Kentucky Center for Economic Policy: The Impact of Diverting Public Money to Private School Vouchers in Kentucky
There are folks in Kentucky who really, really want school vouchers, badly enough to propose amending the state constitution. Jason Bailey, Dustin Pugel, Joanna LeFebvre, and Pam Thomas, writing for the Kentucky Center for Economic Policy, look at what impact those vouchers could be expected to have.
This November, Kentuckians will vote on an amendment to the state constitution that would permit the General Assembly to spend public money on private schools. 1 This report aims to examine what policies will likely follow if Amendment 2 is approved, and how they will impact education in the commonwealth.
The Kentucky General Assembly enacted a private school voucher program in 2021 and legislation was filed to expand the program before the state Supreme Court struck it down for violating Kentucky’s constitution. That decision led directly to the legislature putting Amendment 2 on the ballot. Similar states that lack Kentucky’s constitutional protections for public education have recently increased spending on vouchers and school privatization at a rapidly growing cost to their budgets. Given that history and context, it is plausible to assume the legislature will pursue a similar path if voters approve the amendment.
This report estimates the impact, including by school district, if Amendment 2 is approved and the General Assembly enacts legislation to subsidize private schools using public funds. It models the impact of voucher legislation similar to recent expansions in several states. For Kentucky, establishing a program proportional to what Florida, the largest state program, has in place would cost $1.19 billion annually from the Kentucky state budget. That equals the cost of employing 9,869 Kentucky public school teachers and employees.
Even a much smaller initial voucher program just one-sixth the proportional size of Florida’s and smaller than the rapidly growing programs in Arizona, Indiana, Iowa, North Carolina, Ohio and Wisconsin would cost Kentucky’s budget $199 million, equivalent to the cost of employing 1,645 public school personnel. As this report shows, reduced state contributions to public school budgets are the expected source of funding for private school vouchers in Kentucky, meaning the numbers in this report reflect potential cuts to public school funding and staffing should voucher programs be allowed.
The report also finds:
- The recent experience of other states shows that 65%-90% of voucher costs go to subsidize families already sending their children to private schools or planning to do so — a group whose average household income in Kentucky is 54% higher than public school families. Providing vouchers to that group will easily cost the state hundreds of millions of dollars based on the number of Kentucky students already in private school.
- The cost of paying for vouchers will directly hit the state’s poorest rural areas the hardest because low property wealth makes them more dependent on state dollars for public education. These districts almost entirely lack private schools, and vouchers are unlikely to make setting up new private schools financially viable in many communities. The result will be tax dollars leaving these rural districts entirely, with local residents’ state taxes paying for private education elsewhere.
- The cost of private school subsidies will also be high in the state’s more populous counties, where public schools are more likely to face a second budgetary impact of a shift in enrollment to private schools and privately controlled charter schools. Local public schools will continue serving the vast majority of students and those with the greatest needs. They will also continue facing many of the same fixed costs, which cannot be reduced proportionately with a decline in the number of students. More money will be spent overall on duplicative administrative expenses across public and private systems rather than in the classroom where it is most needed. And schools will be increasingly segregated and unequal both racially and economically.
If Amendment 2 passes, it will upend Kentucky’s longstanding constitutional commitment to public education and result in legislation that diminishes public schools across the commonwealth.