In the 1989 movie Field of Dreams, Iowa farmer Ray Kinsella (played wonderfully understated by Kevin Costner) hears a voice say, “If you build it, he will come.” (It is often misquoted as “they will come.”) Unless you’ve been out to lunch for the past 3½ decades, you understand the reference.
Parents who are taking advantage of new and expanded school choice initiatives are having their own Field of Dreams experience. People are scurrying to school choice options like Swifties clamor for tickets to a Taylor Swift concert.
Take Kansas’s nearest neighbor to the south for example. In 2023, the Sooner State adopted a new tax credit scholarship program. The concept of their program is like others tax credit scholarship programs across the nation: state income tax credits are provided to families to use for private school expenses. A Q&A discussion of the specifics of the program can be found here. Kansas is one of many other tax credit programs that can be found in 20 states. Operationally, The Kansas Tax Credit Scholarship differs from Oklahoma in the way the dollars flow, but the idea is basically the same.
The Oklahoma legislature capped the program, which began this year, at $150 million in 2024. The amount ascends to $200 million in 2025 and $250 million in 2026. It is important for Kansans to be cognizant of the Oklahoma program because there has been some buzz in the Kansas legislature to launch something similar.
The Oklahoma program certainly opened with a “build it, and he will come” parallel. The expectation was that there would be about 35,000 applicants the first year. The state received 36,000 applicants in the first 90 minutes. That’s right – minutes.
School choice “build it and he will come” examples:
- Oklahoma’s new tax credit scholarship program – 36,000 applicants in the first 90 minutes.
- Utah – applications far out distanced supply in the first year. The “overwhelming number of applications in only the first 24 hours” caused the Utah legislature to double the funding for the program.
- In Iowa (home to Field of Dreams), the number of applicants for their new ESA program (2023) more than tripled the number of applications anticipated.
- Arizona’s universal ESA – after expanding their ESA to a truly universal one, the number of participants grew by 600% – from 11,000 to 77,000.
- Florida – their ESA enrollment jumped 63% in one year, from 83,700 in 2022 to 136,807 in 2023.
- North Carolina – over 85,000 students are on charter school waitlists.
- Montana became the 46th state to allow charter schools. Despite a lawsuit that contends the state is dragging its feet allowing charters, 19 new charters were approved in the first year. If you are keeping score, it is very rural Montana 19 (in one year), Kansas 9 (in thirty years).
- Nationwide 67% of charter schools have waitlists – nearly 1,000,000 students.
In the movie, Ray hears that now-iconic line while walking through his cornfield. As we all know, he builds the baseball field over the protests of Mark (Timothy Busfield), his brother-in-law. The analogy between the movie and school choice is that Mark represents the education establishment. Like the educrats, Mark wants to preserve the status quo, considering Ray out of touch with reality. And anything different is not only whimsical but ultimately a threat to an established way of life. There is no room for something different. Something with the potential of improving an individual’s life.
All parents want the best education for their children. There is a parallel between that desire and Field of Dreams. Consider this: in the movie, the protagonist chooses to turn a cornfield into a baseball field to address issues from his childhood. Similarly, allowing families to symbolically build their own version of turning a cornfield into a baseball field through school choice provides optimism for their children’s future. Of course, Field of Dreams is a fantasy. But that doesn’t mean school choice has to be the same.
Another main theme in Field of Dreams is regret. Ray regrets the way he and his father became estranged when Ray was an early teenager and were never able to reconnect. Let’s hope the Kansas legislature has their own Ray Kinsella moment. One in which they allow Kansans from all walks of life – not just the ones who can afford it – their own educational versions of Field of Dreams. As exhibited in several states across the country, many with barely a cornfield, indeed, if you build it, he (they) will come.
David Dorsey – Kansas Policy Institute
David Dorsey is a Senior Education Policy Fellow with Kansas Policy Institute. His primary emphasis in this role is combining his time spent as a public school teacher with policy research on issues related to K-12 finance, student achievement, and education reform. Prior to joining KPI, David spent 20 years as a public school elementary teacher, seventeen in Kansas.
