The Future of School Choice in the States That Rejected It

Earlier this month, Nebraska voters rejected a proposal to spend $10 million in state money on “opportunity scholarships,” a type of school voucher that could help certain students pay for private school tuition. The proposal, which the state Legislature initially approved as part of a bill, would allow individuals and estates to donate a certain amount of their state tax liability to organizations that provide tuition assistance, diverting money from the state coffers. Opponents of the program, including teachers unions and civil rights groups, argued that it would open the door to privatization of the state’s public schools. They put a measure on the November ballot asking voters to overturn the bill. It won with about 57 percent of the vote.

But it’s not the end of the push for school choice in Nebraska.

“I think it’s irrelevant what happened,” says Nebraska state Sen. Lou Ann Linehan, the primary backer of the scholarship program. “It’d be different if you could point to two or three senators who got beat because of it. Then we’d have a problem. But nobody got beat because they voted for school choice.”

Nebraska’s measure was one of three state ballot measures promoting various aspects of school choice, a catchall term used by supporters of everything from open enrollment in public schools to private school vouchers. Voters in Kentucky rejected, by a ratio of almost 2 to 1, a proposed constitutional amendment to let the state spend public money on non-public schools. Colorado voters rejected a constitutional amendment to establish “the right to school choice for children in kindergarten through 12th grade,” though the measure failed by a much narrower margin.

Supporters of school-choice policies say they expand opportunities for students in poorly performing schools. Opponents of the measures see them as part of a nationwide effort to undermine public schools and public-sector unions and have said the results of the election show voters’ skepticism about efforts to divert public funding to private schools. But the election overall was good for Republicans, who tend to be more strident backers of charters, vouchers and other school-choice efforts. President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to expand school choice at the federal level, and is pursuing a program that would allow tax-deductible donations for private-school scholarships.

It’s a dynamic — voters rejecting a policy even as they support candidates who favor it — that has played out in other areas as well, including abortion. Voters supported greater abortion rights in seven out of 10 states that held ballot measures, even as they also supported candidates who oppose abortion. Like reproductive rights in the wake of the Dobbs decision, school choice or privatization policies vary greatly from state to state. Most states have some version of a school-choice policy, which include tax-credit scholarships and tax-advantaged education savings accounts that allow parents to save for school tuition and other expenses. Twenty states have some type of voucher program. Some states, like Florida, allow vouchers up to a certain amount for all students, regardless of their income, to attend the school of their choice. Many families have exercised that option, which has accelerated enrollment declines at some public schools.

Backers of this year’s state ballot measures took different messages from the results. But most of them are undeterred by the defeat and still expect their states to adopt related policies in the near future. Most also cited spending on ad campaigns by teachers unions and other opponents as a decisive factor. Linehan says the campaign to overturn the scholarship program in Nebraska framed it as taking money away from public schools — something school-choice backers deny.

“If I didn’t know anything and all I saw was the TV ads, I’d vote against it too,” Linehan says. “When you get outspent seven-to-one or eight-to-one, you lose.”

Linehan is term-limited and leaving office at the end of the year. But Nebraska’s Republican-controlled Legislature is likely to keep trying to implement various school-choice policies. “We’re not going to be on the cutting edge,” says Nebraska state Sen. David Murman, chair of the Legislature’s education committee. “But [school choice] will get here eventually.”

The backers of Colorado’s Amendment 80 — which would have created a constitutional right to school choice, including “neighborhood, charter, and private schools; home schooling; open enrollment options; and future innovations in education” — are undeterred. Colorado has long had a variety of school-choice policies, including charter schools and open enrollment at public schools, though it does not provide taxpayer-funded private school vouchers. Many of the state’s Democratic leaders, including Gov. Jared Polis, who founded a network of charter schools, are backers of school-choice programs. Supporters of the amendment say it was meant to prevent the legislature from chipping away at those programs in the future.

“I don’t think we’re discouraged by the fact that [the amendment] didn’t win the first time,” says Kristi Burton Brown, a vice president at Advance Colorado, a nonprofit group that sponsored the amendment, and a former chairwoman of the Colorado Republican Party. “Voters didn’t want money to be taken from their local schools, and unfortunately they believed what the union was saying.”

While school-choice supporters cite the power of union spending in campaigns against their preferred policies, they also have access to a vast network of pro-school-choice funding. Wealthy political donors like Pennsylvania’s Jeff Yass and former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos have spent millions to promote policies and candidates that back taxpayer funding of private school tuition. “It’s going to take national school-choice money” to build a winning campaign for the constitutional amendment in Colorado, Brown says. The group plans to back the measure again on a future ballot, though Brown doesn’t know exactly when.

Meanwhile, lawmakers in Kentucky, where voters rejected the school-choice plan most strongly, seem to be accepting defeat for now. Kentucky’s constitution prevents state money from being spent on non-public schools. The proposed amendment would have changed that. It was opposed by unions as well as public school administrators, and only earned about a third of the vote.

“I don’t sense that effort happening again any time soon,” says state Sen. David Givens, who supported the amendment. “We’re going to have to work within the public school system through innovation and through finding creative opportunities.”

While school-choice policies tend to align with Republican ideologies about competition and government control, they haven’t always had an easy path even in deep red states. The Texas Legislature, for example, has repeatedly rejected school-choice programs backed by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott. One reason why is that some rural legislators tend to dislike voucher programs that they say would drain money out of their districts.

“There’s nothing exceptional about the politics of vouchers: It’s a garden variety cash transfer to a different part of the state and districts know this,” says Joshua Cowen, a professor of education policy at Michigan State University and author of the book The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers. “It’s very hard for legislators to sell why this helps their district.”

Still, Gov. Abbott now says he has the votes to pass a voucher program next year. Pro-voucher candidates won a series of primaries this year in rural holdout districts with the backing of donors like Jeff Yass. Tennessee state lawmakers are also planning another push to pass vouchers for private school tuition. The incoming GOP Congress may approve federal spending on vouchers with the support of the Trump administration as well.

“If that does happen, and they get Texas and Tennessee, there’s going to be a lot of declaring victory,” Cowen says.

Even with potential federal spending on vouchers, the landscape of school-choice policies will remain a patchwork of state programs. Most education spending comes from state and local governments. For backers of the school-choice movement, no single setback is decisive.

“I think all those cases are different from each other and will have absolutely no bearing on what happens next year,” says Robert Enlow, the president and CEO of EdChoice, an organization that traces its origins to the free-market economist Milton Friedman, a pioneer of the voucher movement. Enlow notes that Utah voters rejected a voucher program in 2007. But last year, the state Legislature approved a $42 million expansion of school vouchers with a recall-proof supermajority of lawmakers.

“I’ve been down this road before,” he says. “The reality is, over time, it changes.”