Gary Houchens

For a long time, Kentucky has been one of the only states to systematically deny K-12 students meaningful school choice options, but that could finally change thanks to the recent federal budget reconciliation package.

The One Big, Beautiful Bill includes a provision offering a federal tax credit to individuals who make private donations for scholarship programs that help eligible students access a variety of education services, including private school tuition.

Scholarship tax credit programs like this already exist in 21 states and are appealing because they use private, not public, dollars. The government already provides a host of other popular tax credits and deductions to encourage other forms of charitable giving or spending for the common good.

States will have to opt in to allow their residents to participate in the program, and the Kentucky legislature should act as soon as they are in session next year to make our state’s students eligible. If they leave it up to Governor Beshear, he will surely deny Kentuckians this life-changing option, given his long-standing opposition to letting low-income families have alternatives to their assigned public school.

Beshear and the enemies of education freedom will likely point to last year’s failed ballot amendment as an excuse for Kentucky to stay out of the federal scholarship program and maintain its public-school monopoly on working class families.

Amendment 2 addressed a problem created by state courts which had erroneously interpreted the Kentucky constitution as prohibiting school choice. If it passed, Amendment 2 would have simply given the legislature the opportunity to do their job: setting education policy for the state and potentially joining the 48 other states that provide some mechanism to give low-income families the same opportunities to choose a school for their children that affluent families already enjoy.

Sadly, Amendment 2 was defeated. The convoluted nature of the proposal – amending the constitution so that the legislature could consider some yet-to-be-determined policy for the future – was understandably confusing to voters.

But Amendment 2 also failed because the state’s school districts used their immense influence over public school employees to falsely threaten them with job losses and millions of dollars of education spending cuts if the initiative passed. The sheer quantity of misinformation spread by public school leaders was impossible to combat, and too many public-school employees persuaded their friends and family members to vote no on Amendment 2, depriving options to tens of thousands of students stuck in chronically low-performing schools.

The bottom line is that voters – even if they hold a majority – should not be able to deny their fellow citizens the dignity of choosing a school for their children.

As Colleen Hroncich and Neal McCluskey of the Cato Institute wrote last year, “Education choices should not be based on majority rule. It is simply wrong to compel families to pay for, and de facto attend, government schools – places intended to do nothing less than shape human minds – that they find subpar, or even morally unacceptable, even if the majority is okay with them.”

It’s time for the Kentucky legislature to give our students the same privileges enjoyed by children in states all around us.

— Gary Houchens, PhD, is director of the educational leadership doctoral program at Western Kentucky University.