Millions of dollars have been spent Trying to get Kentuckians to influence a constitutional amendment that appears on the November ballot, both sides are sharing conflicting information that has left some voters confused.

If approved, Amendment 2 would amend seven sections of the state constitution to allow tax dollars to go toward various forms of education, which could include charter schools or vouchers that help with private school tuition.

Amending the Constitution is a necessary step if lawmakers want to pursue what advocates call a “the school choice programbecause the Kentucky Supreme Court has ruled twice that providing money for education outside the current public school system is unconstitutional.

Lawmakers have not indicated what type of program they would implement if the amendment passes, and there are several different paths they could take.

Still, that hasn’t stopped advocates both for and against the amendment from making false and misleading claims about what it will do. To alleviate confusion, The Courier Journal attempted to address some of these points.

Would Kentucky’s Amendment 2 Increase or Decrease Public School Funding?

The Kentucky Students First campaign has spent more than $1 million on messages highlighting purported positive effects associated with the amendment, including a flyer that claims the amendment “invests more money in our public education system” and “increases public school funding per pupil. “

On the other hand, Protect Our Schools Kentucky has said that Amendment 2 will hurt public schools by reducing their funding. (( MAKE SURE THEY HAVE SAID THIS AND I DON’T HAPPEN))

Both promotions are misleading. Because lawmakers haven’t outlined a detailed plan for what they would enact if the amendment passes, it’s impossible to say how the amendment will affect the current education system.

If it were to pass, Chris Karbownik, an associate professor of economics at Emory University, said it’s possible public schools could lose funding if the state doesn’t increase its budget for education.

“If you don’t increase the budget, you’re just pouring money from one glass to another,” he said.

Programs that divert students from public schools could also have different financial impacts on the current system, depending on how many students leave, Karbownik said.

For example, he said, if a school has a class of 30 students and 10 attend, it would not have to prepare as many meals, but it would still have to pay a teacher’s salary for the remaining students, along with overhead costs to maintain a building open.

The Bluegrass Institute for Public Policy Solutions—part of the Kentucky Students First campaign—argues that public schools will keep most of their funding because “if a child were to leave a public school, that school district would still receive a majority of the funding for each student and all its local tax dollars.”

Since a specific program has not been described, it is unclear if this would be the case.

Would Amendment 2 Increase Teacher Salaries?

The Kentucky Students First flyer also claims the amendment “provides additional funding for teacher pay.”

Again, the statement is misleading because lawmakers have not proposed a specific school choice program or funding plan.

But Karbownik said establishing a voucher program or adding funding to open charter schools could create more competition to attract and retain public school teachers, leading to higher salaries.

The minimum wages for public school teachers are set by state law, while private schools are not required to disclose how much they pay their staff — further complicating whether this claim is true. Additionally, each state with vouchers or charters has different policies governing what can and cannot be done within these programs, further adding to the difficulty of comparing them.

Kentucky Center for Economic Policy responded to campaign flyers in an article stating that the average public school teacher earns $5,126 less in states with limited vouchers and $8,231 less in states with universal vouchers. Additionally, states with significant voucher programs spent $2,800 less per student on public education than states without vouchers in 2021, according to the article.

On the other hand The Bluegrass Institute published an article citing a study that says “school choice tax credit and voucher programs increase teacher wages and employment in districts affected by these programs relative to districts not affected. The effects of charter school programs, while having some positive effect, were not as strong .”

Will the change create a coupon program?

Protect our schools Kentucky has spent more than $6 million campaigning against Amendment 2, emphasizing the potential damage a voucher program would have on the state’s public schools.

Several superintendents and teacher unions, both urban and rural, have also spoken out against the amendment, regularly referring to it as the “voucher amendment.”

However, Amendment 2 says nothing about a voucher program, and Republicans have been coy about their intentions if they succeed in amending the Constitution.

Legislation in 2021 that could have provided funding to private schools was judged to be unconstitutional by the Kentucky Supreme Court, based on the justices’ interpretation of the state constitution, with Amendment 2 amending the same section cited in that ruling.

That law also established what Kentucky called “education opportunity accounts” but more commonly known as education savings accounts, which provide families with funds for educational expenses outside the public system. This could mean private school tuition but also homeschooling textbooks or even school uniforms.

Additionally, Republicans recently tried to defund charter schools, which have been legal in Kentucky since 2017.

Jefferson County Teachers’ Association President Maddie Shepard recently raised concerns about voters’ lack of knowledge about what will eventually be enacted.

Passing the amendment and giving politicians more freedom to create a program without voters knowing their intentions, she argued, is like “writing a blank check to politicians in Kentucky who … have historically underfunded public schools and have demonstrated by their actions that public schools are not a priority.”

On the other hand, Jim Waters, President and CEO of Bluegrass Institutesaid the amendment to the constitution “allows the Legislature to stop looking past what the courts require and start looking ahead to what parents want and students need.”

Hannah Pinski contributed to this report. Contact Krista Johnson at [email protected].

This article was originally published on the Louisville Courier Journal: Kentucky Amendment 2: Fact-checking three misleading claims