Tuberville Champions School Choice During "National School Choice Week"

WASHINGTON – Today, U.S. Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) participated in a Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee hearing focused on expanding school choice. During the hearing, Sen. Tuberville asked the witnesses questions related to how school choice is preparing the next generation for the future.

In addition, Sen. Tuberville joined his colleagues to introduce a resolution designating Jan. 25-31, 2026, as National School Choice Week.

Read excerpts from the hearing below or watch on YouTube and Rumble.

TUBERVILLE: Thanks for being here. One of the reasons I ran for this position is I've been in education all my life. And I wish we didn't have to have this talk about the Choose Act, you know, school choice. Now we passed it in my state of Alabama, and we'll see how that works. I wish that we had a plan in our country where no child is left behind. And we teach them knowledge, not ideology, through the public system. Again, 35 years of coaching, I went into high schools in every state except for Alaska. And we have some great public schools in this country. We have some great teachers. We have excellent administrators.

Here's the problem. It turned into tenure. You can't fire anybody. If I was in coaching and I had somebody I couldn't coach and I couldn't fire them, I'm gonna get my ass fire at the end of the day. It' the same thing with teaching. If we're not teaching knowledge in these schools, we got huge problems. And that's not what's happening in a lot of our schools. We got way too many administrators in our country. We have tripled the amount of administrators in this country as compared to teachers. [...] So, what I'm saying is we've forced our hand into this school choice. It's been forced because we've wasted trillions of dollars. And again, I've worked with thousands of kids that come in with 4.0 GPAs and they couldn't read and write. They were passed along. Just get on. We don't want you anymore. You're a good athlete, so let somebody else do it.

I spent a lot of my own money teaching kids to read. I had a kid tell me one time after we taught them to read what's the most exciting thing that happened to you? He said, 'I can read a menu now. I don't have to go in and order hamburger.' It's embarrassing. If I was a teacher in this country and I saw what was happening to our kids in the public system, we should have a run on these buildings up here. That being said, we got a lot of work to do. I'm getting ready to hopefully be governor of Alabama. We're fixing to change everything in education. We need to change our education system, K-12, higher education. We need to get back to teaching and stop this ideology, get away from tenure, fire the bad people that don't do their job, and get back to doing what's right in this country and help our kids. We're stealing from the American taxpayers in a lot of ways, but this is one of them. They're losing their money because they're not getting their money's worth.

So, Ms. Worrel, If you have school choice, and I'm in Alabama, you tell me how I'm going to transition from school choice to workforce development. How do I do that? I mean, how does that work? How does school choice and how do we understand the significance of making that transition from school choice?

WORREL: I think, Senator, you have an incredible opportunity in Alabama to do it right from the beginning with all the options that are a part of the school choice continuum. If you go into them, it doesn't just have to be schools that are for dropout students, should have career technical education and work based learning opportunities and going to the employers in those regions where you have schools, which is everywhere, is I think the first way to start that and to see what the high demand careers are coming in Alabama-

TUBERVILLE: So, what grade area would you start transforming from school choice to workforce development? Would you wait till the twelfth grade? Would you start at the ninth? Would you start in the sixth? How would you do that?

WORREL: If I had a magic wand and we could do it I believe early exposure. A passport of skills, a way that kids can start to learn what it looks like, what it what it feels like, what they wanna explore, and then build on that passport of skills and understanding early in elementary school through middle school and make it more tangible and weave it into as they go into high school shouldn't be the first time in the junior year that they step foot in a major employer. It just shouldn't be.

TUBERVILLE: Here's the way I look at it. You got to teach these kids to read and write. If you don't read and write before the third grade, you're about had it. You can do it, but it's awful really, really hard. But we've got to teach reading and writing early. Math and science and history will come if they can read. You can't do math and history and science if you can't read. And so that's one of the things I plan on doing. And so hopefully, we're gonna do workforce development. The K-12 to me is just so obsolete. It really is. It's in the Stone Ages. There's a lot of kids that don't need to go twelve years. You know, they need to go out in the workforce and learn and be an example.

TUBERVILLE: Mr. Kirtley, I live ten years in Coral Gate. Coached 10 years at University Miami from 1985-1995. Won a lot of games. But I saw a city transform. There's not a more diverse city in this country than [Miami-Dade] and Broward County. And I saw our education get better. Because a lot of these kids come in, they can't speak English. They come from all these third world countries. But they did a great job doing it. How did they do that?

KIRTLEY: Thank for the question, Senator. As I mentioned earlier in my testimony, Miami Dade is the freest market for K-12 education in this country. Every student in Florida, but certainly Miami Dade, has the ability, if they, want to have an education savings account to use for tuition to a private school or to buy education services and products to customize for education. We have 150 charter schools. We have 400 private schools that kids can attend and low-income kids do attend on our scholarships. But most importantly, as I said earlier, the public district in Miami Dade did not shy away from competition. They didn't complain, not once. When the superintendent came in 2008, when choice was just coming to the fore, he said, I'm not afraid of this. We're gonna create options that families want, and they did so. They have over 100 magnet schools in Miami Dade. And I would add, sir, they have amazing technical education programs. Automotive technology, medical technology where they'll have three levels. Kids can go right into nursing, they can go to school and nursing or they can go on to college and then go to med school, but they all go to the same public high school together. It's a beautiful thing. Competition works. [...]

TUBERVILLE: In my state of Alabama, in other states with all the people coming here from other countries, our schools are being overrun. We don't have enough people to teach, you know, the different languages that are coming in. You have that because you have people that have come from other countries that have grown up in the system that have been educated speaking, you know, different languages from Latin America, Central America, and those things. How do we do it now? How do people that don't have that number of people that can speak the language of these young kids coming, how do we do that? I mean, how do we transition? Because we put them in a room and just turn on a video. I mean, tell me how that works.

Ms. Garcia, you're shaking your head. Could you answer that question for me?

GARCIA: Well, in the state of Arizona, what we've seen over the last few years is that a lot of teachers have been brought in on visas to be able to teach students of different with different languages. We also have first generation and second-generation teachers who are bilingual and can speak two languages and can help students, not only flourish in their original language, but also learn English so that they are bilingual and able to have two languages academically. [...]

TUBERVILLE: If we're gonna make it to 22nd Century and make our kids better, What's your thought? I'll start with you, Ms. Garcia.

GARCIA: Well, thank you for inviting me. Thank you, Senator Tuberville for the question. I like to think about the future and think of each one of my students and what that could look like, what ensured a lot of their success. I have students all over the world. Many of them have joined the military. Some of them are dentists. Some of them are parents buying homes. And one of the things that I think helped them and I think helps every student is the ability for us to connect with them, see them, see where their strengths are, where their weaknesses are. I, too, Coach, was a softball coach for many, many years in middle school, so a little bit different experience. Girl softball in 8th grade. But what I found very quickly there is each one of my students needed direct time with and support to make sure that they were hitting the goals that they needed.

Unfortunately, my experience in public schools over the last 20 years have shown my class size grow larger and larger and larger. My first year I had about maybe 26 students per class period. Now it's close to 32 and 34, which means I'm teaching 160 8th graders every day. So, what I would love to see is innovative way and direct tax money going to ensure lower class sizes, highly qualified educators, ensuring that we have tutors to meet these needs of every student. Showing that kids had before school and after school programs, qualified librarians, nurses, that we had services available to meet the needs of all of our students. And I believe there is a path to get there as long as parents, educators, as well as policymakers are in the same room together. [...]

KIRTLEY: Thank you, Senator. I guess I would say, I hope that other states followed the journey that we took over the last 30 years. I mentioned earlier that 30 years ago, we had a very simple definition of public education. Every dollar went to the districts, districts ran all the schools, assigned kids via ZIP Code. Work great for me, works great for most kids, doesn't work great for every kid. Now in Florida, we have a different definition. Parents can direct the dollars to different providers and different delivery methods. We've gone from 35th out of 38 states on the NAPE back in 1998 to 2019, we were in the top five. Graduation rates have gone from 50% overall, and much less from minority kids, to over 90%. That's an incredible change. And choice wasn't the only reason why that happened. But choice was the catalyst that made other reform elements work better and faster. And I just hope that people in other states will challenge their definitions of public education. What is it? Is it really the old definition? Try something new. Try something innovative. Push the power to families and good things will happen.

TUBERVILLE: Thank you. I'm with you. Choice should make public schools compete and get better. Ms. Worrel?

WORREL: Senator, thank you. I would just really urge us to not be distracted by conversations that I think take the focus away from students and achievement and literacy. We know that if a kid can't read by 4th grade, they're four times more likely to drop out of high school. We have all the things we need. And I feel like if we lean more into that and listen to parents, listen to students, and be responsive and not be responsive to the systems, but be responsive to the people that we're tasked in giving a world class education to, which are students.

A lot of times, we don't even talk to students or the young people that this is directly impacting, on what their experiences are like. So, I think that if as we move forward, we're going to have to all come together and realize that it's a continuum and not siloed that all of us are necessary for all students to be able to succeed. And when we start to silo off into our adult little corners of the space, kids suffer. And adults may not seem like they're suffering, but eventually we pay the price for failing students. And we're seeing that right now, and we're going to continue to see it unless we change what we're doing. So, thank you for the opportunity to be here.

TUBERVILLE: Well, thank you and thank all of you for being here. We have Foreign Relation Committee hearings today. We have Ag Committee. We have everything going on. There's nothing more important than what we did here today. Nothing. Because if we don't do that, we won't survive as a country. Because we're gonna cheat our kids, and kids are the future. You know, they are our Number 1 commodity. [...]

Senator Tommy Tuberville represents Alabama in the United States Senate and is a member of the Senate Armed Services, Agriculture, Veterans' Affairs, HELP and Aging Committees.