Gina Hinojosa, a Democratic former school board member, last week won a decisive and unexpected victory for Texas governor over the three-term Republican incumbent, Gov. Greg Abbott. Hinojosa has floated curtailing the state’s $1 billion private school choice program, restoring local control for districts under state takeover, and investing more heavily in public schools.
But on the local level, efforts to boost public education funding in Texas suffered in last week’s midterm elections: Fewer than one-third of the state’s 78 local school district “propositions”—for tax increases and bond issues—secured enough voter support to pass.
“Schools did not come out well this election season,” said Kevin Brown, executive director of the Texas Association of School Administrators. “I think affordability had a lot to do with it.”
Texas isn’t alone: In at least five other states—Alabama, Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, and Virginia—a majority of local ballot measures aiming to increase school funding failed, according to an Education Week analysis of unofficial election results. And a majority of New Hampshire localities voted in favor of property-tax caps that will limit school funding.
As ever, the school funding picture nationwide is highly varied and nuanced.
In another nine states, a majority of local ballot measures for boosting or extending school funding passed, according to Education Week’s analysis.
Still, even those results offer little comfort to the districts where those measures missed. For instance, 45 school districts in Wisconsin got majority support from their voters for funding-related referenda—but another 34 fell short.
More broadly, the election results foreshadow shakeups across the school finance landscape. On Tuesday, during an onstage panel discussion here at the National Summer Learning Association conference, three state education chiefs highlighted the unfamiliar political terrain they’ll be navigating in the coming months—even in states where overall partisan control isn’t changing.
Eric Mackey, Alabama’s state superintendent, will be working with a new governor for the first time in his eight-year tenure. Charlene Russell-Tucker, Connecticut’s commissioner of education, will have to brief 17 newly elected Democratic lawmakers on her priorities after several longtime Republican legislators lost reelection.
And in Indiana, Democrats ousted the longtime chairman of the state Senate education committee and the Republican lawmaker who’s led the state House since 2020.
Indiana’s legislature didn’t flip to Democratic control. But an election that swept in waves of newcomers across the country means a loss of institutional knowledge as longtime officeholders depart.
“We’ve got to really rethink relationships,” said Katie Jenner, Indiana’s secretary of education.
Requests for new taxes had a rough go
In some states, voters broadly balked at school district requests for new forms of taxation.
In Ohio, 55% of district requests for property-tax increases passed, as did 80% of requests to renew existing property taxes for schools. But requests for new district income taxes to cover operating expenses—proposed amid a broader push to crack down on surging property taxes—were far less successful: Out of 39 Ohio school districts that sought permission to levy an income tax, only five got the OK from voters.
A similar story played out in Virginia, where many localities asked voters for a new 1% sales tax to help pay for school facility improvements.
Lawmakers earlier this year authorized the option of a sales tax ballot measure after a report they commissioned found that fixing more than 1,000 of the state’s aging public school buildings would cost $25 billion.
Fifteen localities last week got majority support for the new sales tax; another 32 did not.
Voters in other states embraced new opportunities to limit property-tax collections.
Every ballot in New Hampshire this November included a question asking voters whether they supported curbing property-tax rate increases for their own local school district.
Roughly 59% of voters statewide answered “yes,” according to unofficial data shared with Education Week by the New Hampshire Association of School Business Officials.
Limiting property taxes was also top of mind for many voters in Alabama, where 17 counties secured approval for local constitutional amendments that will freeze property-tax assessments for many homeowners older than 65.
Only one Alabama school district—Henry County—sought approval from voters for a tax increase through a local constitutional amendment. That measure failed, with more than 60% of voters opposed.
Sometimes, majority support wasn’t enough
Districts in some states had better luck with tax increases than in others.
In New Jersey, all three districts seeking voter approval for tax-levy increases struck out. In Colorado, meanwhile, roughly half of the 24 school district proposals to override local property-tax limits passed, as did two school district tax increases to raise matching funds for a construction grant from the state.
In Indiana, where state lawmakers in recent years have implemented major property-tax limits, more than two-thirds of school district referenda to raise property taxes passed.
But voters in neighboring Illinois were less generous—35 measures to increase local school taxes failed, while 21 passed.
In Minnesota, Democrats won resounding victories for statewide leadership; the party will now control the governor’s office and both chamber of the legislature. But voters in 38 school districts rejected referenda aiming to raise local revenue by increasing tax rates, while only 25 districts secured victories.
And in a handful of cases across the country, school districts lost out on funding they were seeking despite majority support from voters.
Iowa school referenda require the support of 60% of local voters. In the Ackley Geneva Wellsburg Steamboat Rock district, 57% of voters supported a proposed bond issue for HVAC upgrades—enough for a victory in neighboring Illinois, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, but not in Iowa.
Similarly, the Weiser school district in Idaho garnered the support of 53.6% of voters in favor of renewing an expiring levy for building maintenance. But majority support wasn’t enough because such measures require 55% voter support in the state.
Election losses can have existential consequences for districts.
Indiana lawmakers recently passed a law that prohibits school districts from putting property tax increases on election ballots in years that end in an odd-number year. Districts whose referenda failed last week will have to wait until 2028 to ask voters again. In the meantime, at least one leader of a district in that situation has already notified parents that $8 million cuts are on the horizon.
In Wisconsin, two days after the midterm elections, the 275-student Hustisford school district became the first district in the state in three decades to dissolve—in large part, district leaders said, because voters rejected five referenda for tax increases over the last five years.
In a statement following the dissolution announcement, state Superintendent Jill Underly called the district “a casualty of decades of an antiquated, broken school funding formula that has failed to keep pace with the costs of educating our children.”
