Families who “vote with their feet” by transferring their children out of their residential school districts may be less likely to vote at the ballot box in school bond elections, new research concludes.
The study, released in May, comes at a pivot point in K-12 education, as families face more schooling options than ever—charter schools, inter-district transfers, and vouchers and scholarships that allow them to homeschool their children or send them to private schools.
“Once a family has opted out of a residential district, they are just not going to have that same attachment to that district as a political community,” said Sarah Reckhow, a political science professor at Michigan State University who co-authored the working paper, along with lead author Aliyah Mcilwain, a doctoral student.
The researchers paired Michigan school enrollment information from 100,000 households with state voter files from off-cycle school bond elections in 2017 and 2019 and analyzed them to identify patterns.
Turnout for bond elections is 15% lower for households with children in interdistrict choice programs, and 12% lower for households with children enrolled in independent charter schools, they concluded. Their analysis accounted for differences in student race and poverty.
“These numbers are large enough to potentially impact the outcome of very close school bond elections,” the study said.
The analysis did not draw a causal link between the choice policies and election outcomes: It’s unclear if leaving residential schools made families less likely to vote, or if those families were already lower-propensity voters, Reckhow stressed.
Still, the findings add to a growing understanding of how choice policies change political dynamics. Previous studies in other states showed voter turnout decreases in a community as charter school enrollment increases, but the Michigan State study took a new approach of examining voter behavior on a household level, rather than looking at aggregate data.
One might assume that households who jump through the necessary policy hoops to take advantage of choice policies are better equipped to overcome the logistical barriers that often keep people from voting—like registering, researching candidates, and finding a polling place, the researchers surmised. But that does not appear to translate to higher civic engagement.
Bond elections come with high stakes for school districts
The findings come at a time of shifting fiscal and political dynamics for districts.
The ground is shifting under district leaders’ feet as states pass new policies to increase public and private school choice.
At the same time, districts’ budgetary concerns have intensified due to declining enrollment, a loss of federal aid, and inflation—making voter support for bond issues more urgent.
Districts proposed 2,300 bond issues in 2024, and about a quarter of them failed, according to data from the Amos Group, which sells school finance data to companies that contract with districts.
The politics of school bond elections, known for low turnout, have always been complicated, Reckhow said. Even among families with children enrolled in the affected districts, just 24% voted in the off-cycle elections included in the data.
Leaders who wish to appeal to school choice households may benefit from emphasizing education as a collective good, rather than an individual benefit, Reckhow said. That strategy is already key to courting voters without school-aged children.
The researchers would like to further probe voter trends among choice households by analyzing similar data in a state with a private school choice program, Reckhow said.
Thirty states and the District of Columbia have at least one private school choice program, according to an Education Week analysis. Of those, 17 states have at least one private school choice program that’s universally accessible to K-12 students in the state or on track to be universally accessible.
