Most People Support School Choice. Why Won't They Vote For It?
School choice advocates work hard, but public school interest groups work harder.
On Tuesday, voters in Nebraska, Kentucky, and Colorado rejected school choice at the ballot box, voting against two pro-school choice state Constitutional Amendments and moving to repeal a school choice law. The defeat of all three measures signals a turning tide for school choice policies. After several years of major legislative and electoral successes—and a night where Republican politicians, who are more likely to support these measures, overperformed—voters themselves seemed resistant to approving individual pro-school choice ballot measures. However, this outcome isn't exactly surprising.
"School choice has never—at least not that I can think of—been approved in a popular vote," says Neal McCluskey, the director of The Cato Institute's Center for Educational Freedom. "We see polling that typically shows people support school choice if you just sort of present them with, 'hey, we could give you money and then you could use it to go seek the education of your choice.'" But, McCluskey adds, highly motivated public education employees manage to dominate the conversation when it comes to ballot measures.
"Referenda for school choice are always at a disadvantage because you're trying to take on entrenched, easily organized interests who defend the status quo and they can put a lot of money into defending the status quo and a lot of boots on the ground," says McCluskey.
In Nebraska, voters moved to repeal a school choice bill signed into law earlier this year. The law, Legislative Bill 1402, created scholarships allowing certain families—including low-income families, military families, those with special-needs children, or children facing other challenges like bullying—to allow eligible families to pay for private school with private money.
In Kentucky, voters also rejected Amendment 2, a measure that would have enabled the state legislature to fund school choice programs like charter schools, tax-credit vouchers, education savings accounts, or other backpack funding programs that would give parents the ability to use some of the money that would have funded their child's public school education to help fund private or homeschooling.
In Colorado, voters also rejected a school choice Amendment, though Colorado voters came the closest to passing the measure—the tally hovered around 52 percent voting "no" and 48 percent voting "yes" when the race was called by The New York Times on Thursday. The ballot measure, Amendment 80, aimed to enshrine a right to school choice into the state's constitution. The text of the measure states that "All children have the right to equal opportunity to access a quality education; that parents have the right to direct the education of their children; and that school choice includes neighborhood, charter, private, and home schools, open enrollment options, and future innovations in education."
Despite polling indicating generally broad support for school choice, it's hard for pro-school choice groups to combat intense campaigns from anti-choice advocates, who frequently frame the measures as destroying or defunding local schools.
"A lot of parents would probably like to have school choice, but they have regular jobs. They're not sure, even if school choice passes that they're going to get it. They're not sure how to use it. But the status quo or the establishment knows that they could lose money and they don't like that," says McCluskey. "You have a highly motivated, relatively easily organized group of people who will defend the status quo, and it's very hard to balance that out on the pro-school choice side, in large part because parents can't go out every weekend and campaign for it."
