In the waning days of this year’s General Assembly session, Gov. Brian Kemp voiced his public support for a school voucher bill. The bill failed in the House, but with that extra spin of Kemp’s support, we’re sure to see a renewed effort to pass the measure in next year’s session.
Using government vouchers to pay for private, religious, or homeschooling with money that would have gone to public schools is an idea that has been popular in conservative circles since Milton Friedman in the 1950s. The movement to put the idea into practice is ending its most successful year, with at least 10 states enacting new or expanded voucher programs in 2023.
Georgia wasn’t the only state where voucher bills fell short, however. In the most closely watched and probably most expensive state legislative battle of the year, the Texas House rejected a voucher plan aggressively pushed by Gov. Greg Abbott. The decisive vote came before Thanksgiving in the fourth special session called by Abbott this year. All the Democrats voted to cut the provision from a ball-of-wax education bill, along with 21 Republicans, most from rural districts.
If that sounds familiar, it’s because the chemistry of the 84-63 vote in the Texas House is about the same as the 89-85 vote in the Georgia House, which sank the school voucher bill earlier in the year.
There are a lot of little towns in Georgia and Texas where the rituals that define a community happen on Friday nights, under the glare of floodlights, when high school rivals clash. In these places, the idea of taking money away from a local school system to pay for a student’s private school tuition sounds much different than it might at a mixer for a conservative think tank.
The county school consolidations, which have affected many rural districts over the past few decades, have added to the mistrust of outsiders meddling with their schools. These are deep red districts in both states, but so far, appeals to party loyalty haven’t caused many voucher holdouts to budge.
After a test vote during the regular session in April showed 24 Republicans opposed to his voucher proposal, Abbott went on an all-out blitz, holding pro-voucher rallies in rural districts, calling two special sessions to deal with education and playing hardball with the Republicans who defied him. After seven months of that, he flipped a net of three votes.
Abbott has since made good on his threat to withhold his endorsement from any of the Republican holdouts and has endorsed their Republican primary opponents in several races. The mammoth education bill loaded with needed money for a variety that contained the voucher proposal remains like a beached whale in the state’s legislative agenda.
“We’re in it to win it,” Abbott has said of the push for passage of his main legislative objective. You wonder what it’s going to cost him to achieve that objective.
The Georgia proposal isn’t a completely open voucher plan like the one enacted this year in Florida or the one voted down in Texas. In Georgia, only students from schools that tested in the bottom 25 percent would be eligible for the $6,000 vouchers. Some states that have passed limited systems like this have subsequently been expanded to include all public school students.
Kemp was no more successful than Abbott in pushing school vouchers over the top this year, but there are some lessons he can take from the Texas governor’s failure, not that he hasn’t learned them already.
One is that hardball isn’t going to work. As much time and money as school choice proponents have spent promoting their ideas, it still seems hard for them to catch the cultural nuances involved in selling them in places that resemble neither the failing inner-city schools nor the prosperous suburban schools of school choice rhetoric.
Another lesson is that winning on this issue isn’t as important as what Abbott has done to achieve it. The victories in other states this year, as well as the close votes in Georgia and Texas, are part of a concentrated drive to advance the voucher concept everywhere. But everywhere isn’t where most kids go to school.
In Georgia, for reasons that are impossible to determine, the sponsor of the voucher bill in the Senate is from Forsyth County, where the public schools are superb. Further, the representative carrying the bill in the House is also from Forsyth. Go figure.