School Vouchers Proved Unpopular on the Ballot, But Threat Remains Under Trump

Part of the Series

Communities Beyond Elections

On Tuesday hundreds of thousands of voters supported Donald Trump while opposing ballot initiatives backed in their states by right-wing billionaires. Trump’s clear victory at the presidential level did not translate into red state victories for a key education policy priority: school vouchers.

Vouchers are public funds for private school tuition, whose origins date back to the wake of Brown v. Board of Education, when they appealed to opponents of that Supreme Court ruling as a way to avert racial integration. Since then, vouchers have appeared in a variety of cities and states, usually as a conservative alternative to directly funding public school investments.

School vouchers headlined both the Project 2025 education agenda and its abridged cousin, Trump’s Agenda 47 policy platform.

Heading into Election Day, school vouchers had never won a statewide ballot initiative. Despite the passage of public funding for private K-12 tuition in fits and starts through 2021 — and then in a wave of red state legislative maneuvering over the past two years — when it came to actual voters, vouchers had repeatedly struck out.

That’s why the handful of right-wing billionaires behind the national voucher push — Betsy DeVos, Charles Koch and Jeff Yass chief among them — had been turning to state legislative primaries to get vouchers passed. DeVos’s American Federation for Children has spent big in places like Iowa and Arkansas, while Yass has spent $10 million in Texas alone. Each of these efforts have been toward ridding these legislatures of rural Republicans who oppose voucher schemes.

But this time around, fueled by Donald Trump’s presence on the ballot and a supposed groundswell of parents demanding private school choice, voucher advocates were optimistic that three states would open the door to vouchers through a direct ballot vote for the first time.

That’s not how it turned out.

The clearest example is Kentucky. Two years ago, the state’s supreme court unanimously overturned the voucher-like tax credit passed by the GOP legislature over Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear’s veto. The court argued (correctly) that a tax credit system by which wealthy individuals and corporations paid what they owe in state income taxes into a voucher-distribution fund had the same impact on state revenue as a direct expenditure. And such an expenditure on private school tuition violates the state’s constitution.

So national voucher advocates, backed by millions in spending from DeVos and Yass, took to a constitutional amendment process that would have paid the “costs of students in kindergarten through 12th grade who are outside the system of common (public) schools.”

In response, opponents of school vouchers organized information and advertising campaigns against voucher plans. I took part in this effort: In mid-October, I appeared at a press conference with Governor Beshear and Randi Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers to warn against the dangers of voucher schemes, which defund public schools and have caused massive learning loss as measured by standardized tests. Other education activists pushed back by speaking about how vouchers could defund local district schools.

In the final vote, the voucher amendment failed 35-65 percent. Vouchers lost all 120 Kentucky counties. (To put that in perspective, Donald Trump won the state by the inverse margin: 65 percent to 35 percent.)

Now let’s look at Nebraska. Nebraska’s GOP-controlled unicameral legislature actually passed a voucher bill last year, but it had yet to take effect. The bill sponsor and most visible voice for vouchers in that state was Sen. Lou Ann Linehan, whose daughter is actually the vice president for communication and development at Betsy DeVos’s 501(c)(4) advocacy group, the American Federation for Children.

But Nebraska’s lawmaking process allows voters to repeal most laws through direct ballot. So opponents of the Linehan/DeVos voucher scheme organized a petition that came up for a vote this Election Day.

A different process than Kentucky, but a similar result: 57 percent of Nebraskans — thousands of voters who supported Donald Trump — chose to repeal the state’s new voucher law. It’s the first outright repeal on record.

Finally, there was Colorado — which, like Kentucky, had a constitutional amendment on the ballot. Colorado’s Amendment 80 provision would have enshrined “school choice” in the state constitution — despite the existence of charter schools in the state already. Amendment 80, which was supported by the state’s private school lobby and a number of Christian organizations, would have expanded the definition of school choice to include private school options (i.e., vouchers) and add language that “parents have the right to direct the education of their children” to the constitution.

In Colorado, that pathway to vouchers faced an uphill climb from the beginning, needing 55 percent or more to succeed. The final result fell below a simple majority, much less than the 55 percent benchmark required to pass.

But vouchers aren’t the only part of the right-wing education agenda which took a hit this election. In North Carolina, a MAGA candidate for state superintendent who marched at the U.S. Capitol on January 6 was defeated by a Democrat. And in Florida, voters rejected a proposed amendment that would have made local school board races partisan campaigns; the outcome thus making it more difficult for Republicans to take over school districts simply by virtue of partisan balloting.

This means that despite many voters’ personal affinity for Donald Trump at the national level, when it comes to making decisions about their own communities, especially when those communities are rural, voters tend to reject right-wing policy priorities — at least in education.

Now, I want to be clear: Just because voters’ voices have soundly rejected voucher schemes in their states, that doesn’t mean lawmakers will listen.

In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott already held a rally on November 6 to claim victory for his upcoming voucher push in January. That’s not because Texas voters approved a voucher plan, but because Abbott’s super PAC, fueled by Jeff Yass’s $10 million, has finally picked up enough rural GOP legislators to pull vouchers over the finish line there.

Abbott’s chosen rally location was the private Kingdom Life Academy — a fitting location given that the vast majority of voucher users are already in private school before taxpayers pick up the check.

For that reason, taxpayer-funded private tuition is best considered not as a new opportunity for struggling public school students, but more a garden-variety subsidy for an existing special interest.

In my recent book, I explain how a handful of right-wing billionaires exploited culture war tensions on issues of race and gender to create a case for school vouchers. That case depends on electing local and statewide officials who effectively vote against the economic and educational interests of their constituents by framing debates about values.

It also depends on the courts. I’ve written that the push for school vouchers to fund mostly religious education coincides almost precisely with the Christian right’s push to end reproductive freedom. In 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court’s six conservative justices expanded the rights of private schools to use public funding explicitly for religious education. They did so just three days before officially invalidating abortion rights enshrined in Roe v. Wade.

As with vouchers, Election 2024 saw states thoroughly reject right-wing ballot efforts on abortion: seven states enshrined new protections for reproductive freedom, including four states that went for Trump overall.

But as Betsy DeVos herself has written, the end goal for voucher advocates is a new Supreme Court ruling that school vouchers are mandatory in all states.

So the story here is that right-wing billionaires, and the legislative candidates and federal judges they support, are out of step with ordinary voters when it comes to some basic public policy pertaining to religious faith and economic interests. And that’s true in red states as well as blue.

If the first Trump presidency was any indication, a second Trump administration will see voucher supporters find new ways to expand funding for private, religious education. Indeed, Trump allies are already celebrating the chance to implement Project 2025 — even after distancing themselves from the plan during the campaign.

But mark it plainly: Many of the very same voters who chose to send Trump back to office overwhelmingly rejected a key part of the Trump-Project 2025 education plan — school voucher funding for private school tuition.