This November, education choice is on the ballot.
Voters in three states—Colorado, Kentucky, and Nebraska—will decide Nov. 5 whether families should be able to choose the learning environments that work best for their children and have public funds follow their child.
Two states are considering amendments to clarify that school choice is constitutional, while one is asking voters to ratify or reject a school choice measure passed by state legislators.
Here’s a rundown.
Preserving School Choice in Colorado
In the Rocky Mountain State, voters will consider Amendment 80, which would add a section to the Colorado Constitution stating:
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 homeschools, open enrollment options, and future innovations in education.
Colorado has a long history of school choice. In 1993, it became one of the earliest states to enact a charter school law and, in 1994, adopted an open enrollment policy for public schools.
In 2011, Colorado’s Douglas County created a school voucher program for low-income students. However, the Colorado Supreme Court struck down that program in 2015 under the state Constitution’s anti-Catholic Blaine Amendment.
The case was vacated by the U.S. Supreme Court in its 2017 decision in Trinity Lutheran. However, the teachers union-captured school board terminated the program later that year, before the state Supreme Court had an opportunity to reconsider the case.
Supporters argue that the constitutional amendment on the ballot is necessary to protect Colorado’s existing and potential future school choice policies from similar legal attacks.
“This is a pathway to ensuring that school choice is preserved in Colorado, parental rights are recognized in our state’s Constitution, and that every child can have the best options in education,” said Kristi Burton Brown, executive vice president of Advance Colorado, the public interest organization behind the ballot initiative.
School choice is quite popular in Colorado.
According to Morning Consult, 7 in 10 Coloradans support K-12 education savings accounts, including 77% of parents of school-age children. Nearly two-thirds of Coloradans say they support charter schools, including nearly 70% of parents of school-age children.
Kentucky’s School Choice Comeback?
Voters in the Bluegrass State will consider a constitutional amendment to enshrine school choice in the Kentucky Constitution.
Amendment 2, also known as the Students First Amendment, would give the state Legislature the explicit authority to “provide financial support for the education of students outside the system of common schools.”
The ballot question comes as a response to the Kentucky Supreme Court’s flawed decision to strike down the state’s Education Opportunity Account Program, enacted in the wake of school shutdowns over COVID-19 in 2021.
The state’s highest court ruled that the choice policy, which would have operated similarly to K-12 education savings account policies in several other states, violated a provision of the state Constitution.
After the court’s decision, Kentucky dropped from No. 8 in the nation for education choice and No. 30 for education freedom overall on The Heritage Foundation’s Education Freedom Report Card to No. 38 in the nation for education choice and No. 41 overall.
On Heritage’s most recent report card, Kentucky ranks No. 45 for education choice and No. 36 overall.
Kentucky students fare poorly on the National Assessment for Education Progress, scoring 32nd nationwide in reading and 39th in math.
But money isn’t the issue. Kentucky school districts spend more than $18,500 per pupil, on average, according to the most recent data from the Kentucky Department of Education. That’s up from about $13,500 per pupil a decade ago in 2022-23 dollars, a 37% increase.
Meanwhile, teacher salaries have declined by 5%, adjusted for inflation, between 1992 and 2019, according to data from EdChoice.
Public schools in Kentucky also have been rocked by a series of scandals and failures. Madison County’s school district reached a settlement agreement last year with the U.S. Justice Department over its failure to protect students from pervasive racial harassment.
The most visible failure was when Jefferson County Public Schools—the largest district in the state—suffered a transportation meltdown on the first day of school last year.
Some scared and hungry children weren’t dropped off at home until nearly 10 p.m. and some had soiled themselves. The school district canceled several days of classes to address its own mishandling of student transportation. The district later cut transportation services to “magnet” schools entirely.
It’s no wonder Kentucky’s homeschooling rates have soared in recent years—up 56% since the 2017-18 school year statewide, and up as much as 75% in some areas, including rural Pulaski County and urban Fayette County.
Yet instead of getting its own house in order, Kentucky school districts apparently used public resources to campaign against Amendment 2. As Corey DeAngelis and Dean McGee of the Liberty Justice Center wrote in an August op-ed in The Wall Street Journal:
In August, Pulaski County Schools urged voters to say no to Amendment 2 on its websites, Facebook page, and even a physical sign on school grounds.
[Kentucky] Attorney General Russell Coleman, a Republican, responded with a formal advisory reminding school districts that “tax dollars appropriated for public education funds . . . must not be used to advocate for or against the Amendment.” The Liberty Justice Center, a libertarian public-interest litigation firm, also took action, sending a demand letter on behalf of Pulaski County taxpayers to the school district seeking the removal of all illegal campaign messages and the cessation of any further violations of the law.
Pulaski County Schools has since removed the graphics, but replaced them with a statement by its superintendent, Patrick Richardson, that itself seems to violate the law. Mr. Richardson wrote that although he would follow the advisory, he disagreed with it and complained that the attorney general hadn’t consulted with him before issuing statewide legal guidance, which he called “partisan politics at its worst.”
It appears that Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, a Democrat, essentially has given license to district schools to engage in illegal electioneering, erroneously claiming they have a “First Amendment right” to “fight for the future of public schools.”
Of course, as individuals, school district employees have the right to say whatever they want about matters of public policy. But they have no right to use public resources to do so.
Given that license, it’s not surprising that the Kentucky Education Association’s Facebook page contains multiple examples of campaigning against Amendment 2 inside public school buildings.
What the teachers unions don’t tell voters is that when parents have choices in education, so do teachers. Teachers generally get into teaching to help kids reach their full potential, not to be micromanaged or to do hours of administrative work.
Freeing families from the constraints of district schooling also means freeing teachers. In states that have embraced education choice policies, groups such as MatchEd help teachers leverage that freedom to teach the way they want to teach and find families willing to pay them directly.
In Nebraska, Unions Oppose School Choice
In the Cornhusker State, voters will decide whether to keep or repeal a school choice policy passed by the Nebraska Legislature earlier this year.
In April, a bipartisan supermajority of Nebraska lawmakers voted 33-14 to pass a scholarship policy for students from low-income families. The bill received exactly the number of votes necessary to pass, since a supermajority was needed to overcome a filibuster.
However, opponents of the scholarships for poor students gathered enough signatures to refer the measure to the ballot.
Teachers unions urge voters to repeal the $10 million scholarship program. Tim Royers, president of the Nebraska State Education Association, claims that families already have enough options: “In 1989, Nebraska created ‘option enrollment’ that allows any family to attend any public school in the state as long as they are not at capacity.”
In other words, you can have a Ford in any color you want, so long as it’s black.
Ballot initiatives on school choice have not fared well in the past, but this year might be different.
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, with widespread school closures and learning loss, as well as pervasive woke ideology infecting schools, families increasingly demand alternatives to traditional schooling.
Parents who feel disillusioned with the status quo increasingly are choosing school choice.
