
School choice initiatives losing support among Republicans

Made by Gavin Schiffres using ChatGPT
For 25 years, the Republican Party has supported school choice policy solutions based on a free-market model for K-12 education. In 2000, President George W. Bush’s platform included opt-in public charter schools, private school tuition vouchers, and “portable” funds that could pay for private tutors. Today, the GOP’s official platform continues to call for “universal school choice.”
Historically, red states have led the nation in school choice experiments. While public charter schools have become nearly ubiquitous, operating in 46 states and the District of Columbia, only majority red states have statewide programs that allow public funds to be used for private education providers. Twelve states—Montana, Arizona, Utah, Oklahoma, Iowa, Arkansas, Indiana, Ohio, West Virginia, Alabama, Florida, and North Carolina—have a universal private school choice program, such as tuition vouchers, education savings accounts, or tax-credit scholarships.
Recent election results, however, suggest that traditional support for school choice may be changing. While Donald Trump won the presidency with an education choice agenda, every state ballot initiative supporting private school choice failed. Surprisingly, the measures failed by the widest margins in traditionally Republican Kentucky and Nevada, both of which Trump won handily. A school choice initiative came closest to passing in Colorado, which Harris won by 11 points.
These ballot failures should alarm those seeking to improve educational opportunities for American children, especially those in lower-income households. In a meta-analysis of 187 studies on school choice programs, the Mountain States Policy Institute found that 84 percent have shown a positive effect on student and community outcomes, 10 percent no impact, and 6 percent a negative result. Although school choice may be good policy, electoral defeats show that, recently, it can be bad politics, even in places it has previously polled well.
School choice advocates are still dissecting these disappointments. The results suggest a disjunction between national politics and local sentiment on education reform. As analysts diagnose the cause, they should keep two factors in mind.
First, our constitutional model apportions different education powers to federal and state officials. The education reform issues that drive party affiliation in federal elections can differ from those that divide voters in state elections.
Second, voters care less about education than they used to, at least relative to other issues. On these state-level ballot initiatives, school choice is the only issue at stake, but when voting for a candidate, it is one of many.
While this feature of American federalism and trend of voter priorities may not fully explain this new divergence among the Republican electorate, both likely contributed. They should be part of the conversation when digesting the most recent election results.
National politics vs state pragmatism
Since Trump’s first term, the national debate about K-12 education has been captured by America’s culture wars: Which bathrooms should transgender students use? Should they be allowed to compete on gender-specific sports teams? Should schools ban certain books from school libraries? How should history curricula deal with slavery and segregation? Issues like these can motivate voters, so party organs use them to campaign and fundraise.
At the state and local level, K-12 policy debates tend to be more practical. That’s because state and local governments have more immediate responsibilities for implementing regulations and managing public schools. While state and local leaders do take action on the same sensational issues that animate pundits, they also handle mundane questions such as, “How will we pay for facilities renovations?” School choice policies fall closer to those wonky state-level disputes about funding and operations than to passionate identity politics, critical race theory, and DEI. Education savings accounts, which would have become possible with Kentucky’s proposed constitutional amendment, are not the type of hot button topic that normally comes up in presidential debates.
Historically, Republican Party positions have commingled school choice with traditional social values. But the recent ballot initiatives indicate that may be starting to change. Republicans do still want more control over schools, in part to affect what their children learn. According to Pew Research, 52 percent of Republicans believe the federal government has too much influence on what their schools are teaching; 65 percent disapprove of the Department of Education, which Trump has pledged to eliminate; and 59 percent want to let teachers lead students in Christian prayer, among other findings. Yet that push for local control no longer means they are ready to give up on the old-fashioned neighborhood school model they grew up with.
Tennessee Republican state representative Todd Warner exemplified this electoral divide in a July 2024 ProPublica article. Although Warner “absolutely” supported Trump for president, in part because of K-12 culture wars, he opposed state-level private school choice: “I’m for less government, but it’s government’s role to provide a good public education. If you want to send your kid to private school, then you should pay for it.”
Americans aren’t voting on education
There’s an ostensible contradiction between supporting a pro-school choice president like Donald Trump and opposing down-ticket school choice ballot initiatives. Any interpretation of revealed voter sentiment should keep in mind that Americans, particularly Republicans, are voting more and more on issues besides education.
In 2000, when George W. Bush advocated his private school choice policies, a plurality of respondents told both Gallup and independent pollsters that education was “the most important problem facing the U.S. today.” A similar 2024 YouGov poll found that just four percent of voters feel the same today. Not only was education a less salient issue in 2024, but it was less important for Republicans than for Democrats, according to Gallup. That’s inauspicious for private school voucher advocates, who disproportionately rely on conservative voters to support their reforms.
Voting for president collapses all of a voter’s nuanced beliefs and positions into a single choice. Kentucky and Nevada voters who supported Trump by 31 percent and 3 percent respectively evidently weren’t voting for his school choice policies. Along with Republican culture war positions, Trump’s administration supports and has previously advanced non-traditional school options. Trump’s former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, a charter school founder herself, championed online schools as well as vouchers for private schools. Linda McMahon, Trump’s Department of Education secretary nominee, has written that “parents should be able to choose the schools they believe can best educate their kids, whether they are neighborhood schools, private schools, religious schools, or charter schools” (emphasis added). Far from strengthening the traditional American public school, Trump’s administration has focused on empowering parents to send their kids to alternative, often private, educational providers.
Kentucky and Nevada’s ballot initiative results may be early indications that the Republican orthodoxy for the last 25 years of free-market school choice may now be losing ground with some Republican voters. Apparently, diverting public funds to private schools or other non-public education has become unpopular in some states, even among those who otherwise support Republican candidates.
Regrouping and reassessing
For school choice proponents, these ballot initiatives were both dismaying and instructive. Political maps have shifted, and it’s time to draw up a new plan of attack. They can no longer assume that registered Republicans want options other than the traditional neighborhood school model. The default Republican position today doesn’t equate applying free-market principles with reforming education.
To be effective, school choice promoters should avoid over-indexing their strategy on party affiliation. Educational choice policies came closest to passing in Colorado, a staunchly Democratic state. New grassroots efforts need to target other proxies for local sentiment. What those heuristics should be is the question to ask in the wake of this election loss. The answer needs to consider the distinct nature between state and federal education prerogatives. It should also account for Americans’ de-prioritization of education policy overall.
Given the promise of school choice to transform America’s educational landscape, especially for our most disadvantaged students, supporters must find new strategies to enlarge their constituency before the next election.