within the legislature in the governor’s office to give parents what they need, which is control over their child’s education.
Ginny Gentles:
Well, thankfully they have that now with the students first program, these education savings accounts. In the upcoming year, they’ll be eligible for accounts, I think that are worth about $7,600, and there’s been an application season of about a month. It’s a short one, and,
Senator Amy Sinclair:
It’s a short one.
Ginny Gentles:
Tell us a little bit as we start concluding our conversation about the response that you’ve had from parents to this new opportunity.
Senator Amy Sinclair:
So I will admit I haven’t checked today, but within the first week, there were over 10,000 applications.
Ginny Gentles:
The legislative analysts for you all had estimated that there would be somewhere around 14 or 15,000.
Senator Amy Sinclair:
And we’ve already exceeded that number.
Ginny Gentles:
Yeah. So you’re going to be exceeding that. But let’s be clear, that’s still what, less than maybe 3% of the student population.
Senator Amy Sinclair:
Sure.
Ginny Gentles:
Again, we’re not seeing the flood gates open completely here.
Senator Amy Sinclair:
It just speaks to the heart of the issue and the heart of the issue is the parents want to have control over what their child is learning and how. And many parents don’t have the means to do that on their own. This speaks to the heart of the issue. Now, many of these that are signing up, many of these that are applying are probably current non-public school students who are just below that 300% federal poverty level, 200% federal poverty level. That’s probably what we’re looking at is a large chunk of those, but also a large chunk of new kids. I was told recently that one Christian school here in the metro area of Des Moines had for their kindergarten class of 120, I believe they have slots for, they had a 500 student wait list.
Ginny Gentles:
Oh my goodness.
Senator Amy Sinclair:
500 student wait list. There’s demand.
Ginny Gentles:
For sure. And what we’ve seen again in other states like Florida, is that education entrepreneurs, private school leaders, educators who are done with the constraints and the problems of the public system, go and form new education options and new schools. So perhaps that’s something that we’ll see in Iowa too, so that there can be a supply to meet that demand among the parents. Senator Sinclair, we’re going to have to have you back on to talk about the ESA and maybe the future of the ESA because it is an unusual program in that in order to participate, families first have to enroll their child in an accredited private school. So as we head into future legislative sessions, I will be curious to hear kind of what the thinking is. Will there be opportunity to expand that constraint on the program? Before we have our last question, I do want to speak about one of our favorite podcasts here at IWF, and that is Problematic Woman, are you a conservative woman?
Do you feel problematic just for existing in today’s political landscape? Every Thursday morning on problematic women, Lauren Evans and Virginia Allen sort through the news to bring you stories and interviews that are of particular interest to you, a problematic woman. That is a woman whose opinions are often excluded or even mocked by those on the so-called pro-woman left. Lauren and Virginia, break down the news you care about in an upbeat and sharp witted way. Search for Problematic Women wherever you get your podcasts. All right, Senator Sinclair, last question. We like to ask our guests to address the school choice myth that bothers you the most and that you want to dispel today.
Senator Amy Sinclair:
Ugh, and of course that’s easy for me. I get so frustrated when people say no public dollars for private purposes. That is infuriating to me. Everything the government does with public dollars goes to a private purpose. We have Medicare and Medicaid, which are public dollars, going to the private healthcare of private citizens. At private hospitals and clinics, we have our SNAP program, our food stamp program, but our public dollars going to private individuals, going to private grocery stores and convenience stores and purchasing their choice of food without any intervention from the government. We have public dollars in the form of scholarships, Pell Grants, GI Bill. There are public dollars going to private post-secondary institutions. And here in the state of Iowa, we have a public/private partnership for our four-year-old preschool program that sends money to private preschool providers for individual children to attend preschool.
Nobody blinks an eye at any of these things. In fact, they would get angry if we suggested that any of those programs should be transitioned to an entirely government-run system. We would be livid if we said, for example, that folks who were getting food assistance had to get their food from some government-run food bank. We would be livid at that. Everyone would come unhinged. We would be angry if we said that folks who were on Medicaid could only go to a public hospital or a public clinic. We would be livid about that. We would say we were discriminating against these individuals in their healthcare choices.
Well, I would suggest to you that the “no public dollars for private purposes myth” is just that. It’s a myth, and it’s beyond time for Americans to wake up to the fact that we shouldn’t trap students in a system that may or may not be serving their needs. Just because we run with this myth, and it is a myth that no public dollars should go to private purposes, that’s all government does is serve the individual needs. We do it in a collective way often, but so many other protected rights of individuals, whether food or healthcare or post-secondary education, we embrace a public private partnership and there is no reason we shouldn’t embrace that same partnership in our K-12 schooling.
Ginny Gentles:
Well, we are so thankful for your fiery defense of students and your commitment to placing students over systems and to shepherding this incredible legislation through. We now have the Students First Act as a model for the nation. Many states followed Iowa after you all led legislatively in January by passing the Students First Act and creating education savings accounts for Iowa students. So Senate President, Amy Sinclair, thank you so much for all that you’re doing and for joining us today.
Senator Amy Sinclair:
It is my pleasure, Ginny.
Ginny Gentles:
We hope listeners found today’s conversation informative and encouraging. If you enjoyed this episode of Students Over Systems, please consider leaving a review on your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to share this episode with your friends. To learn more about the work of the IWF Education Freedom Center, please visit iwf.org/efc. Thank you for listening to Students Over Systems. Until next time, keep celebrating education freedom and brighter futures.
