Opponents of Amendment 2, which would clear the path for lawmakers to give Kentucky families educational choices already available in the vast majority of states, derisively label it a “voucher amendment.”

However, this amendment doesn’t address what kind of specific policy Kentucky will have, whether charter schools, vouchers or scholarships.

It simply serves as a constitutional bush hog by removing legal barriers, clearing the path toward education freedom in our commonwealth. It allows for debate and decision-making in future legislative sessions about policies that best meet the needs of families and their children.

Opponents also claim passing the amendment will harm Kentucky’s public education system by diminishing desperately needed funding for an already-underfunded system.

But is Kentucky’s education system underfunded, and would school-choice policies decimate it?

Recently, I discussed the amendment in beautiful Jackson County in southeastern Kentucky. Along with my presentation, the Bluegrass Institute has released a policy brief looking at that rural school district’s spending and academic outcomes.

The brief reports that since 1990, Jackson County’s per-pupil spending, adjusted for inflation, has more than tripled – from less than $7,500 to nearly $24,000, higher than in urban Fayette County, Kentucky’s second-largest school district.

The district’s academic performance hasn’t nearly kept pace with these huge spending increases.

Only 8% of Jackson County’s eighth-graders attained proficiency in mathematics; two-thirds failed to score “proficient” or above in reading.

Rep. Timmy Truett, R-McKee, is the McKee Elementary School principal and opposes allowing voters to decide the education-choice amendment while adding to opponents’ continued harping on this mythical narrative that offering parents education choice will diminish the public K-12 system.

“I am against taking money away from the districts who need that extra funding,” Truett says. “I’m afraid of what this legislation may do.”

Why would a legislator be “afraid” to allow the people to speak?

Shouldn’t the concern be more about what the future holds for unprepared students than in propping up a mediocre system?

In fact, isn’t it possible that allowing the legislature to create programs with funding mechanisms providing parents more choices regarding where their children learn will create the dynamics that bring improvement to Kentucky’s education system?

It’s happening in other states.

In Florida, a half-million students are educated in public charter and private schools chosen by parents rather than assigned by school-district bureaucrats, including more than 100,000 benefiting from scholarships.

If Truett’s fears that offering parents options with funding mechanisms were well-founded, then Florida’s public system should already be decimated since hundreds of thousands of that state’s families in that state have enrolled their children in nontraditional schools for years.

Yet the more choices Florida offers its parents, the more its public education system improves with greater efficiency in the use of taxpayers’ dollars.

The institute’s Jackson County report is part of a series of snapshots of Kentucky school districts’ spending and educational outcomes. The series includes a look at statewide trends, which follow similar patterns found in Jackson, Fayette, Jefferson and other counties: steep per-pupil spending with lagging academic performance.

In constant 2022 inflation-adjusted dollars, Kentucky’s per-pupil education revenue increased from less than $10,000 in 1992 to more than $16,000 in 2022 while Florida’s only increased by the equivalent of less than $700 in real dollars during that same time period.

Census data indicate that in 2022, only four states had lower education revenue than Florida while Kentucky’s was higher than 18 other states. But academic performance in the two states hasn’t mirrored that fiscal reality.

Choice in Florida is clearly associated with noteworthy – and economical – education improvement while school-choice-sparse Kentucky languishes with an inefficient system that now performs notably behind Florida’s.

Section 183 of Kentucky’s Constitution states: “The General Assembly shall, by appropriate legislation, provide for an efficient system of common schools throughout the State.”

Opponents of choice for parents without means are all shook up about whether schools of choice fit the constitutional moniker of “common schools.”

Ironically, it’s the very idea of education choice they oppose so strenuously that offers Kentucky its best chance of achieving what they claim to seek: a truly efficient, thus truly constitutional, public education system.

– Jim Waters is president of the Bluegrass Institute for Public Policy Solutions, Kentucky’s free-market think tank. Read previous columns at www.bipps.org. Reach him at jwaters@freedomkentucky.com and @bipps on X.