This story was originally published by the Hechinger Report’s Elementary to High School newsletter.
Voters in three states overwhelmingly rejected or repealed school choice measures related to allowing taxpayer dollars to be used for private and charter schools.
Nebraska, Kentucky and Colorado voting results
- In Nebraska, voters repealed a law that provided public money for school vouchers.
- In Colorado, residents voted against an amendment that would have enshrined a right to school choice in the state constitution.
- In Kentucky voters also rejected a pro-school choice amendment to the state constitution.
Kentucky highlights
When interviewing the people of Louisville, Kentucky, in the weeks leading up to the election, it’s noteworthy that even some parents who send their kids to private schools planned to vote against the measure. Louisville and Lexington, the two largest and bluest cities in Kentucky, are home to most of the state’s private schools. But 90 percent of the students here in the Commonwealth attend a public school, and the state has no charter schools.
Across the state, 65 percent of voters said “no” to the measure.
Rural counties also played a big role in the outcome of the vote, according to Peter Jefferson, a 17-year-old student at Henry Clay High School in Lexington who organized against school vouchers for the nonpartisan Kentucky Student Voice Team. He said,
“Rural schools give students unparalleled opportunities.”
“If our state were to pass this amendment, it could have been billions of dollars lost for education in Kentucky, and much of that in rural counties.”
Rowan County Senior High School senior Ivy Litton, a 17-year-old who also serves as a policy coordinator of the Kentucky Student Voice Team, credits a large part of the victory to students “standing up and saying something” about what would happen to their schools if the amendment passed.
“We don’t want vouchers…”
“Education is a bipartisan issue, and it doesn’t have to be so divided,” said Litton, who is from Owingsville, a small rural town in eastern Kentucky. “I think we made a clear statement that students and the people who matter in school, students and teachers, overwhelmingly, do not want these school choices. We don’t want vouchers, and we don’t stand for that, regardless of whether we’re Democrats or Republicans.”
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Javeria Salman is a staff reporter for The Hechinger Report. She also contributes to all their newsletters and writes their Future of Learning newsletter covering K-12 education issues through the lens of innovation and technology. Salman’s work has appeared in Telemundo, The Atlanta-Journal Constitution, The Christian Science Monitor and the Solutions Journalism Network.
This story about school choice voting results was included in Hechinger Report’s Elementary to High School newsletter that covers emerging efforts to improve K-12 education.
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