Parents, Homevoters, and Public School Employees: An Analysis of Voting Patterns in the 2012 Georgia Charter Schools Amendment Referendum

ABSTRACT

Georgia’s 2012 Charter Schools Amendment was the first successful statewide school choice referendum in the United States. This amendment permitted the state to authorize new charter schools, thereby creating a way for charter creators to bypass local school boards. This study analyzes voting on this state constitutional amendment and finds that support was higher among counties with lower achieving public schools, more school-aged children, more adults having college degrees, more private school enrollment, more homeowners, and lower public school employment. There was also a positive correlation between Democratic voters and support for the amendment–this result differs from previous research and the heavily Republican legislative vote authorizing the public referendum.

KEYWORDS:

• charter schools
• school choice
• voting

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Scott Milliman, Aleksandar (Sasha) Tomic, Robert Maranto, seminar participants at the 2013 and 2014 Southern Economics Association meetings, and four anonymous referees for very helpful comments. We also thank Clay Collins for expert research assistance. All remaining errors are ours.

Notes

^1. A school of choice is a school that parents can choose instead of the public school assigned to them based on a geographic attendance zone. Charter schools are typically open to all children in a school district regardless of geographic attendance zone within the school district. Charter schools that are oversubscribed must have a lottery or other random process to select students who may attend. In Georgia, most counties are served by a single school district though a few counties host more than one school district.

^2. Laws and policies that charters must follow typically include federal education laws, civil rights, and safety laws.

^3. At the time this was written, Kentucky, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont, and West Virginia did not have laws allowing the creation of charter schools.

^4. Later that evening, on Election Day 2012, the voters of Washington State narrowly passed the second education choice referendum in U.S. history. The Washington State measure is more modest in scope than Georgia’s (Rich, 2012).

^5. Soon after Minnesota passed the nation’s first charter school law in 1991, the Georgia General Assembly passed its first charter law in 1993. This Georgia law allowed only for “conversion” charter schools to be created. That is, existing traditional public schools could “convert” to charter status with approval by both their local school board and State Board of Education. These conversion charter schools were not schools of choice, but they did obtain a modest degree of flexibility from state and local laws and regulations.

^6. It is worth noting that the referendum was scheduled for a high-turnout general election rather than an election in which no major offices were on the ballot. Papers such as Meredith (2009) and Gong and Rogers (2014) find that bond referenda supporting traditional public schools stand a greater likelihood of passage in low-turnout elections; hence, the charter school issue’s passage may have been aided by having it scheduled for a general election. Our finding that Democrats, who likely had a high turnout to support President Obama’s reelection, strongly supported the referendum, increases the saliency of this point.

^7. By law, this percentage is equal to what is spent per pupil in the four lowest spending traditional public schools in Georgia.

^8. All three are members of the Republican Party. Because of their differences on education policy, Dr. Barge ran against Governor Deal in the 2014 Republican Primary for Governor.

^9. Because charter school flexibility includes the ability to hire teachers who are not state certified and to eliminate fair dismissal protections for teachers (i.e., tenure), teachers who might lose jobs if a public school closed would not necessarily have an extremely high likelihood of getting hired at a charter school. Further, teachers and other traditional public school employees may perceive that employment conditions at charter schools are not as beneficial to them as are the conditions at their current traditional public schools. Along with a lack of tenure, charter schools are not subject to statewide limits on class sizes and other work rules.

^10. Georgia has 159 county school districts and 21 city school districts. Since our voting data was at the county level, for the counties that had a city school district within their county limits, we created a weighted average public high school graduation rate for the county. Thus, the county graduation rate was a (student) population-weighted average of the county and any city school district graduation rates.

^11. Georgia does not require party affiliation when registering to vote, so a party registration measure of ideology is not available. The turnout rate for the election was 72.2%. There were 3.88 million votes cast in the presidential contest and 3.72 million votes cast in the charter school amendment referendum; hence, there is little concern that down-ballot attrition caused there to be substantial difference between the voters in the two contests.

^12. There are at least two potential objections, specific to Georgia’s Charter Schools Amendment, that we are not able to incorporate in the empirical model. Some voters might object to the loss of local political control that would accompany the policy of having new charter schools authorized without local school board approval. A second objection is that in 2012 Republicans controlled all three offices that appoint members to the Charter Schools Commission and that remains the case in 2016. Perhaps at least some opposition to the Amendment was due to concerns over one political party controlling appointments to the Commission. With available data, there is no way to measure or parameterize these concerns (and no a priori expectation about how they might vary across counties), so they cannot be captured in the estimation results.

^13. Using the only available test scores, eighth grade Criterion Referenced Competency Test (CRCT) scores, as an alternative school quality measure yielded similar results. The CRCT is Georgia’s statewide educational assessment exam.

^14. One independent House member also voted in favor of the amendment.

^15. Estimation via probit yields similar results. Estimating separate models for Republican and Democratic legislators also yields statistically insignificant relationships between YESPCT and whether the legislator voted to authorize the charter amendment.

^16. Other possibilities for the divergence between voter preferences and legislators’ votes include school choice being a fairly unimportant issue for voters (meaning legislators are unlikely to be punished at the polls by voters with different preferences); efforts by legislators of both parties to please their ideological allies and important donors (for example, teachers unions for Democrats and charter school companies for Republicans); and rural legislators representing multiple counties, where these counties may have different preferences with respect to charter schools.

^17. Authors’ calculations based on the election results (http://results.enr.clarityelections.com/GA/42277/113204/en/summary.html).