What Happened in 2024?
Kentucky
The biggest loss last fall came in Kentucky, where a proposed constitutional amendment to allow the state to enact and fund a private school choice program was rejected by more than 60 percent statewide and lost in every single county. The Republican supermajority in the state legislature placed the amendment on the ballot last spring following earlier defeats in court. The resulting campaign became a test of political influence between the state’s top elected Democrats, Governor Andy Beshear and Lieutenant Governor Jacqueline Coleman, who both actively opposed the amendment in partnership with the National Education Association (NEA), and the state’s Republican establishment, including U.S. Senator Rand Paul.
The amendment would have empowered the state legislature to “provide support for the education of students outside the system of common schools,” overturning state court precedent that had previously interpreted the Kentucky constitution as prohibiting voucher programs.
The dueling campaigns raised nearly $16 million, marking a new record for political spending in Kentucky that more than doubled the previous record set in 2022 in connection with a constitutional amendment to protect abortion rights.
In their advertising, opponents of the voucher amendment targeted Republican voters, emphasizing the fiscal costs of similar programs in other states and arguing that this spending would come at the expense of public investment in local schools in rural communities. One ad featured a young girl explaining to her parents the risks involved: “In Arizona, [vouchers] blew a massive hole in the budget. . . . In Georgia, rural Republicans are in revolt over vouchers.”
Another ad featured a teacher from an area of Kentucky devastated by major floods in 2022. “When the floods hit Eastern Kentucky, we lost everything,” the narrator explains in a distinctive drawl. “Public school saved us. It’s where everyone could find food and shelter.” The voucher amendment, the ad warned, would hurt rural Kentuckians by using “our tax dollars on private schools” and “forcing many public schools in rural communities to close.”
A series of commercials featuring the state’s Democratic governor warned that the proposed amendment “subtracts taxpayer money from public schools and gives it to unaccountable private schools” and predicted that, if it passed, “you will see dollars move from rural Kentucky school systems into unaccountable urban private schools.”
Voucher proponents emphasized that the measure would bring about “educational freedom”—predicting it would improve student achievement, increase teacher salaries, and give parents more control over their children’s education. With financial support from billionaire Jeffrey Yass, they managed to outspend opponents by more than $1 million—only to lose the vote by 30 percentage points.
Nebraska
Nebraska’s campaign followed largely similar lines, although the path to the ballot proved more circuitous. In 2023, the legislature voted to create a tax credit program to subsidize private school vouchers. Democrats and labor allies mobilized almost immediately to put the new program to a popular vote. Anticipating a tough campaign, the legislature repealed the original law and adopted a smaller, directly funded voucher program prioritizing low-income and special education students, pairing it with $1 billion in new funding for public schools.
The effort to head off a referendum didn’t work. Opponents collected nearly twice the number of signatures necessary to force a vote to repeal the voucher section of the legislative package.
The campaign united Democrats, energized organized labor, befuddled business groups, and divided Republicans. With nearly $6 million in financial support from the NEA and its state affiliate, repeal proponents heavily outspent voucher backers. They ran an intentionally nonpartisan campaign aimed at convincing the state’s overwhelmingly Republican electorate that school choice would undermine public education.
Tim Royers, president of the Nebraska State Education Association, called vouchers an “existential threat to our capacity to fund our schools in the future” and “a fundamental attack on the integrity of public education within the state.” Campaign ads warned that “state legislators are playing games with our children’s education,” predicting that vouchers would cost as much $100 million over 10 years and cause “larger class sizes, less resources, lower teacher pay, and higher property taxes.” As in Kentucky, voucher opponents argued that the program would transfer resources from rural public schools to urban private ones.
On Election Day, Nebraska voters repealed the voucher plan by nearly 15 percentage points.
Colorado
The closest advocates of private school choice came to success last November was in Colorado, a state that has long been a leader in public school choice even as it has shifted from red to purple to blue. An amendment to the state constitution to explicitly grant “each K–12 child the right to school choice” defined to include “neighborhood, charter, private and home schools, open enrollment options and future innovations in education” fell six points short of the 55 percent supermajority required for passage.
The amendment would not have created a program of any kind or required an appropriation, but it was seen by critics as the first step to opening the door to public funding to private schools. (As shown in Table 1, two earlier voucher proposals were defeated by Colorado voters: in 1992 and again in 1998.)
In contrast to Kentucky and Nebraska, where school choice of all kinds remains controversial, Colorado has provided for considerable public school choice for decades. The state was the third in the nation to pass a charter school law in 1993 and one of the first to require mandatory inter- and intradistrict choice among public schools. Support for public school choice in Colorado has long been firmly bipartisan. Today, an estimated 40 percent of Colorado students participate in open enrollment or charter schools.
This context may explain why the choice measure received support from nearly half of the electorate—but also shows that goodwill built through public programs may not extend to private school vouchers. Amendment supporters denied that it was “a backdoor to vouchers”—although an early draft of the proposal would have explicitly authorized a voucher program—and claimed their motivation was to protect charter schools, which have attracted growing skepticism from Colorado’s Democratic majority in recent years. The state’s moderate Democratic Governor Jared Polis—a former charter school founder and a vocal advocate of public school choice—remained neutral on the amendment. The state’s charter advocates did not actively support it either.
The campaign for the amendment ended up spending nearly $1 million, raised from prominent Colorado Republicans and conservative education groups. Controversially, the campaign’s website and other communications featured a deceptive video of the state’s top teachers union leader edited to intimate (falsely) that he supported the amendment.
As in Nebraska, however, supporters were heavily outspent by opponents, led by national and state teachers unions, which raised $5 million to defeat the amendment. Whereas in Kentucky and Nebraska both sides framed school choice in the broadest terms, opponents of the Colorado amendment explicitly invoked support for open enrollment and charter schools and sought to distinguish these public choice programs from private school vouchers. Perhaps surprisingly, several prominent homeschool advocacy groups also opposed the amendment, warning that it would open the door to increased regulation and government oversight.
