Republicans go against their voters on school vouchers

Using public funds to pay private school tuition has never been high on the priorities of voters, Republicans or Democrats. However, Republican governors and party leaders have spent the past four years pushing new private school voucher programs.

They may have hoped that accusations that public schools were indoctrinating children with critical race and gender identity theory would encourage the public to embrace voucher programs. But on Election Day, voters once again chastised them for their efforts, rejecting the vouchers in every state where they appeared on the ballot. even by wide margins in ruby-red Kentucky and Nebraska. The results say a lot about where the heart of American democracy still lies and how dangerously elected officials are moving away from it.

Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, for example, has invested more political capital in private school vouchers than any other issue, given how hard he has had to fight members of his own party on the issue. When his voucher bill failed during the 2023 regular legislative session, he held the Legislature through four special sessions. Throughout, he also held teacher salaries hostage, refusing to approve pay increases unless vouchers were part of the package. Even after rural Republicans repeatedly rejected the bonding bill, Abbott still didn’t let it pass. He spent the following primary season selecting and endorsing candidates to replace Republican lawmakers who had opposed vouchers. Earlier this month, Abbott finally got what he wanted: 79 “Strong school choice advocates” are now in the Texas House of Representatives.

These school choice advocates are not paying attention to the will of the people. Republican lawmakers had opposed vouchers because they knew where their communities stood on the issue. They remembered the last time the school choice lobby tried to push a voucher bill through the Legislature. In 2017, public school supporters from across the state, including small rural school districts, came to the state Capitol in opposition. Texas House rejects voucher bill 103-44.

Lawmakers have changed a lot since then, passing voucher laws in several states, but voters have not. In fact, when we put it to the voters, No measures to expand private school vouchers. has ever achieved it.

It’s not that lawmakers are misjudging their constituents; is that voters and their educational needs are not part of their calculations. Big money donors, ideologues and party leaders have turned vouchers – and the dismantling of what they call “government schools” – into a litmus test of loyalty. In 2018, the Koch brothers and their political network declared Arizona ground zero in the fight over vouchers. Dark money poured into the state, and with Arizona’s governor at the helm, voucher advocates thought they could win a state referendum to expand vouchers. They were terribly wrong. Voters rejected vouchers because 65 percent to 35 percent. The real surprise, however, was how little the voice of the people mattered. A few years later, the Arizona Legislature passed one of the largest voucher programs in the country.

The fight over bonuses might, on the surface, seem like typical partisan politics, but something more disturbing is going on. Leaders are willing to sacrifice public education on the altar of politics and, in the process, endanger the health and stability of democratic society.

Unfortunately, we’ve been here before: when blacks laid the foundation for a public education system after the Civil War and leaders argued that the South would be better off without any public education; when the Supreme Court said that schools must be open to all on equal terms and governors stood at school doors to prevent it. When that didn’t work, Virginia passed legislation to close public schools entirely and send children to private schools with publicly funded vouchers.

After all this time, everyday people seem to have learned an important lesson about public education. Unfortunately, some of their elected leaders are still willing to play dangerous games with the two-century-old pillar of our democracy.

Derek W. Black is a law professor and director of the Constitutional Law Center at the University of South Carolina Joseph F. Rice School of Law and author of the forthcoming book “Dangerous Learning.”