Nov. 5 referendums in Colorado, Kentucky, and Nebraska will determine the future of certain school choice measures in those states.
Even though the presidential candidates haven’t discussed it much, school choice is an election-year issue in many parts of the nation.
The ballots in Kentucky and Colorado this year allow voters to decide whether school choice, including taxpayer-funded private school vouchers, charter schools, homeschooling, and other alternatives, should be codified into their state constitutions.
In Nebraska, voters will decide whether to repeal a 2023 law that funds private school tuition with taxpayer dollars, which has cost about $10 million. Referendum 435 notes the arguments for and against the current law.
“Indeed, half of Nebraska’s 93 counties do not have a private school. Nebraska taxpayers cannot afford to fund two separate school systems,” says the section of the proposition explaining the pro-repeal position.
The opposition stance says: “Repealing the program would eliminate record investments in Nebraska schools and block education freedom reforms that empower parents and hold schools accountable.”
The Support Our Schools Nebraska (SOSNE) organization, led by members of teachers’ unions that oppose school choice, collected more than 61,000 signatures to get Referendum 435 on the ballot, according to its Facebook page.
SOSNE did not reply to The Epoch Times’ requests for comment.
The Kentucky proposition to codify school choice follows years of opposition from Gov. Andy Beshear.
In 2021, the Democrat governor vetoed a bill that funded private school tuition vouchers through tax credits, according to a news release on the state government’s official website.
“This measure is a handout to wealthy donors,” Beshear said. “They would receive tax benefits even larger than charitable donation deductions and could even profit by transferring securities to the private educational institutions to avoid capital gains taxes.”
Two competing organizations are jockeying for money and votes on their sides of the Kentucky school choice divide ahead of Nov. 5.
Protect Our Schools KY’s website states: “Our Kentucky constitution is the only thing protecting families from these voucher schemes. We must do everything we can to safeguard our public schools, and that means voting no on Amendment 2.”
By contrast, the Protect Freedom Pac, which is aligned with U.S. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), supports school choice and provides campaign funds for candidates in several states.
In 2020, Paul introduced a national school choice bill that didn’t advance beyond the committee stage.
“It’s imperative that we empower parents to make the decision that’s best for their child’s education—without being restricted by the political games our governors and teachers’ unions’ have been playing with our children’s lives and well-being,” Rand states on his website.
Kentucky does not yet have a publicly funded school voucher program, but the passage of Amendment 2 would allow the state Legislature to create one.
Not Always So Partisan
Colorado already allows school choice, but putting a guarantee in the state constitution via Amendment 80 would prevent future state lawmakers from removing it, while also paving the way for taxpayer-funded vouchers that cover private school tuition or expenses for homeschooling.
This situation is unique in that Colorado is a blue state, while Republicans increasingly lead school choice.
Kevin Welner, director of the National Education Policy Center and a professor of education policy at the University of Colorado Boulder, said there are several reasons school choice is more popular with Republicans.
The first is that the GOP is more inclined to look at private markets and often views public schools as “socialist or worse.”
There is an increasing rift between Republicans and public school teachers’ unions that support Democrat candidates and policies.
The two sides also disagree over regulations governing religion in schools and legal protections for students.
“My strong hunch is that if the United States were comparably regulated [to Canada and Western European nations that offer public subsidies for private schools], they would get quite a bit more buy-in from Democrats,” Welner told The Epoch Times via email.
Patrick Wolf, chairman of the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas, said school choice was a very bipartisan issue when it emerged in the early 1990s.
Fiscal conservatives and progressive Democrats sought alternatives to failing public schools in Cleveland, Milwaukee, Washington, the District of Columbia, and other major cities.
The issue became more polarized when federal and state leaders supported public charter schools but not private school vouchers.
Then the pandemic brought remote learning. Parents were dissatisfied with what they witnessed in the online Zoom lessons, and the slow response to returning to more effective in-person learning in many states only increased scrutiny and dissatisfaction with neighborhood schools.
“Student achievement was already dropping in K–12 pre-pandemic,” Wolf told The Epoch Times.
“Parents saw that their kids weren’t engaged, and they felt their neighborhood schools were not very responsive to their needs or their children’s needs. They felt education wasn’t being delivered effectively.”
Wolf said referendums “historically have not been kind to school choice” because voters don’t fully grasp what they are deciding on.
Still, he said he believes that public opinion across the United States favors school choice.
Most children spend some time in public schools, whether they start in elementary school and select a private institution in high school, or vice versa.
Even more, children remain in public schools from kindergarten through graduation, while the number of students who never attended public schools is far lower, Wolf said, adding that he doesn’t think there will be a massive exodus to private education because of school choice measures.
“But Americans value choice,” he said. “It’s just kind of a core value.”
What the Data Suggest
A recent survey of 20,000 parents across the United States conducted by education advocacy organization 50Can and Edge Research indicates that parents in most states are not “very satisfied” with their local school, though most also indicated that they feel they have a choice to educate their child elsewhere.
Only two states had results faring below 50 percent in both categories—Maine (41 percent very satisfied and 47 percent indicating they have a choice) and New Hampshire (35 percent and 47 percent, respectively).
Nevada had the lowest percentage of very satisfied parents, at 31 percent, while 53 percent of the respondents in that state said they have school choice.
EdChoice, a school choice advocacy organization, reports that two-thirds of Americans support charter schools, school vouchers, and tax-credit scholarships.
FutureEd, an independent think tank at Georgetown University, reports that 33 states fund private school choice programs to some degree, and 12 of those states subsidize private, religious, or home school education regardless of income or need.
It also said 569,000 K–12 students received public subsidies for private school education in the 2023–24 academic year at a cost of more than $4 billion, and that 40 percent of the nation’s 50 million elementary school students are eligible for public subsidies that fund private school education.
Ben DeGrow, senior policy director at ExcelinEd, a nonprofit agency that advocates for school choice, said while the pandemic accelerated disconnect with neighborhood schools, so did the push from parents in disadvantaged communities to get their children in a safer learning environment.
Charter schools, which have separate district oversight from neighboring public schools in their communities but are still subject to state regulations, have enjoyed more bipartisan support than private school subsidies, education savings accounts, and state-funded scholarship programs.
“But opponents like to label it all as vouchers,” DeGrow told The Epoch Times.
In the years to come, DeGrow added, folks on both sides of this issue will dispute the actual taxpayer costs of private school subsidies, whether school choice fosters better academic performance, and whether the quality of education improves when schools compete for students and funding.
But the main argument, he said, is who should be considered the beneficiaries of education—the students or the communities?
In many states, schools are funded by local property taxes and state aid through income and/or sales tax.
A parent who sends their child to private school still must pay the municipal property taxes that fund local schools, but that local district still loses state aid based on enrollment.
“I think most people strongly agree that the money should follow the students,” DeGrow said.