School-choice advocates face challenges beyond just implementation, even in friendly states.
School-choice advocates face challenges beyond just implementation, even in friendly states.
V ice President Kamala Harris recently received the endorsement of the National Education Association in her bid for the Democratic nomination for president. While the NEA’s opposition to education choice is well known, it’s unclear exactly how candidate or President Harris would approach the topic.
Champions of education choice should be aware of national political trends that may threaten education choice while remembering this important truth about advancing the issue at the state level: Passing a bill means you’re only halfway there.
Many state legislatures have successfully passed education-choice programs, but they risk forgetting that even after passage, poor implementation and direct challenges can threaten families’ access to resources to create individualized education for their children.
Utah and North Carolina are illustrative of this point.
In theory, both states now have universal publicly funded education-choice programs on the books. Utah passed a bill to create a brand-new program in 2023, and North Carolina passed a bill to expand an existing program that same year. However, lawmakers in the Tar Heel State have yet to agree on funding levels for the expanded program.
Both programs brought praise from families who were finally going to have the ability to pay for options they needed but previously could not afford. Now, both programs are plagued by uncertainty.
Legal Challenges in Utah
Last year, the Utah legislature passed the Utah Fits All scholarship program, which allows families to use public funds to create a personalized education for their children.
Now, after 10,000 accounts have already been awarded to families (nearly 99 percent of which are in the lowest income bracket), the Utah Education Association has filed a lawsuit arguing that the program is unconstitutional.
The lawsuit claims that because the state constitution requires the legislature to “establish and maintain” a public-education system open to all students, providing a program outside of that is unconstitutional. However, no language in the state constitution precludes such outside programs from existing.
A closer read of the filing reveals that much of the argument is policy disagreement, claiming that the program would harm funding and therefore public schools. But this very common argument is better suited for the legislature — where it failed in the first place.
Though the arguments in the lawsuit are on weak footing, if the challenge is successful, many families already relying on the program to help their children may be abruptly left without those options — to say nothing of the wait-list families who are hoping to be notified of their own scholarships one day.
Political Hurdles in North Carolina
In North Carolina, political hang-ups on the funding side are delaying the expansion of an education program. The state senate approved $463 million in May to help address the influx of 72,000 new applicants to the state’s popular voucher program, but the house instead rolled the funding provisions into its overall budget. Doing so gives the house more bargaining power in budget negotiations with the senate, increasing the likelihood that other house budget priorities will pass. Speaker of the house Tim Moore is also running for Congress in North Carolina and has pledged to support public-school teachers. Tying the Opportunity Scholarship Program expansion to raises for public-school teachers in the house budget accomplishes this.
While these political processes play out, parents are growing more frustrated with North Carolina lawmakers. At a rally in late July, parents mobilized to convey their dissatisfaction with lawmakers. While parents were given assurances about the ultimate fate of the legislation, funding levels for the expanded scholarship program remain unchanged.
If the state senate and house both feel comfortable delaying budget votes until after the election, parents may understandably grow more skeptical of lawmakers who say that expanding the Opportunity Scholarship is a priority.
Lessons Learned
The successes and challenges of education-choice efforts in Utah and North Carolina are instructive for other states. As we discussed in an episode of the Sutherland Institute’s Defending Ideas show, there are several things other states should keep in mind. These most recent challenges point out other takeaways.
For instance, one question that state leaders must address is how the legislation is written when passing an education-choice program. In North Carolina, for example, for too long major choice legislation has been rolled into the budget. The lack of a charismatic and dependable legislative champion for education choice might have contributed to this approach.
At the same time, Utah combined its education-choice program with increases in teacher pay to ensure that all types of education in the state were being supported, which arguably helped the legislation to pass.
The choice movement needs legislators who will fight for school choice in a way that meets the unique needs of each state while helping the movement cross the finish line.
Another lesson is to consider how programs are to be expanded later. In expanding an existing program, leaders should make sure that any legislation seeking universal expansion is based on a wide-open and deliberative process. North Carolina’s legislation, for example, is missing key components. Expansion should have been phased in to allow the market to meet demand and minimize the crush of applicants that overwhelms schools otherwise.
Likewise, state leaders need to tackle the funding structure. They need to decide whether funding for the program should be tied to general appropriations. The downside of tying education-choice funding to general appropriations is that it ties the fates of thousands of children and hundreds of schools to the annual budget debate.
In Utah’s case, future expansion of its universal program is dependent on the amount of funding allocated to the program each year, which will probably mean that for years to come, not all families who want it will be able to access it.
Lastly, states should remember that even after successful passage of legislation, ongoing threats can emerge. Expansion of North Carolina’s Opportunity Scholarship program was the culmination of a decade’s worth of work. Choice advocates successfully persuaded the public and policy-makers, as evidenced by high poll ratings for education-choice programs and their successful passage thus far. And choice legislation was upheld by North Carolina’s high court. Despite these successes, universal school choice is still subject to political and budgetary forces, as illustrated above. To help remedy these challenges, efforts should be made to tie dollars for the Opportunity Scholarship to a funding formula. Doing so would provide more reliable funding and help depoliticize the funding process.
Utah has had various targeted education-choice programs since 2005. A universal-choice program in 2007 failed via a referendum, but choice advocates have worked ever since as demand slowly grew over time, leading to the passage of the universal program in 2023. But now it’s being challenged in court. The bottom line is that education-choice advocates can’t take anything for granted.
Looking ahead, education-choice champions in other states should plan now to address funding, political, and legal challenges to their choice programs. National political fights over the issue attract attention, but state lawmakers are equipped to advance education choice the right way for their residents. The students and parents counting on such programs deserve no less.
Christine Fairbanks is an education-policy fellow at the Sutherland Institute. Robert Luebke is the director of the Center for Effective Education at the John Locke Foundation.