Armstrong: Initiative 138 threatens school choice in the name of protecting it

August 27, 2024 By Ari Armstrong

from Complete Colorado

I am as invested as anyone in school choice in Colorado, given my wife and I have homeschooled our now-nine-year-old from the beginning. Because Initiative 138 is ambiguously written, it could undermine school choice in Colorado in important ways, depending on how lawmakers write enacting legislation, how school districts interpret it, and how courts decide the inevitable legal battles. The proposal to amend the state constitution, promoted by the conservative group Advance Colorado Action, thus violates the basic principle, first do no harm.

Others have expressed various concerns with the measure. Jon Caldara of the Independence Institute (which is the publisher of Complete Colorado) worries that 138 “has a great chance of failing at the ballot box and that defeat will embolden legislators to attack . . . school choice.” Christian Home Educators of Colorado fears the measure invites government interference in homeschooling. On the other side, the teachers’ union sees 138 “as a stepping stone toward a state voucher program in disguise,” as Erica Breunlin summarizes.

My main concern is over the ambiguous language of the proposal. We can pull out three main statements from the measure (my numbering):

1) All children have the right to equal opportunity to access a quality education.

2) Parents have the right to direct the education of their children.

3) Each K-12 child has the right to school choice, [which] includes neighborhood, charter, private, and home schools, open enrollment options, and future innovations in education.

At first glance, this language seems sensible enough. But take a second look, keeping in mind that those responsible for interpreting, enacting, and enforcing the measure largely will be people who oppose school choice.

Homeschooling threat

The term “quality” in this context practically begs the state to further regulate homeschoolers and other alternative schoolers in the name of ensuring quality. Already bubbling is a nationwide movement to regulate homeschoolers more severely. Elsewhere I have reviewed a couple of flagrantly biased “news” stories calling for more such regulation. By establishing a positive “right” for “all children” to access a “quality” education, Initiative 138 seems to demand that state government intervene to impose the state’s vision of “quality.” For homeschoolers, that is a disaster waiting to happen.

Now, you might wonder, what is wrong with quality in homeschooling? Nothing! For example, my homeschooled child receives a far better education that he could get at any public school. He is reading and doing math ahead of grade level. Recently he scored in the top one percent on a widely recognized standardized test.

The problem is, if state government makes it its businesses to dictate to me what a “quality” education looks like for my son, it will inevitably actively interfere with my ability to provide that quality education. My family needs freedom, not bureaucratic controls. I can’t do my job as a homeschool dad if I have to waste a bunch of time and energy trying to comply with ill-suited government demands.

Incidentally, state government obviously cannot ensure quality in the education it already oversees. Recently released results from the Colorado Measures of Academic Success show that, for not a single grade 3-8, for neither reading nor math, do a majority of students meet or exceed expectations.

Competing rights

Defenders of 138 might point to the bit about parental rights. Isn’t that language sufficient to prevent the sort of problems that worry me? No, it isn’t. Two other parts of the measure explicitly refer to the child’s rights, not parents’ rights. Nothing in the measure gives priority to parents’ rights or gives legislators, school board members, or judges any guidance on how to balance the “rights” of the child versus the rights of the parents. So those responsible for enacting the measure, if it passes, may well interpret it to mean that parents’ rights to direct the education of their children are constrained by the state’s need to ensure a child’s right to a “quality” education, however the state chooses to define that.

The language of the measure has other problems too. When the measure declares that “all children have the right to equal opportunity to access a quality education,” does that create a positive obligation for the state to provide “quality” universal preschool for all ages? After all, some wealthier parents put their children in expensive schools from infancy, so obviously other children do not have that “equal opportunity” unless the state provides it. Or some plausibly could argue.

Also, when 138 declares that “each K-12 child has the right to school choice,” does that imply that a child should be able to override his parents’ school choices? Again, because the measure states both that parents have rights to direct education and that each child has the right to school choice, whether parents or the child should get legal priority is entirely unclear.

More government control

Finally, is the teachers’ union right that the measure is a backdoor voucher proposal? If a “child has the right to school choice,” and if school choice includes private schools, then does the state have a positive obligation to fund private schools, directly or indirectly? The answer is anyone’s guess. I think we should seriously consider a universal voucher proposal, but we should do so in the context of a specific proposal that is unambiguously setting up vouchers. We shouldn’t recklessly punt the ball to lawyers and the courts.

School choice is vital to my family. I am begging Advance Colorado Action to stop trying to “help” me with its badly written ballot measure that seems to have more to do with spending donors’ funds than actually helping the families who need school choice. We need real school choice, not the risk of more more government controls clothed in the rhetoric of school choice.