- The Washington Times - Thursday, November 7, 2024

Voters in Colorado, Kentucky and Nebraska on Tuesday rejected school choice ballot measures that would have let parents spend state education dollars on private and public charter schools.

News outlets and officials in the three states confirmed the results Wednesday as polling places reported their final votes on the Republican-led constitutional amendments.

“As commissioner, I see this as both an affirmation that a majority of Kentucky’s residents supports public education and a call to action to earn the trust of ALL Kentuckians,” Robbie Fletcher, Kentucky’s education commissioner, said in a statement.

Two-thirds of Kentucky voters refused to amend the state Constitution to fund public charter schools and Education Savings Accounts for private schools, despite Republican President-elect Donald Trump winning the state in a landslide after supporting school choice.

More than half of Nebraska voters elected to repeal a program that gave parents state tax credits to spend on similar alternatives to traditional public schooling.

In an email, the Nebraska Department of Education declined to comment on the result.

The tightest battle came in Colorado, where the Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris won the state’s presidential vote easily over Mr. Trump on her way to losing the race for the White House.

By a margin of 52% to 48%, Colorado voters dismissed a proposal to add a “right to school choice” to the state Constitution.

Critics claimed the measure would have let families spend tax dollars on neighborhood schools, public charter schools, private schools, home schooling, open enrollment options and “future innovations in education.”

Bret Miles, executive director of the Colorado Association of School Executives, which opposed the measure, said voters understood it “would have diverted money away from our public schools, of which about 95% of Colorado students attend.”

“Now that it’s been defeated, we can continue to focus on supporting our schools and teachers so that kids have what they need to learn and succeed,” said Mr. Miles, whose organization represents the state’s K-12 public school administrators.

Proponents of the amendment said a campaign by Democrat-leaning teachers unions distorted the fact that it merely sought to protect school choice from legislative repeal.

“We saw in this election that Colorado … did not see a rightward shift,” said Brenda Dickhoner, CEO of Ready Colorado, which lobbied for the measure. “It has become a deep blue state.”

Teachers unions have long opposed private and public charter schooling. Unions poured millions of dollars, including over $6 million in Colorado, into advertising that warned the measures would hurt school districts in the three states.

The National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union, claimed victory Wednesday.

“The decisive defeat of vouchers on the ballot across multiple states speaks loudly and clearly: The public knows vouchers harm students and does not want them in any form,” said Becky Pringle, NEA president.

Political insiders say the union campaigns found unlikely support among some rural GOP voters wary of inflationary spending and conservatives resistant to government involvement in private schooling.

“School choice has always been difficult to enact in rural communities where you don’t have enough students to attract new leaders to open schools,” said Nina Rees, a longtime charter school advocate and former Education Department official in the George W. Bush administration.

Ms. Rees also pointed to research showing that most voters ignore or reject ballot questions unless they are personally familiar with the topics.

“Conservatives have never been fans of expanding education budgets, and some have questioned the benefits of school choice, as it may open the door to regulations in private schools,” she added.

Advocates insisted that school choice remains popular across party lines in Colorado, as evidenced by the close vote.

“We will continue, from the grassroots, to battle efforts to deny Colorado students the options they need and deserve,” said Michael Fields, president of the Advance Colorado Institute, which also supported the amendment.

Others said a failure to word the ballot measure in a way people could understand may have contributed to its defeat.

“The language was also vague enough to leave room for misinterpretation by some conservatives, which the unions exploited successfully,” said Kelly Sloan, a right-leaning lobbyist based in Denver.

In Kentucky and Nebraska, two states long dominated by Republicans, opposition to the measures came as a bigger surprise.

Despite Mr. Trump’s support for school choice funding and an endorsement from Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, Republican voters broke from party leaders to reject the measure by a wide margin.

Some conservative parental rights advocates noted that Biden-Harris administration efforts to tie public funding to transgender policies and racial diversity initiatives have sowed mistrust in recent years.

“Once private and home-schools start taking government money, the government will dictate how and what they teach,” said Sheri Few, president of the conservative U.S. Parents Involved in Education.

Ms. Few said she supports increasing the federal child tax credit instead of vouchers. That would let families spend more of their earnings on the school of their choice rather than rely on state tax dollars.

Most Republicans support letting families spend a calculated amount per student of state tax dollars on private schooling. They include Mr. Trump, who signed an executive order at the end of his first term in December 2020 that let states divert money from a federal anti-poverty program to provide vouchers.

Michael Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a right-leaning education think tank, said this support made school choice more “radioactive for Democrats” in statehouses during the first Trump administration.

“If Trump liked something, the Democrats were against it,” Mr. Petrilli said.

Conservatives have long argued that public charter schools — which are independently managed campuses operating under state charters — and private campuses produced better academic results with less money.

The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools reported last month that such institutions expanded their student bodies by almost 12% between the 2019-20 and 2023-24 academic years. Over the same period, the tally at traditional public school districts dropped by nearly 4% as students left during COVID-19 lockdowns.

The Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group reported that roughly 8,000 charter schools nationwide counted 3.7 million students in the spring, representing 7% of all public schools. Traditional K-12 school districts counted 43.2 million students.

“Regarding public charter schools, we do not believe these ballot measure election results are reflective of public support for public charter schools,” said Starlee Coleman, CEO of the alliance. “We have seen a longstanding trend of public charter schools continuing to grow and thrive regardless of which party happens to hold power at any time.”

School choice advocates expect the second Trump administration to push Congress to fund education savings accounts for families seeking alternatives to traditional K-12 school districts. 

“Education freedom programs actually save money for the state, thereby reducing spending and inflation,” said Andrew Handel, an education and workforce analyst for the American Legislative Exchange Council, a network of conservative state lawmakers and investors. “President Trump and his supporters are serious about putting education freedom into the platform — the overwhelming support for President Trump on Tuesday makes this clear.”

• Sean Salai can be reached at ssalai@washingtontimes.com.

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