While this is certainly a blow for families in Utah for whom the status quo is not good enough, the cold hard truth is that this initiative’s fate had nothing to do with school choice and whether or not it is right, good or popular.
 
A good friend of ours deeply involved with the politics of education reform says, “If you have 30 minutes to sit down with each voter – like you would with a legislator – you can make a strong case for why these reforms are important. But with voters, it’s all about five-second sound bites.  The ‘this destroys public schools’ argument, no matter how bogus, rings clearer in voters minds than anything reformers can come up with.”
 
Every year, parents all over the country have a choice of where to send their kids to school.  Every year, millions of parents (and that number is growing) choose something other than the traditional public school to school to which their family is assigned.
 
The proof that Americans — and parents specifically — want choice is incontrovertible. 
 
But Americans are skittish about making policy at the ballot box.  While they support the right to make choices for themselves, they are reluctant to do that for others.  They entrust that job to their elected representatives – the very legislators who established the Utah voucher program in the first place.
 
Unfortunately, the parents and families working together at a grassroots level to support this program were no match for the tens of millions of dollars that poured into Utah from teachers’ unions across the country.  Voucher opponents took this fight to a national level, spending $144 for every teacher in Utah to stop the program.  And because PAC contributions in the Utah teachers’ union is significantly down, much funding came from the National Education Association, headquarters in Washington, D.C.
 
In contrast, Parents for Choice in Education raised 84 percent of their campaign funding locally in Utah.  Working hard at the grassroots level, this powerful group of parents held their own against an indestructible union with deep pockets.
 
This defeat is a lesson in American government and the power of campaign funding, not a statement on school choice.  And the victims of this defeat are the children and families who saw this program as a way to escape the educational straightjacket of failing public schools.