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In 2018, Arizona voters overwhelmingly rejected school vouchers. On the ballot that year was a bill that would allow all parents, including the wealthiest, to receive tax money to send their children to private, usually religious schools.
Arizonans voted no, but by a close margin. Even in right-leaning states where prominent Republican leaders support the initiative, the vote was 65% to 35%.
Heading into this week’s election, Donald Trump and the Republican Party were hoping to reverse this kind of public opposition to “school choice” by introducing new voucher voting systems in several states.
However, despite Trump’s landslide victory in the presidential election, vouchers were once again firmly rejected by the majority of Americans. In Kentucky, a ballot measure that would have allowed public funding for private schools was rejected by a vote of about 65% to 35%. That was the same margin as Arizona in 2018, and the reciprocal of the margin Trump won in Kentucky. In Nebraska, nearly all 93 counties voted to eliminate the existing voucher program. Even the reddest counties, where 95% of voters supported Trump, said no to vouchers. And in Colorado, voters rejected an effort to add a “right of school choice” to the state constitution. This language allowed parents to send their children to private schools at public expense.
Despite support from wealthy conservatives, expanding school aid has never won a single victory when presented to voters. Instead, it lost by a narrow margin that is rarely seen in such a polarized country.
Tim Royers, president of the Nebraska Education Association, a teachers union, said candidates from both parties would be wise to “make strong public education a big part of their political platform because vouchers are not commonplace.” said. Royers pointed to the emergence of a coalition in his state and others that includes both progressive Democrats and local Republicans who oppose these broad “school choice” efforts. (Trump voters in small towns oppose such measures because their local public schools are often important community facilities and there are not many or no private schools in the area. )
But voucher efforts have been more successful without being put to a public vote. In recent years, nearly a dozen states have enacted or expanded major voucher or “education savings account” programs, providing taxpayer money to even wealthy families who can already afford to attend private schools.
That includes Arizona, where in 2022 the conservative Goldwater Institute is working with Republican Gov. Doug Ducey and the Republican majority in the Legislature to create a state that voters passed just a few years ago. enacted the very same “universal” education savings account initiative that had been rejected by the United States. in front.
Another way for Republican governors and interest groups to circumvent public opinion on this issue is to identify anti-voucher members of their party and support pro-voucher candidates against them in primaries. In this way, they can build a legislative majority and enact voucher laws, no matter what conservative voters want.
In Iowa, several Republican lawmakers were standing in the way of a massive new voucher program in 2022. Gov. Kim Reynolds helped oust them from office, even though they were incumbents in her own party, in an effort to ensure a majority to pass the bill. measurement.
Similar momentum is developing in Tennessee and in dramatic fashion in Texas, making it the ultimate prize for voucher advocates. Republican Gov. Greg Abbott said Tuesday that pro-voucher candidates in the state Legislature have won enough seats to pass a voucher system in the legislative session, which begins in January.
A day after the election, Mr. Abbott, who has made vouchers his top legislative priority, called the results a resounding signal that Texans are showing a “tsunami of support” for pro-voucher lawmakers. . But in reality, the issue was conspicuously absent from the campaigns of many of the New Republicans he helped win, even as polling numbers show that Texans have mixed views on school choice. I was doing it. (A University of Houston poll conducted this summer found that two-thirds of Texans support the voucher bill, but an equal number believe vouchers are “already in trouble.” (I believe that funds are being drained from public schools.)
In six Texas House races covered this election by the pro-voucher American Federation for Children, backed by Abbott and former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, Republican candidates did not put vouchers at the center of their platforms. Ta. Most companies did not address the issue on their campaign websites, instead listing positions such as “supporting public schools” and “increasing funding for local schools.”
Corpus Christi-area Republican Dennis Villalobos vowed on his website that if elected he would “fight to increase funding for teachers and local schools.” She did not emphasize the pro-voucher views. At least one ad, paid for by a PAC affiliated with the American Federation for Children, attacked her opponent, Democrat Solomon Ortiz Jr. The message was not an opposition to the vouchers, but an attack on what he claimed were “progressive open border policies that flood our communities with violent crime.” And fentanyl. ” (Villalobos defeated Ortiz by 10 points.)
Matthew Wilson, a political science professor at Southern Methodist University, said the strategy reflects voucher supporters’ belief that vouchers are not really a “winnable issue” compared to border wars or culture wars. Ta.
Following Tuesday’s presidential election results, Chuck Todd, chief political analyst for NBC News, said Democrats are pushing school choice as a policy likely to be popular with working-class people, including Latinos, in states such as Texas. He said he had missed it. But the concrete results of voting efforts across the country show that it is, in fact, Trump, DeVos, and other voucher supporters who are out of step with the American people on this particular issue. It shows.
But they continue to support vouchers for multiple reasons. A sense that public schools are places where children develop liberal values, an ideological belief that free markets and private institutions can do things better and more efficiently than public institutions, and a long-standing – in this country The short-term goal is to provide more religious education in the country.
Even in states where universal school vouchers are available, low-income families are reluctant to take advantage of them.
And they know that public sentiment can and has been subverted by the efforts of powerful governors and wealthy interests, said Dr. says Josh Cowen, who published a history of the billionaire-led voucher movement.
He said the Supreme Court may also support the voucher movement in the coming years.
“They’re not going to stop just because voters reject this,” Cowen said.
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