This is a guest opinion column

Last month, a judge in Alabama slapped a temporary restraining order on the Alabama High School Athletic Association, barring it from excluding students who participate in the state’s private school choice program.

The AHSAA had tried to block nearly 25,000 students from playing sports — that’s how many children take advantage of Alabama’s CHOOSE Act education savings account program, which gives parents access to up to $7,000 that they can use for private school tuition and a host of other approved educational expenses.

The problem started because the AHSAA has bylaws prohibiting students who transfer to a private school from receiving financial aid. The idea is to prevent schools from poaching students and effectively paying them to play sports. The high school sports governing body argues that receiving a state education savings account is a form of financial aid, so they are within their rights to keep those students off sports teams for one year.

While it makes perfect sense to try and stop sports-related financial aid shenanigans, that is nowhere close to what is happening with the school choice program in Alabama.

Unlike under-the-table scholarships that are provided only to athletically gifted students, the CHOOSE program is funded by the state, open to everyone, and completely transparent. The school isn’t offering the student financial aid — the state is — so there is no issue with competition because everyone is on the same playing field.

Also, the value of a CHOOSE Act scholarship is far less than what Alabama spends per pupil in its public schools. The most a CHOOSE student can receive is $7,000. Alabama spends $13,500. Why should students who use government support to attend private school be treated worse than students who use far more government support to attend public schools?

States have wrestled for years with how best to include private schools and homeschooled students in athletics. Famously, more than half of US states have “Tim Tebow” laws on the books that allow homeschooled students to play for their local public school, which actually make many public schools more competitive (Tebow led Nease High School in Florida to a state championship without ever enrolling in it).

Meanwhile, Alabama already penalizes private schools participating in athletics. Private schools are subject to a “competitive balance factor” of 1.35, meaning that they must multiply their enrollment by 1.35 to determine the division in which they will play. This means that a 500-student private school that would normally play in the 5A division is treated as if it has 675 students and the AHSAA forces them to move up to 6A, a division with schools as large as 1,090 students. Larger schools are generally considered more competitive because they have a larger pool of athletes to draw from and often more resources for the sports program.

Then if private schools are too successful, they are penalized again. There is a complicated set of point calculations, but to use a simple example, if a private school’s football team makes the state final one year, or the state semifinal two years in a row, the team is forced to move up divisions. That means that our 500-student private school, which is already competing against 1,000-student schools, could move up to 7A, the largest classification where schools have as many as 2,217 students, should they make it to the state final.

Given the effort to suppress their success, one would think private schools dominated Alabama high school sports. That is simply not the case. Across boys’ football, basketball, and baseball, private schools have won 10 state championships in the 7A, 6A, and 5A divisions over the last decade. That means that public schools have won 89% of the time. In girls’ basketball and softball, public schools have won every title in 5A, 6A, and 7A over the past decade. They went 60 for 60.

All told, the ASHAA’s recent actions are unnecessary, ill-conceived, poorly targeted, and inappropriate.

This is why EdChoice Legal Advocates is representing a family who has joined the lawsuit as a plaintiff because their child would be sidelined by the AHSAA’s rule blocking CHOOSE Act participants from sports.

Alabama’s school choice program does not tilt the playing field in any school’s particular direction. All it does is make private school possible for tens of thousands of families who otherwise would not be able to afford it.

Expanding opportunity is not the same as hoarding it. The CHOOSE act expanded opportunity, and the ASHAA is wrong for getting in its way.

Michael McShane is director of national research at EdChoice, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, nonpartisan organization working to advance educational freedom and choice for all students as a pathway to successful lives and a stronger society.

Robert Enlow is president & CEO at EdChoice.