School choice is today’s top civil rights issue, Sen. Ted Cruz told a group of several hundred students at a rally in Washington on Wednesday during National School Choice Week.
“Just last week we celebrated Martin Luther King Day. In 1963, Dr. King stood at the Lincoln Memorial and promised justice for all of our children. School choice is the civil rights issue of the 21st century,” the Texas Republican senator and 2016 presidential hopeful said (hear his remarks here).
Cruz declared that school choice was a way of “ensuring every child has an opportunity to receive an excellent education, that it shouldn’t matter what your race or ethnicity or zip code is, every single child deserves an opportunity to achieve the very best.”
The school choice movement has been growing with increasing numbers of charter schools and options such as publicly funded vouchers for private schools.
Cruz is a supporter of new legislation introduced on Tuesday by Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina that would encourage states to establish school choice programs for students with disabilities; create a pilot program at five military bases that would provide scholarships to students so they could leave public schools; and expand the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program for low-income children.
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