Voters in three states, including two where Republicans won statewide and national races, on Tuesday decisively rejected efforts to expand or codify private school choice. But advocates for the movement for private school choice may yet have cause to cheer in the coming months.
Two-thirds of Kentucky voters rejected amending the state constitution to pave the way for charter schools and private school choice options like education savings accounts. More than half of Nebraska voters approved repealing an existing program that gives parents state tax credits to spend on private school. And a narrow majority of voters in Colorado dismissed a proposal to incorporate a “right to school choice” into the state constitution.
Similar ballot measures during past election cycles have failed by similar margins. In Arizona, 64 percent of voters in 2018 nixed a planned expansion of the education savings account program. As far back as the year 2000, 69 percent of Michigan voters said no to state-funded school vouchers.
“We’re not seeing a huge trend toward convincing voters that this is how they should spend their tax dollars,” said Chris Lubienski, a professor of education policy at Indiana University Bloomington.
Even so, conservative politicians in states like Tennessee and Texas are signaling plans to aggressively push private school choice during their upcoming legislative sessions.
And prospects for federal efforts to expand private school choice nationwide are looking brighter. Donald Trump, an outspoken supporter of school choice, won the presidency, and Republicans regained majority control of the U.S. Senate. They could still retain their majority in the U.S. House of Representatives, though several races remained too close to call Wednesday.
Even if the GOP falls just shy of a House majority, Republicans may only need a handful of conservative-leaning Democrats on their side to secure enough support for private school choice, Lubienski said.
Private school choice at the federal level could mean either withholding federal funding from states that don’t offer public funds to parents for private education, or launching a small pilot program with federal dollars going toward education savings accounts or tax-credit scholarships.
“I think the possibility has just skyrocketed,” Lubienski said. Voters are “sending people to Washington who might very well pass more of a nationwide school choice program, even though they’re saying they don’t want it in their own state.”
Project 2025, the policy document published by the Heritage Foundation earlier this year that outlined priorities for a conservative presidency, included proposals to allocate federal education funds to parents for private schooling.
“Schools serve parents, not the other way around. That is, of course, the best argument for universal school choice—a goal all conservatives and conservative Presidents must pursue,” the document says.
Private school choice isn’t a winning issue with most voters
Still, Tuesday’s results show that private school choice continues to face an uphill battle in garnering widespread public support. After more than two decades as the subject of ballot measures, private school choice has yet to win over a majority of voters in any statewide contest.
For the first time, a set of voters chose to repeal an existing private school choice program—Nebraska’s Opportunity Scholarships Act, which dedicates $10 million a year in state appropriations to parents sending their children to private school. Parents receive the funds in the form of tax credits.
Fifty-seven percent of voters were in favor of repealing the program, according to unofficial election results from the Nebraska secretary of state.
Lawmakers enacted the program after a prior ballot initiative aimed to undo an earlier iteration of private school choice in the state, a tax-credit scholarship program. Lawmakers tried to thwart the initial ballot initiative by repealing the program it targeted and passing the direct tax credit program. Public school advocates gathered enough signatures to place a second repeal initiative on the ballot targeting the new school choice program—the measure that passed Tuesday.
The lawmakers who championed that effort are leaving office, having finished out their terms.
Meanwhile, 65 percent of voters in Kentucky voted against amending the state constitution to pave the way for education savings accounts and charter schools. A majority of voters in all 118 of the state’s 120 counties that had reported results as of Wednesday afternoon weighed in against the amendment.
The race prompted record advocacy spending for a constitutional amendment proposal in the state—more than $8 million on each side, largely from dark-money groups located outside the state. Proponents of the change sent mailers attacking rural districts for declining to ban books that contained material they deem controversial, and accusing schools of being institutions of the “radical left [that] wants to control your kids.” Kentucky’s Democratic governor, Andy Beshear, directed money from political action committees to oppose the amendment.
Kentucky’s politics can be mercurial—the state has two conservative U.S. senators and a staunch Democratic governor. Even as voters rejected private school choice in their state, they opted by a similar margin for Trump, who supports expanding private school choice nationwide and has called it the “civil rights issue of our time.”
The private school choice contest in Colorado was tighter. With all 64 counties reporting results, a proposal to amend the state constitution to explicitly enshrine “the right to school choice” secured just shy of 48 percent of the vote. The measure needed support from 55 percent of voters to pass.
“It appealed to people’s sense of a personal right, which is a bit different than when people are voting on a proposal to put funding toward school or not,” Lubienski said. Even so, he said, “there was enough opposition,” including from home school associations, which worried about enshrining children’s rights to school choice at the expense of their decisionmaking parents.
When it came to voting for individual officeholders, though, residents of some states were less wary of the candidates’ support for private school choice.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott declared Wednesday that his efforts to endorse state lawmaker candidates who support a universal education savings account program were successful.
The same day, Tennessee lawmakers introduced a new bill that would annually set aside at least $144 million for 20,000 students to receive education savings accounts. Half of those slots would be reserved for students from families earning less than 300 percent of the federal poverty level. The other half would be open to all students who apply.
Last year, lawmakers in both Tennessee and Texas failed to reach consensus over an array of competing education savings account proposals. It remains to be seen whether they’ll prove more successful this year.
One other bright spot for private school choice opponents came in North Carolina, where Democrat Mo Green triumphed over Republican Michele Morrow to become the state’s next superintendent of public instruction. Morrow, a home school proponent who supported expanding private school choice, was a lightning rod for controversy throughout the campaign, including for publicly calling for the execution of prominent Democrats.
