In this episode of State of Choice, host Ed Tarnowski talks with Katherine Schultz, Nathan Sanders, and Aaron Gillham about state election results and how they may impact the state of choice.
Ed Tarnowski: Welcome back to the State of Choice podcast. I’m your host Ed Tarnowski, also known as Ed with EdChoice. This is our first episode post-election and there’s so much to talk about what an election night it was nationally and across the states.
And of course, here at EdChoice, we know education policy is mostly done in the states, policy laboratories of the country, which we love so much. We love federalism here. So you hear, I’m sure everyone’s heard a ton about the national election, maybe a little less about state elections.
So today we’re going to be focusing on state elections and how they and how they may impact the state of choice. Joining me today is Katherine Schultz, Nathan Sanders, and Aaron Gillham, all of our policy and advocacy directors. And we’re going to get into each of their states today.
And I’m going to go ahead and start with Katherine to talk about some of what’s going on in Texas, Arizona, and the rest of her states.
Katherine Schultz: It was an excellent night for school choice in my region. In Texas, we saw Governor Abbott, who is an ardent supporter of school choice, win every election he endorsed during the cycle. It’s a huge statement for Texas to see so much parental empowerment being demanded by our elected officials.
The highlight that we really want to focus on is in a Senate district down in South Texas that actually flipped from D to R to a giant school choice supporter. And so we are so excited to welcome Senator Letitia Hossa to any of our discussions on school choice. But it’s a big step for Texas.
You know, going into this, we knew we had strong support in both the House and Senate for school choice. This just clarified from the voters that there’s a demand for more options and more parental empowerment in Texas. So we are just super fired up to get ready for next session.
I know there’s a lot of movement. Actually, while recording today, our House Higher Education Committee is meeting. And so we are ready to rock and roll in Texas.
Another highlight state, Tennessee, Governor Bill Lee, the morning after the election, went ahead and had House Bill 1 and Senate Bill 1 filed in Tennessee. Both school choice programs being the first initiative he wanted to push for this session. So exciting stuff out of Tennessee.
And then finally, in Arizona, some really great news. We fully expect Republicans to hold a Senate majority, potentially picking up one more state. As many people have noticed, Arizona takes a little bit of time to get their election results in.
However, we’re watching one Senate district that also may flip ours. That could be very exciting. And finally, in our House of Representatives, Republicans are also on track to keep control.
And that’s a huge thing. Going into this, we had a lot of discussions about Arizona, looking at what happens if they have divided government. But it looks like the people have spoken, and they are standing behind the Arizona Freedom Education Program.
And so it’s just an exciting time in our region.
Ed: Thank you, Katherine. And let’s talk a little bit about Texas for a second. I mean, one of the reasons that I see Texas as being such a huge and important state to watch is just the sheer population, the number of kids across the country who would then, the percentage of kids that would be eligible for a private school choice program would just go up immensely.
I don’t know if you would like to talk a little bit about that.
Katherine: Oh, definitely. So there’s a lot of conversations going on with leadership looking at what a bill will look like for next session. You know, in Texas, we haven’t had anything filed yet.
However, you’ve got Chairman Brad Buckley returning. He won his election, of course. His team has been aggressively working on looking at what the best bill would be to serve the most students in Texas.
And what’s interesting with Texas is we have approximately 6 million students in our state that are school choice aged. So when you look at that, some of these programs you see when they start, we’re looking at $30,000, $40,000 students. Texas is a giant piece of the apple.
So even if you were to only do, you know, 1 million students, that would be one of the largest programs in the nation operating. And so I know that there’s been discussions with the comptroller, with the Texas Education Agency on how something would be run. And we’re going to see a lot more unveiled in the coming months.
What is also really exciting is in the Senate, we knew we had strong support. Gaining one more empowers those senators who already were kind of stepping out and being champions of this to push this program farther. And so I think as we start negotiations, as we start plans, we’re going to see a little bit larger of a program come out.
You know, we’re always pushing for universal. And that means three things, right? Eligibility, usage, and of course, funding.
And I think in Texas, we have the best possible cards dealt to have that program.
Ed: That’s so exciting. Let’s hope Texas finally catches up to Florida on school choice.
All right. And next, let’s go on to Aaron, who has kind of a Midwest and West kind of region. It’s a little bit of a mix out there.
But yeah, Aaron, you have the floor.
Aaron Gillham: Great. Well, thanks for having us on, Ed. And it’s great to be talking about the election.
Obviously, we saw some very interesting demographic shifts across the board nationally. And I think that may be resonated at the state level as well. And when it comes to the school choice issue, you know, one of the states in my region that will be eyeing very closely this upcoming session is the state of Idaho, which is surrounded by some states that haven’t made a lot of moves on school choice.
So they have the opportunity to kind of get a leg up and be competitively advantaged if they can get some school choice accomplished this upcoming session. They made a run at it last year and it didn’t succeed. But I know that there are some big advocates of school choice in the legislature that want to make the attempt again.
And what we saw was those champions succeeded in their election and prevailed. And I think, you know, we can even reflect back briefly on the primary. And it’s not just Idaho, but Wyoming, which is in my region.
And we can probably speak to Texas and some other places for those who came out of the 2024 session or even the 2023 session the year before and were outspoken against school choice. They mostly were defeated. The voters made their, made themselves known.
And the support for school choice was shown in advancing those legislators that want to see some action in their states. We talk, as you mentioned at the top of the podcast, 50 Laboratories of Democracy. A lot of times the competitive element is thought of by folks as more of a economic competitiveness, taxes, regulations.
But I think that we have to bring school choice into that conversation, too. And we think about how states compete with one another, especially for communities like mine. I live in Cincinnati.
We’re on the border of two states. What does that look like for a state like Kentucky, where they once again rejected school choice on the ballot? We can get into some of those ballot measures as well.
But, you know, those are things that you have to think about because there are communities on the border that can look to their neighbors and see what they’re doing and what might work better for them and their families. And again, that can be economic. But I think certainly school opportunities, education, freedom plays a big role in that, too.
So Idaho saw great results on election night. I think we’re poised to really have a good win on school choice. Hopefully we’ll see a good bill come to the floor and we’ll be able to see legislators on both sides.
We hope that it’s a bipartisan effort here, that they can get behind this and do what’s right for the families there. But I know it’s one of the big states that we’re looking at going into 2025. Wyoming did put a small school choice package on the table.
We’re hoping to see that expanded. Not a lot of shift there in the legislature after the election. It looks like Democrats might have picked up one seat in the House.
The Senate will stay the same. So, you know, hopefully, you know, again, whether it’s, you know, hopefully it’s not a partisan issue. Hopefully it is something that, you know, folks across the aisle can find things that they like about school choice and can understand the underpinnings of what we’re trying to do with school choice.
And that provides, you know, freedom of opportunity for students, regardless of the financial situation that they might be in. So that’s another state. We’ll keep watching as session begins.
But the election results there look promising. But as I kind of mentioned, you know, it’s not just the election results that I know we were monitoring. Of course, state legislatures are where the action is.
That’s where the bills come from. But in a couple instances, we saw a direct ballot measure. We saw an initiative on the ballot that voters got to vote on themselves with regards to education freedom.
And what I find interesting, and I kind of hoping we could talk about as a group, but just the opposite effect, right, when we see voters choosing on the ballot directly to not fund school choice. One of my states, Nebraska, that I cover in my portfolio, had a small program in place, had a budget of around 10 million, and they chose to defund that. The voters on Tuesday had a chance to look at that.
And they decided, you know what, we don’t want to fund that after all and repealed what had existed. So a very small program, but still seeing that is of interest to me, because I know we do our own internal polling. And parents also make themselves very, very clear on this issue.
They want more choices, even if at the end of the day, a parent or family guardian chooses to send their student to their district school. That’s a choice that they want to make. They want to have opportunities and options on the table, even if that’s the route they ultimately end up going with.
So hopefully we can get into that a little bit, too. Again, as I mentioned, I’m on the border of Kentucky. We saw their ballot measure fail as well to allow the legislature to consider school choice efforts.
So that’s kind of my take, and what I saw in some of my states. And we’ll look forward to seeing how that plays out as session gets underway, and we see the leadership and organizational meetings in each of the legislatures.
Ed: Thank you, Aaron. And yeah, to speak to the polling, remember, in our school, EdChoice’s Schooling and America’s Survey this year showed support for ESAs over 80%. It is momentous across the country.
So it is interesting to see a difference in how in the voting patterns when it comes to this issue. And now offline, Katherine had a good point to make. And I’d love for her to kind of tell our viewers more about one of her theories.
Katherine: Sure. Well, I think that we cannot understate the importance of language being used on these ballot initiatives. I think that what we saw on this election night was a demand for funding to go local, for power to be back put in the home.
And when we look at some of these ballot initiatives, some of the language used was voucher for an outside program. Well, that is not school choice per se. School choice is making sure parents can take any funding that they would get from the state to go wherever they want, be it homeschooling, be it to a charter school, be it to a private school.
But when a ballot initiative is worded that way, making it seem as though the government will be spending additional money to uplift some sort of outside organization, anybody’s going to be hesitant on that. And so I think it’s very important to talk to our allies about when they look to push ballot initiatives to get that language right. Even we see this in the polling, when the vernacular is different, we see different polling results.
A highlight of that is even our internal polling, when we look at allowing parents to have ESAs over the term voucher, I think there’s about a six-point spread on that, where parents prefer ESAs over vouchers. Well, vouchers and ESAs could sometimes be used interchangeably depending how the state sets up a program. But ultimately, voucher sounds, well, what’s that mean?
What do you mean a voucher? What does that look like? Where I think ESA, a savings account, that looks more, I don’t know, welcoming to a family.
And so I understand that people would be nervous about spending any money during this economy that would further burden taxpayers. But that’s not what necessarily is linked to school choice. And so just again, when our allies are looking at ballot initiative language is very important.
Aaron: Yeah, I think that’s a good point. And looking at the Nebraska language, I mean, it was all about the dollar amount, and they didn’t really explain the program. Obviously, you only have so many words you can put on a page when it comes to these sorts of ballot measures.
But it really, I think that was the thing that stood out to me was it just spoke of the $10 million a year cost and didn’t really have the chance to explain or inform the voter as to what that actually meant, how that broke down, what that provided to families in need in the opportunities across the state. So I think that’s a little tricky. And I think that’s a very good point that you raised.
Katherine: Well, that and then to something we push when we talk about implementation is encouraging champions of programs to be created immediately. So if you have a parent in a program that has a transformational story, we push to have that highlighted to highlight the program to show what these programs do. I think that’s always a very heavy lift of any choice program is not only get it operational, get it functioning, but then get their stories out there to champion what transformation this opportunity has given to people.
And so it’s a good warning flag to any program that we see nationally that you need to have champions built into your program. And it’s a hard ask because they’re already doing so much. But I think it’s a good reminder to all of us that we have to get these programs advertised and championed by families so that voters know they exist and know that they’re working for families.
Nathan Sanders: Yeah. And what I’ll mention on that is, like, especially in the case of Kentucky, to where the ballot language was fine, it was fairly, you know, fair. But I think a big factor in Kentucky and a big reason why it failed so much, you know, it was like 65/35 is that a lot of the public school districts for months were coming out against it, telling their parents and telling their administration, their staff to vote against it.
And which is obviously, like, not legal. And so the attorney general had to step in and make a statement. But I think that played a big factor.
I think if you look at the breakdown of the amendment, rural Kentucky, particularly Republicans in Kentucky, in the rural areas voted against it. And like, as we know, working in state legislatures, working with partners, like the rural areas of states, it’s a different fight because they’re worried, you know, those public schools, the largest employer and they, you know, everyone knows somebody who teaches at the local school. And so when you hear these sort of myths that are perpetrated by the school district saying, oh, you know, if this thing passes or something like this passes, then, you know, our teachers will lose their jobs and we’ll lose all our funding and the school shut down and the world goes, you know, the world crashes down.
So I think that affected it a good bit is when these when these school districts in Kentucky were saying, hey, like, they’re perpetrating the same exact myths, as I just mentioned, they were telling their folks, you know, on their email list and things like that, like, don’t vote for it. And so I think that was a huge factor, obviously, just, you know, in addition to the fight that you already have when it comes to battling, which when it comes to passing something like this on a ballot, I think it was just it was all of that added up. So it’s unfortunate.
But I mean, that’s, that’s kind of what you get with the ballot initiative. It’s unfortunate.
Ed: All such important perspectives. And just to segue in, Nathan’s next. Nathan covers the southeast.
So Nathan, what happened? What happened down there this year?
Nathan: Yeah, there’s a few states that we’re looking at, particularly both the Carolinas, North and South Carolina. So in North Carolina, there were a lot of political factors sort of up and down the ballot that affected each down ballot race. I think most notable in the news, the governor’s race was one that kind of affected it.
You know, statewide, if you look at statewide races, North Carolina, they elected, the Democrats elected a governor, they elected attorney general, they elected a lieutenant governor, they elected a state superintendent of education. The Democrats also sort of picked up enough seats in the General Assembly to take back the supermajority that the Republicans had. So the Republicans in the General Assembly still have a majority, just not the supermajority that they have had, and were able to override the governor in the last couple of efforts for school choice.
So that’ll be a different, you know, sort of reality. The next few years in North Carolina, you know, we’ve had the benefit of having the supermajority of Republicans who support school choice. Now we don’t necessarily have that power to veto if they want to sort of expand that or change the program in any way.
So I feel confident that North Carolina, the pro school choice folks will be able to kind of defend and hold back any efforts to call back the programs. I’m not necessarily worried about that, but I don’t necessarily think there’s going to be any serious efforts to expand or change the program in any positive way, just because they’re going to kind of be dealing with some, a lot of pushback from leadership. So North Carolina, that’s kind of the situation there.
In South Carolina, some good news, obviously, in the last few months, they’ve been dealing with the Supreme Court, South Carolina Supreme Court, virtually overturning the program to where parents aren’t able to use the ESA private school tuition. And so sort of the strategy going into next session is going to be, hey, you know, how are we going to fix this program? How are we going to make it legal?
That’s still sort of ongoing in terms of what leadership wants and things like that. But positive note of the election is the South Carolina, the state Senate picked up a couple of seats from folks who are pro school choice. And so everyone who works in South Carolina sees that as great, because although they had a majority of school choice supporters in both chambers, and they were able to pass the program that we had, that were just overturned, but I spoke about the Senate, it’s always been a little tighter and a little tougher to get through when it comes to what school choice should look like.
So picking up those two seats in the state Senate are huge, I think moving forward, especially as we’re sort of rethinking what school choice looks like in South Carolina. That’s all that’s all good stuff. Another state, lastly, what I’ll mention is Missouri, what I where I’m really excited about, there’s a legislative makeup, not big changes.
We did lose a big legislative champion a few months ago in the primary representative Doug Ritchie, that was kind of a loss for for a champion there in in the house, but he was running for Senate. But legislative makeup still looks good in terms of school choice. It’s a very slim majority in the house.
But what I’m most excited about is the new governor coming in Governor elect Mike Kehoe has been vocally supportive of school choice. And I think if his team decides to sort of strategically push that in the legislature saying, hey, let’s go universal. I think there’s a real chance in a real play at going big there in the state.
And so that’s kind of TBD. Let’s see what you know, him and his team start to start to talk about. But I’m really excited about Missouri over the next couple of years.
So I think that’s it for me.
Ed: Why don’t we go back to South Carolina for a second, Nathan, for those of you who don’t know, there was a really big Supreme State Supreme Court ruling in the state just a little earlier this year. I’m wondering, based on these elections, do you think this impacts what the legislator might do to try to come back kind of fix that fix the program based on what’s going on with the legal issues?
Nathan: Yeah, well, I think with the seats that we picked up in the state senate, the pro school choice folks picked up in the state senate absolutely helped that I think when they’re sort of talking about legislative strategy and crafting or fixing or whatever they decided to do program wise to pass a program next session, I think having that extra cushion of support in the state senate absolutely changes the conversation because like I mentioned before, you know, before this, you know, the senate was already a pretty slim majority. They weren’t quite as gung-ho on school choice as the house and the speaker were. And so I think having that extra cushion in the state senate could be big for kind of revisiting this conversation of what the program should look like and could look like.
And so I think the chances are better now. I think that it just helps the conversation. So I’m excited to see what they decide to do.
I think it’s very interesting they’re going to have to be extremely nimble and navigating what they can do just because of the of the court precedent. But I think it’s good.
Ed: Thank you, Nathan. And I’ll just jump right in here to the Northeast Mid-Atlantic states that I covered. We had a really exciting night up in the Live Free or Die state up in New Hampshire.
Just to give you guys some context on what happened, Kelly Ayotte went on to win the election for governor, defeating her opponent, Joyce Craig, the former mayor of Manchester. The reason I bring that up is because Kelly Ayotte had such a victory that she actually beat Joyce Craig in the city that she was previously mayor in. And that’s something to really take a look at, because in Manchester, they’re having a lot of issues with the quality of their public schools, especially when you really get into the urban areas of the city.
A lot of parents are using the state’s Education Freedom Account program in Manchester. Now, there could be a lot of reasons for that result. But I certainly don’t think that this is something to write off.
In the House, Republicans expanded their majority. Last session, it was a razor thin majority. Legislation would also often have to depend on who was there that day, who was going to the bathroom, or I mean, remember, New Hampshire has 400 seats in their House.
So in a razor thin majority, it really matters that everyone’s there. But they expanded, I believe they’re landing at 222 seats of Republicans in the House. The Senate also picked up two seats for Republicans, they’re now going to have I believe it’s a 16 to eight seat majority.
Just to give a recap on last year, they came really close to getting an expanding the program’s eligibility from 350 to 500% of the federal poverty line. It came just short. Some people had electoral concerns worried about how the voters might respond to the program.
But I think what we see from this election is that people are resoundingly showing their support for the school choice program and wanting to see its expansion. We saw in the Senate, a mom of a child who participates in the state Education Freedom Account picked up a Senate seat. We also saw a Democrat who told an EFA mom that they were they would be supportive of the program when an election there as well.
So really exciting times in New Hampshire. This is the greatest opportunity that we’ve seen so far to bring the program’s universal eligibility. They’ve already achieved universal funding and usage with tying the state’s program to the funding formula and allowing families of wide use of educational expenses participating in the program.
So that’s it on New Hampshire. Also some really interesting news coming out of Vermont. Remember, Vermont is home to the nation’s oldest school choice program.
It was found it was enacted in 1869. They have a program called town tuitioning, which allows families in rural towns that don’t have public schools to take a voucher scholarship to either take it to a public or private school in or outside of Vermont. So what happened in Vermont this this last election was Republicans picked up 18 seats in the House and six seats in the Senate.
They broke the Democratic supermajorities in both chambers, meaning that any threats to the town tuitioning program that may come about can now be vetoed by Governor Phil Scott, who also won his reelection by over 70% of the vote. We did see some legislative threats. Last year, we saw a bill actually passed the House that would have severely restricted the program.
It failed in the Senate. It speculated that it may have failed in the Senate. The Education Committee chairman is actually, he represents a district that has heavy use of the town tuitioning program.
So he had some, a certain perspective that others might not. But now with the supermajorities broken in both, it is very unlikely that the town tuitioning program would see a serious threat. And then we look to Pennsylvania.
Pennsylvania was, of course, hugely watched at the national election. But there was a lot to watch at the state level too. The legislative majorities in both the House and Senate in the end are going to remain the same.
At the time of this recording, the House was decided by just one seat. It came really close to flipping, which would have been fascinating because remember Pennsylvania, Democratic Governor Josh Shapiro, when he was campaigning for governor, endorsed the idea of an ESA proposal on the state lifeline or past scholarships, which is a low-income, low-performing schools ESA proposal. When negotiations came up last year, the House Democrats were staunchly against the program.
He made a deal to line it and veto the program out of the budget that was sent to him that year. But he’s still calling it unfinished business. Now, one of the theories that might come up is, okay, well, if there was a flip, maybe legislative Republicans, plus saying Governor Shapiro has built clean, see if he signs it.
Now we’re not sure what’s going to happen with the legislative makeup looking the same. But Pennsylvania is always the one to watch with the Democratic governor supporting a school choice program. Well, that wraps up my states.
I’m wondering if anybody else has anything else to add on the results of the election across the country this year. Huge news at the state and national level. So I just wanted to give you guys the chance to give any of your last thoughts.
Katherine: I’ll go first. You know, I’m very excited after Tuesday night’s election. I’m seeing states that we normally aren’t active in reaching out.
For example, I had a call from New Mexico last week right after the election. And I also had a call from Nevada. And so those are just exciting new states that we’re cultivating contacts in.
But, you know, you’re seeing the rising tide lift all ships. So it’s very exciting to be in this space at the moment.
Aaron: I’ll just say that I think it’s going to continue to be an exciting space to be in because, again, I just can’t help but go back to the competitive nature of the way our federalist system is set up. And there’s going to be more states that take this on next time. Some states are going to be fresh at it.
Others are going to be trying for, you know, maybe the second time or the third time to take a swing at this. You know, others might be trying to expand existing programs to make them even better. Working for EdChoice, I know, will be right there along the way to help them.
And it’s exciting to see which states those might be as we go into 2025. And Nathan, any final thoughts?
Nathan: I’m just most excited about collecting new data from new and old programs, sort of gathering, you know, how these program design are designed and sort of use that to not only continue to pass new programs, but actually revisit old programs and sort of, I guess, as an organization, try to lead the conversation of what true choice could look like as it pertains to uses and funding and things like that.
And so I’m excited just to continue on, like, moving on and collecting the best of the best and refining programs and creating new programs. So I’m excited.
Ed: That’s all for us today. I’m your host, Ed Tarnowski, also known as Ed with EdChoice. For more information on EdChoice’s research and data, visit edchoice.org.
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