With the November election less than three months away, two of Kentucky’s longtime nonprofits published opposite conclusions about the state’s controversial Amendment 2 ballot measure.

The Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence published a white paper determining that the state’s controversial Amendment 2 ballot measure is against the interest of voters.

It came shortly after the Bluegrass Institute of Public Policy, a free-market think tank that has been advocating for Amendment 2, published a document responding to frequently asked questions about the measure.

The white paper and the FAQ – very different documents that serve different purposes – are two of the latest additions to a growing body of published work on the proposed amendment.

This proposal would allow the Kentucky General Assembly to “provide financial support for the education of students outside the system of common schools” – enabling Kentucky to funnel taxpayer dollars to school options outside of traditional public schools.

The amendment overrides seven parts of the state Constitution to do so.

It ended up on the ballot after the Kentucky General Assembly, for the first time in state history, passed legislation for a plan to establish taxpayer funds for private entities exempt from traditional public oversight – specifically, charter schools. State courts, however, ruled that the move was unconstitutional, leading to the ballot measure to change the state constitution.

In Warren County and Bowling Green, superintendents of both school systems – along with all five members of the Bowling Green Independent School District Board of Education speaking as private citizens – oppose the amendment. Leaders of both school systems have expressed deep concerns the amendment will divert needed funds from public schools statewide.

The Prichard Committee and the Bluegrass Institute – similar to opponents and supporters of Amendment 2, respectively – say they share the same goal: to improve educational outcomes and equity at lower costs. But they support different means of getting there and reach different conclusions about existing research.

The committee’s 16-page white paper, published with three distillations last week, navigates seminal research nationwide to approach one question: Does evidence conclude that the Amendment’s possible education and equity outcomes are worth the possible financial implications?

The analysis puts the onus on the existing body of research and evidence on non-traditional school choice options to prove that spending taxpayer dollars on non-traditional school choice is worth it.

The lead researcher of the paper, Todd Baldwin, confirmed that’s a fair summary.

“Because we’re talking about a really large intervention which is likely to cost a lot of money, the onus is on those who are proposing this to prove that this is, in fact, a better bang for the buck,” he said.

The committee concluded that non-traditional school choice initiatives lack evidence that show consistent improvement in education at scale.

It emphasizes that Amendment 2 could strain Kentucky’s education budget substantially as well as cause a loss of resources in disadvantaged communities. The amendment can also cause a loss for rural counties, states the study, given that nearly half of Kentucky’s rural counties don’t have a private school.

The committee also notes that non-traditional school choice options could cause students with disabilities to lose important protections and services mandated for public school systems as well as increase educational inequality.

“What folks often cite in support of this as a strategy are narrowly tailored school choice strategies – not broad, sweeping Wild West school choice,” Baldwin said. “Amendment 2 opens the door for all things. None of it is narrowly tailored.”

Meanwhile, the Bluegrass Institute holds that enough evidence exists of improved educational outcomes – at financial savings, to boot – to warrant voting for Amendment 2.

Its FAQ claims that public school funding has skyrocketed since 1990 while falling far short in educational outcomes such as higher fourth grade reading marks – and the institute believes it’s time to try a more free-market approach.

“In 1990, we were promised public schools were going to be improved dramatically, and especially going to be working on the achievement gaps,” said Richard Innes, the staff education analyst at the Bluegrass Institute. “It’s 34 years later now. Those promises have not been kept.”

Conclusions from the nonprofits’ two documents clash across virtually all factors, from concerns about those with disabilities, to the possibility of segregation, to effects of non-traditional school choice on equity.

The divergence appears to largely stem from how the organizations interpret existing research and whether enough evidence of positive outcomes exists to support Amendment 2. The two also differ in how they weigh the possible gains and losses of the Amendment against possible financial consequences.

“We can stand by and wait, but I think the evidence is we’ve been waiting too long,” Innes said. ”Let’s try this. If it doesn’t work, Kentucky can do something different.”

Meanwhile, Prichard Committee President Brigitte Blom says that directing taxpayer dollars to private schools causes conditions for an unregulated market – one without accountability to taxpayers nor durable research to warrant that kind of investment.

“While there is clearly more work to be done to continue to improve education outcomes … now is not the time to spend shared public dollars on strategies with a lack of reliably positive outcomes at best – and negative outcomes at worst,” she said.

The Prichard Committee white paper and its distillations can be accessed at https://mailchi.mp/prichardcommittee.org/amendment-2-resources.

The Bluegrass Institute FAQ and its brief can be accessed at https://www.bipps.org.