How Nebraska Voters Are Organizing to Block School Privatization
Nebraska voters are heading to the polls in November to decide whether to send public money to private schools.
by Paul Blest, More Perfect Union
From North Carolina and Florida to Iowa to Arizona, school voucher programs have taken off, funneling taxpayer dollars into largely unaccountable private schools instead of supporting public schools.
This year, Nebraska lawmakers passed a school voucher law during the final day of the legislative session, voiding a scheduled referendum on a similar law passed in 2023. Supporters of public schools across the state, however, quickly organized to get the new law on the ballot so that voters would have a say.
If organizers succeed in overturning the law, they could carve a path for defending public schools against voucher schemes, particularly in rural areas where there are few private schools. But plenty of well-moneyed interests — including Nebraska Sen. Pete Ricketts and former U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos — are dumping money into the effort to privatize education.
“There's a lot of national, well-known figures that are funneling a lot of money into our states to push and lobby for legislation like this,” Kristin Christensen, a teacher from Lincoln who’s currently running for a seat on the state Board of Education, told More Perfect Union.
Proponents of vouchers, who have labeled the programs “school choice,” argue that the free market can provide a better education for students than public schools — particularly students from poor and working-class families. The principle behind the idea is that the money should follow students, even if they aren’t enrolled in public schools.
But these programs usually aren’t subjected to the same oversight that public schools are; in Milwaukee, one of the first cities to adopt a school voucher program, more than 40 percent of private schools receiving public money closed up shop during the first 25 years of vouchers.
“We have yet to see any study that shows the school vouchers are really moving the needle in terms of student achievement,” Hilary Wething, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, told MPU. “In fact, the studies on vouchers show that students tend to achieve less going into voucher programs.”
Evidence also shows that the programs disproportionately help the well-off and families that already utilize private schools. In Indiana, a government analysis showed that during the 2023-2024 school year, the average voucher recipient came from a family making six figures. And in Arizona, nearly 75 percent of vouchers last year went to students who were already attending private schools. (The private schools also raised their tuition rates.)
In Nebraska, as in some other conservative states like Texas, there’s also the question of how this will impact rural students. “The impact on vouchers on rural communities can be particularly devastating because they have very few outside options,” Wething said. “In a rural area, there will not be enough students to provide the conditions to create a second school.”
Nearly 90 percent of Nebraska’s towns and cities are home to fewer than 3,000 people, and 21 of the state’s 93 counties have options for private schools from kindergarten through 12th grade. Eric Garcia-Mendez, a school board member in Grand Island, Nebraska who is backing the referendum, said that the successful campaign to put the law up for a vote shows that the campaign has support across geographical divides.
“We successfully gathered enough signatures to put that bill on the ballot, to let voters decide like, ‘Hey, do you want your public dollars to go to private schools?’” Garcia-Mendez recalled. “And what we found across the state in rural Nebraska and urban Nebraska, was that people are not for this bill.”
We’ve been tracking this fight over the future of public education for a few years now, in states like Arizona, Texas, and Nebraska last year, when the first law authorizing public dollars for private schools passed. In our reporting on both last year’s law and the new one, we’ve been hearing a consistent refrain: public schools are not just a way to educate young people, but a longstanding pillar of community in rural America.
We hope this story can help explain why, in spite of political polarization and the privatization of so many crucial public services, Americans still find value in public education and don’t want it to go away. Watch the new video below.