Mississippi Speaker of the House Jason White was watching the successful but narrow passage of Donald Trump’s package of tax breaks and spending reductions, and he thinks he now has the strategy to get major changes to the state’s K-12 education system through the Legislature.
He says the House in 2026 will package all the changes it wants to see into one massive piece of legislation – something along the lines of a “one big, beautiful education bill.”
It will take more than branding, though, to get such legislation passed.
There is a big difference between Trump’s big bill and the one White has in mind. Republicans in Congress were able to hold together just enough of their majorities in both houses to pass the legislation because of one provision: the extension of the tax cuts enacted in 2017 during the president’s first term. GOP members who didn’t like the massive amount of deficit spending in Trump’s big bill or the steep cuts to Medicaid and food stamps still voted “yes” because they didn’t want to be tagged with a steep increase in taxes that might have otherwise occurred at the end of this year. A “no” vote would have invited Trump-backed challengers in the next round of party primaries, all of whom would have accused the targeted incumbents of “voting to raise your taxes.”
White has no such stick to hold over lawmakers’ heads within his education platform, which includes lifting restrictions on public school transfers, closing or consolidating some schools, allowing home-schooled children to play in public school sports and, most controversial of all, using taxpayer funds to pay for private school tuition.
Most if not all of these ideas have significant bipartisan opposition, especially in those areas of the state where the public schools are doing well academically. That’s why when proposed individually during the 2025 legislative session, the bills got nowhere in the Senate or, in the case of private school vouchers, not even out of White’s own chamber.
The majority of legislators might warm to a few of these proposals separately. Lumping them together, though, is likely to have the opposite reaction.
