Despite Trump’s win, voters widely reject school vouchers

AUSTIN – As Texas prepares to consider a school voucher program, ProPublica reports that in 2018, Arizona voters overwhelmingly rejected school vouchers. On the ballot that year was a measure that would have allowed all parents — even the wealthiest ones — to receive taxpayer money to send their kids to private, typically religious schools. Arizonans voted no, and it wasn’t close. Even in a right-leaning state, with powerful Republican leaders supporting the initiative, the vote against it was 65% to 35%. Coming into this week’s election, Donald Trump and Republicans had hoped to reverse that sort of popular opposition to “school choice” with new voucher ballot measures in several states. But despite Trump’s big win in the presidential race, vouchers were again soundly rejected by significant majorities of Americans. In Kentucky, a ballot initiative that would have allowed public money to go toward private schooling was defeated roughly 65% to 35% — the same margin as in Arizona in 2018 and the inverse of the margin by which Trump won Kentucky.

In Nebraska, nearly all 93 counties voted to repeal an existing voucher program; even its reddest county, where 95% of voters supported Trump, said no to vouchers. And in Colorado, voters defeated an effort to add a “right to school choice” to the state constitution, language that might have allowed parents to send their kids to private schools on the public dime. Expansions of school vouchers, despite backing from wealthy conservatives, have never won when put to voters. Instead, they lose by margins not often seen in such a polarized country. Candidates of both parties would be wise “to make strong public education a big part of their political platforms, because vouchers just aren’t popular,” said Tim Royers, president of the Nebraska State Education Association, a teachers union. Royers pointed to an emerging coalition in his state and others, including both progressive Democrats and rural Republicans, that opposes these sweeping “school choice” efforts. (Small-town Trump voters oppose such measures because their local public school is often an important community institution, and also because there aren’t that many or any private schools around.)