Private school choice is the education issue that has garnered the bulk of national attention, campaign spending, and heated rhetoric this election season. But it’s far from the only education issue voters will ponder as they fill out their ballots.
Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump haven’t addressed K-12 schools much in their dueling campaigns for the presidency. But at the state level, major changes for schools could be on the way once voters have their say.
Education Week has already highlighted several key themes among education-related ballot issues this year, including private school choice. In Colorado and Kentucky, voters will weigh in on whether school choice belongs in the state constitution. In Nebraska, they’ll decide whether to continue or shutter an existing program that devotes public funds for families to spend on private educational options for their children.
In a number of states and localities across the country, voters will have the option to greenlight billions of dollars in spending on school facilities, in the form of bonds that districts pay back with interest over several decades. Voters will also weigh in on the perennially contentious topic of property taxes, a crucial but controversial source of K-12 school funding.
Those are the most common sets of education-related developments to watch for on election night. But they’re far from the only ones. Here’s a closer look at a handful of other contests that merit attention.
Making school boards partisan (Florida)
Amendment 1 would make school board elections partisan. Candidates would have their party affiliations listed next to their names on the ballot, and members of respective parties would face off in partisan primary elections.
Most states keep school board elections nonpartisan, Education Week reported last year. But a growing number of states in recent years have at least considered proposals to change that as school board races in some locales have become increasingly contentious and attracted more attention from partisan political operatives.
All districts in Alabama, Connecticut, Louisiana, and Pennsylvania have partisan school board races. Individual districts in North Carolina can opt in or out of running partisan school board elections. And four other states allow some school board races to be partisan.
Nonpartisan school board elections date back to efforts in the early 20th century to circumvent massive political machines. But proponents of the change in Florida, including Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has taken the rare step as governor of endorsing candidates in local school board races, say voters deserve the right to know how their school board representatives do and don’t align with them on key issues.
Eliminating a key standardized test requirement for high schoolers (Massachusetts)
Question 2 proposes to eliminate the longstanding graduation requirement that K-12 students pass the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) 10th grade exam. Students would still be required to demonstrate competency with state curriculum standards.
Most states no longer require students to take an exit exam to finish high school. Several of the fewer than 10 states that still have those requirements have recently contemplated abandoning them.
The proposal raises significant questions that get to the fundamental role of school in society.
Proponents of the ballot measure, including the state teachers’ union that’s been behind the Question 2 campaign, argue that focusing students’ educational experience on a single exam diverts time and attention from worthwhile learning and put students from marginalized groups at a disadvantage.
But opponents of the proposal contend that the state would be eliminating a crucial tool of accountability that checks both whether students have the knowledge and skills they need to progress into adulthood, and whether the state has adequately ensured that students will obtain the relevant knowledge and skills. The high school class of 2003 was the first in Massachusetts that had to pass the MCAS to graduate. The MCAS has been part of a sweeping, decades-old statewide education reform effort, and students’ test scores have been among in the highest in the nation on the National Assessment of Educational Progress.
If Massachusetts dumps the MCAS graduation requirement, it would become the latest state to drop a requirement that students pass an exit exam to graduate. Only nine states still have such a requirement, down from more than half of states in 2002.
Legalizing sports betting (Missouri)
Amendment 2 would legalize sports betting in the state. Missouri would join 38 other states and the District of Columbia that have begun allowing some form of sports betting since the U.S. Supreme Court gave the green light in 2018.
Advertisements touting the measure assert that the new market will generate millions of dollars for K-12 schools. That’s been the case in Ohio, which earlier this year invested $935 million from sports betting tax revenue into K-12 public schools and the state’s array of private school choice programs.
But the extent to which K-12 schools will experience tangible benefits from sports betting is not entirely clear. Missouri is proposing to tax websites and venues that accept bets on sporting events 10 percent of the revenue they generate from players. That’s below the national average sports betting tax of 15 percent, according to the Associated Press, and significantly lower than the tax in states like New York and New Hampshire, which each tax sports betting at a rate above 50 percent.
The proposed Missouri law also includes several deductions that will place further limits on the revenue the state collects from the proliferation of the sports betting industry.
The state auditor estimates the program could generate as much as $29 million in annual state revenue—or as little as none at all. In some years when it doesn’t collect renewal fees from companies that offer sports betting, the state might even have to draw on funds that otherwise would have gone to education to pay for the program, the auditor’s report says.
Some observers have also raised concerns that the language of the ballot proposal isn’t sufficient to establish a concrete mechanism for the state to collect sports betting taxes.
And even if they do, there’s no guarantee that they will lead to a net gain in funding for schools. State lawmakers could, for instance, use the influx of revenue from sports betting in place of, rather than in addition to, other revenue sources that currently fund the education budget.
Enshrining the constitutional right to education (Rhode Island)
Ballot Question 1 asks voters whether the state should hold a constitutional convention. The question appears before voters every 10 years, but they haven’t voted yes in 40 years.
A bipartisan commission earlier this year solicited testimony from voters and civic organizations on the issues they’d most want to address if a constitutional convention were to take place. Among the most-cited topics were two related to schools: establishing a fundamental right to education, and school choice.
The U.S. Constitution does not include a right to education. Most state constitutions do mention schools, however, and many litigators have used those mentions as the basis of lawsuits arguing for more robust education funding—including cases ongoing in Arizona, New Hampshire, North Carolina, and Wyoming.
But few states explicitly confer on citizens the right to education. Earlier this year, the Rhode Island state senate approved a bill that would have amended the constitution to include a right to an adequate education, but the legislation died in the House.
School choice, meanwhile, is a hot topic in many GOP-led states, but it’s come up recently in Democrat-led states like Pennsylvania as well. Rhode Island currently has one small tax-credit scholarship program that serves low-income children, enabling them to collect tax-deductible scholarships that allow them to attend private school. And public school students also have the option to enroll in schools other than those they’ve been zoned into.
Rolling back efforts to fight climate change (Washington state)
Three initiatives with implications for schools all stem from the same source—Brian Heywood, a conservative hedge fund manager who invested $6 million to secure space on the ballot for these proposals.
Initiative 2117 would repeal the state’s Climate Commitment Act, signed into law by Gov. Jay Inslee in 2023. It would also ban the state and its local governments from passing similar measures in the future.
The law established a statewide limit on greenhouse gas emissions that becomes increasingly strict until 2050. Companies that generate the most pollution in the state can purchase incentive allowances for the carbon dioxide they emit. In the year since it passed, those purchases have generated more than $2 billion in state revenue.
On a separate, unrelated ballot measure, Initiative 2109 would eliminate the state’s tax on capital gains.
Earlier this year, the state budgeted roughly $180 million in revenue from the climate policy for electric school buses, school modernization projects, and HVAC repairs in school buildings. If the climate law is repealed, funding for those projects will have to come from another source.
The state’s grant program for schools to teach students in grades 3-8 to ride a bike and the Safe Routes to School program for improving infrastructure for students as they walk to school also benefit from Climate Commitment Act funds and would be in jeopardy if that money goes away.
And the state would lose the opportunity to generate a major stream of billions in future revenue that could fund school modernization and decarbonization. Those efforts will become increasingly urgent as the devastating effects of global climate change ramp up.
The separate initiative repealing capital gains taxes would eliminate a major source of K-12 funding. The capital gains tax policy, which took effect in 2022, requires the first $500 million of revenue each year to go into a fund for schools and child care facilities. The remainder goes toward school construction efforts. In 2023, the state used this policy to collect $890 million from fewer than 4,000 of the state’s wealthiest taxpayers.
