Writing for The Progressive, independent journalist Jeff Bryant explains where public education scored some wins in the last election.
School voucher programs, elaborate schemes that give parents taxpayer money to fund their children’s private school tuition, had an especially bad day at the ballot box. Voters rejected these schemes despite their popularity with Trump, who many experts say will likely make a federal voucher program a priority in his upcoming administration.
“School vouchers continue to fail at the ballot box,” says Joshua Cowen, a visiting senior fellow at the Education Law Center, in an email to The Progressive. “Voters in Colorado, Nebraska, and Kentucky shot down voucher schemes.”
In Nebraska, voters rejected a measure that would have provided $10 million in tax money annually to fund “education scholarships,” also known as vouchers. Vouchers lost despite backdoor attempts by state lawmakers to thwart the will of the people, according to Leigh Dingerson, senior research fellow at In the Public Interest.
In an email to The Progressive, Dingerson says, “When opponents of [Nebraska’s] original voucher bill [in 2023] gathered enough signatures to put a repeal measure on the ballot, the bill’s sponsor, State Senator Lou Ann Linehan, whose daughter is a communications staffer for Betsy DeVos’s American Federation for Children, scrapped the bill rather than let the public vote. She then introduced a revised form of vouchers that she thought would be disallowed from the ballot. Public school advocates once again hit the streets to call for a public vote. They got that vote and said no to vouchers.”
Public school advocates notched another win in Kentucky, where 65 percent of voters shot down a constitutional amendment that would have allowed the state to spend public tax dollars on nonpublic schools, including private and charter schools.
As the Courier Journal reported, “[Kentucky] lawmakers have tried to pass ‘school choice’ policies in the past, including a funding mechanism for charter schools and a tax credit scholarship [voucher] program. But both bills were blocked by the courts.” In response, voucher proponents tried pushing through a constitutional amendment.
Their strategy to win voter approval of the amendment was to deceive voters, according to Dingerson. “The pro-voucher campaign led with the preposterous tag-line, ‘Give teachers a pay raise,’ ” she says. “It’s hard to imagine the scenario under which a unionized teacher workforce in the public school sector would fare better if public funds for education were shared by the private school sector, where educators are typically paid less.”
