School Vouchers: An Expensive, Ineffective Idea | Opinion

In 2022, Kentuckians rejected Amendment 2—an extremist, right-wing ballot measure designed to wipe out reproductive rights across our Commonwealth. But this year, there’s a new Amendment 2 on the ballot. Instead of coming after women’s fundamental freedoms, this time Republicans are targeting Kentucky’s public schools. This new constitutional amendment—which would open the door to a “school voucher” system like those in Florida, Ohio, Arizona, and Indiana—would deprive public education of the funding it needs and siphon it off for unaccountable private schools.
To say Amendment 2 would wreak havoc on our education system would be an understatement. According to the Kentucky Center for Economic Policy, a school voucher system similar to what Florida enacted would drain our state’s budget of $1.2 billion a year. If you break it down, that’s the cost of employing almost 10,000 Kentucky public school teachers and employees.
This cost would disproportionately fall on the shoulders of rural school districts that can least afford it. The same study also found that 63 percent of Kentucky’s counties don’t even have private schools. Many of these are rural counties, where public schools are the largest employer and an economic engine for the community. They also serve as a lifeline, as we saw in 2022 when floods ravaged Eastern Kentucky and our state was underwater.
If those behind the amendment want to provide Kentucky’s kids a better education, vouchers certainly aren’t the answer. Ohio spent nearly $250 million on vouchers only for public districts to achieve better state testing results than private schools in the same cities. Over in Louisiana, students using vouchers scored much lower than their public-school counterparts on math.
And despite Republicans claiming to be good stewards of taxpayer dollars, the vouchers they hawk are a huge financial drain. In Arizona, vouchers were the primary cause of a $1.4 billion budget shortfall. Now the state is being forced to spend $333 million less on water infrastructure and tens of millions of dollars less on highway expansions.
Our neighbor, Indiana, is running into a similar problem. When its voucher program first started back in 2011, its total cost was $15.5 million. Last year, taxpayers were forced to foot a $300 million bill—even though more than 90 percent of students in the state still attended public schools.
For Kentucky Republicans, fiscal responsibility seems to have fallen by the wayside—especially when it serves as a barrier to defunding public education. Throughout the last legislative session, they rejected opportunities to improve our public schools. Governor Andy Beshear and Lieutenant Governor Jacqueline Coleman proposed an across-the-board raise for educators, as well as universal pre-K. But even with record economic development and tax receipts, Republicans kept both out of the budget.
Now, out-of-state super PACs have started to flood our Commonwealth with ads, spending millions of dollars to sell Kentuckians on another shameless attack against public education. In the words of our governor, they “ain’t from here.” The billionaire-backed campaign to defund our education system won’t sit well with Kentucky voters.
While Kentucky may not necessarily be drawing the same attention as Pennsylvania or Wisconsin this election cycle, make no mistake: Our future is also at stake. This fall, Kentucky voters must reject the GOP’s latest Amendment 2, exactly like we did in 2022 when reproductive care was on the ballot.
Every single child, in Kentucky and across the nation, deserves access to a quality public education—and we won’t let anyone take that right away.
Colmon Elridge is the Chair of the Kentucky Democratic Party.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.