Voucher Wars: Utah Says No
In the national press coverage of last week’s off-year elections around the country, most of the attention was devoted to partisan outcomes such as the Democratic gubernatorial win in Kentucky, and the Democratic takeover of the Virginia Senate.
But voters in Utah dealt summarily with perhaps the most ambitious effort yet to use public funds for vouchers in private elementary and secondary schools, defeating a statewide, non-means-tested voucher plan by a 62%-38% margin.
This was, as voucher opponents quickly pointed out, the eleventh time since 1972 that voters in some part of the country considered voucher or tuition-tax-credit proposals, and the eleventh time they’ve been rejected. Voucher ballot initiatives have actually lost twice in California, Colorado, and Michigan.
But the Utah referendum was unprecedented in that it revolved around a plan already enacted by the Republican-controlled state legislature, and signed into law by the Republican governor. Voucher opponents had to get an initiative on the ballot to overturn the law. Most prior initiatives on the subject were launched by pro-voucher groups, and most involved state constitutional amendments (most notably, in the huge ballot struggles of 2000 in California and Michigan).
The other unusual aspect of the Utah fight was the political strategy deployed by voucher proponents. In both Michigan and California, proponents banked on support from a coalition of Catholic voters hoping for public funds for parochial schools, and from minority voters disgruntled with under-performing public schools (strong last-minute tides against vouchers among minority voters were central to the outcomes in both states). In Utah, the idea was to count on the longstanding support for vouchers among Republicans in a strongly Republican state, along with the profound conservatism of Utah’s majority-Mormon population.
But the achilles heel of the Utah voucher drive was probably an over estimation of Mormon support. The LDS church does not maintain its own elementary and secondary school system, and indeed, non-Mormons have sometimes complained that Utah public schools are too open to Mormon religious influences. While the referendum showed relatively high levels of support for vouchers in the state’s most heavily Mormon areas, in the end, the voucher plan lost in every single Utah county.
One familiar aspect of the Utah vote was the deployment of significant financial resources by wealthy conservative individuals on the pro-voucher side, and by teachers unions on the other side. The 2000 California voucher initiative was designed and lavishly bankrolled by venture capitalist Timothy Draper. The DeVoe family of Amway fame provided most of the financial muscle for the Michigan initiative the same year. In Utah, an estimated $2.7 million of the $3.8 million spent to save the voucher plan came from Overstock.com owner Patrick Byrne, with much of the rest being ponied up by out-of-state conservative think tanks. Meanwhile, the National Education Association contributed more than $3 million to the effort to overturn the voucher plan.
The immediate fallout from the Utah results must have depressed voucher proponents as much as the vote itself. Byrne announced what amounts to a personal vendetta against Gov. John Huntsman, who after signing the voucher bill, refused to campaign for it prior to the referendum. (Huntsman is up for re-election next year). Byrne said he’d work to unseat Huntsman even if his opponent were “a communist.”
Abandonment of public schools through vouchers or other school privatization schemes has been rejected decisively yet again. But what’s bad news for voucher fans could be good news for proponents of charter public schools, which provide parental choice, school competition, and accountability for educational results within the public school system.