Matt Compton
Lawmakers are under extraordinary pressure to bring school vouchers to Idaho during their coming session in January — despite poll after poll showing that Idahoans do not want them. Out-of-state, billionaire-funded groups and their allies at the Statehouse are determined to end Idaho’s place as one of a small number of conservative states across the nation that have resisted these private and parochial school subsidies for wealthy families.
Members of the Idaho Education Association — the good, dedicated public school educators who teach our children and grandchildren, and taught most of us as youngsters — are equally determined to stop vouchers in any form from siphoning resources away from Idaho’s public school classrooms and students.
LEARN MORE ABOUT IEA MEMBERS’ OPPOSITION TO VOUCHERS
It will not be easy.
National, pro-voucher groups like the Maryland-based American Federation for Children have flooded Idaho with hundreds of thousands of dollars in dark money to influence our elections, lobby our lawmakers, and sweep aside anyone who dares to protect public schools and their students. In fact, these anti-public education out-of-state groups are now Idaho’s top political spenders — far outspending everyday Idahoans, like IEA members.
Why? Well, it’s not to help Idaho kids or Idaho families as they claim. Instead, they are here to privatize and monetize public education, plain and simple. And Idaho, with its growing cadre of compliant anti-public education lawmakers, is an easy mark.
To do this, they cynically ignore the growing evidence that voucher programs — often benignly labeled with monikers like school choice, education savings accounts and tuition tax credits — not only do not help students, but also blow up state budgets. Their model is the universal voucher program in Arizona. This poorly planned legislation, which is often copy-and-pasted and introduced in states across the country, including here in Idaho in 2023, is to blame for a $1.4 billion budget shortfall in that state.
To be clear, Idahoans are not asking for voucher programs. Six in 10 say it is not important, according to IEA’s polling of likely voters. And 8 of 10 say that if they are instituted here, the private or parochial schools that receive public funds should be required to live up to the same levels of transparency as public schools.
Despite this, their tactics unfortunately found success during May’s primary election. Several key education allies, like House Education Chair Julie Yamamoto (R-Caldwell), lost primaries to extreme candidates supported by these out-of-state groups and anti-public education extremists in the Legislature. These losses make the work of IEA members and other public education advocates even more difficult.
Additionally, their spending and cause have considerable traction among many Idaho lawmakers returning to the Statehouse in January. Some are eager to tap into this new stream of political funding, even at the expense of Idaho students. Others are anti-public education culture warriors eager to use the largess to blur the secular lines between church and state and benefit publicly-funded faith-based education in our state.
Many of these lawmakers aren’t just interested in bringing vouchers to Idaho. They are behind a broad, long-standing effort to undermine public education. These lawmakers are responsible for efforts to gradually starve public schools of funding, over-aggressively police curriculum and educators, and support book bans and criminalizing librarians.
Despite the growing odds against them, IEA members will not sit idly by and wait for vouchers and other anti-public education measures to become a reality.
They understand the false promise of vouchers is a disservice to students and educators and hurts our public schools. Vouchers create an unequal playing field for Idaho’s children by reducing fair access to educational opportunities. They siphon tax dollars from Idaho’s rural public schools to help a select few pay private school tuition in urban areas. They provide no discernible educational benefit to students. And they rob chronically underfunded classrooms of precious resources.
Just like they have year after year, IEA members will show up to protect public schools from those who want to profit from their death. This coming winter’s legislative session, and the one after that, will be no different.
Matt Compton is associate executive director of the Idaho Education Association, which represents thousands of public school educators and is Idaho’s largest public employee union.