LOUISVILLE, KY—More Grace Christian Academy is located inside a small, run-down church in the West End, the poorest neighborhood in the biggest city in Kentucky. In 2021, at the height of Covid school closures, Cecil Blye opened the school, named after the nearby church where he serves as pastor.
There are about a dozen kids, almost all black, from first through twelfth grade. By the time most of them started at the school, Blye told me, they were at least two to three grade levels behind. He said none of their parents pay the school’s $100 a week tuition because they can’t afford it. Instead, he has to run the school for about $5,000 a month from whatever money the families can cobble together—sometimes $50 a week, sometimes nothing at all—plus the income he gets from his church and the donations of friendly neighbors and strangers.
In this neighborhood, where Blye grew up in a since-demolished housing project, 58 percent of children live below the poverty line, the streets are plagued by violent crime, and just six percent of students at some public schools read at state standard levels. But Blye has no doubt that his school would blossom if “school choice”—shorthand for giving parents state education money to send their children to private school—became law in Kentucky.
“We’d be able to fully fund what we do here because each kid would come with a payroll attached that would enable us to buy their curriculum, pay for their breakfast and lunch, and pay teachers,” he told me.
“We already know that what we’ve been doing doesn’t work,” Blye said of local public schools. “If we try something new and it doesn’t work, then we just would drop it. But how do we know if we don’t try?”
Just over a dozen states in the U.S. have laws that allow school choice. Most of them are red states—including Alabama, Oklahoma, and Florida—because in the national debate over education, the issue has long been championed by conservatives, who see school choice as a means of pushing back against culture war issues such as library books with LGBTQ content or how race is taught in schools. Liberals, especially the big-city teachers unions, argue that any law that diverts public dollars would essentially defund public schools.
But the deep red state of Kentucky does not allow school choice, because its constitution decrees that funds for education can go only toward public schools. Unlike many states, Kentucky doesn’t even offer charter schools, which can serve as a public school alternative. Last December, when the state’s legislature passed a law to allow charter schools, a judge struck it down as unconstitutional.
Then, this year, Kentucky’s Republican-controlled legislature approved Amendment 2. If passed by voters on November 5, the measure would amend the state’s constitution to allow public tax dollars to go toward private schools. School choice would finally be legal in Kentucky.
Kentucky’s Democratic governor Andy Beshear has blasted the measure, stating, “I’m going to vote no against Amendment 2 and I’m going to do everything I can to defeat it.” But as I learned during a recent trip to the state, the issue of school choice doesn’t always break down along neat political lines.
With less than a week to go before the election, there is no public polling data on Amendment 2. So there’s no way to know which side is ahead. But many parents who live in Democrat-leaning Jefferson County are extremely pro–school choice. One such parent is Myah McPheeters, who sent her two youngest children, seven-year-old twin boys, to More Grace Christian. She told me that even though she plans to vote for Kamala Harris come November, when it comes to Amendment 2, “I’m all for it.”
Mary Clayton, who has two granddaughters ages nine and ten, seconded that opinion. At Jefferson County’s public schools, Clayton, a Democrat who told me she still hasn’t decided who she’s voting for this election, said her granddaughters were simply “not learning.” “They didn’t get homework, they didn’t do anything,” she said.
She told me she enrolled them at More Grace Christian to “save” them.
“I want them to have something better,” she said.
At the same time, I saw a similar desperation on the faces of parents and educators in rural Kentucky, which votes overwhelmingly Republican, who worried what will happen if Amendment 2 does pass. One rural district superintendent, Carrie Ballinger, didn’t mince words when she spoke of the possibility.
“It will devastate us,” Ballinger told me. “It will devastate our community. It will devastate our school system. And that’s just something that we can’t recover from locally.”
Two hours south of Louisville is Rockcastle County, population 16,000. This is rural Kentucky, and it is Trump country through and through. The former president took 85 percent of the Rockcastle vote in 2020. Its population may not be as poor as Louisville’s West End but they’re certainly not wealthy; 24 percent of the county’s residents live below the poverty line. The school district spends $43 million annually—or $16,000 per student—to educate the 2,800 students who attend Rockcastle’s public schools.
But school choice isn’t necessarily a popular issue here. Rockcastle’s legislative senator, Brandon Storm, was one of two Republicans in the senate to break from his party and vote against putting school choice on the ballot. In the Kentucky legislature, twelve Republicans, mainly from rural districts, joined all 20 House Democrats in trying to vote down the proposed amendment, which ultimately passed in March by a margin of 65 to 32.
In rural counties, schools are the heart of their communities. “Anytime any type of tragedy or any type of crisis or any type of event happens in our community, our school system is always the first to step up to address the need,” district superintendent Ballinger told me as we sat at the school board’s small headquarters in Mount Vernon.
The closest private schools are in Lexington, an hour away. But Rockcastle doesn’t need them because its public schools are generally good. By and large, rural schools tend to outperform inner-city schools, even though the rural schools invariably spend less per pupil. Just a week before my visit, Kentucky released the results of its public school assessments, and Brodhead, one of the county’s three elementary schools, ranked second in the entire state.
During my visit to Rockcastle County, Ballinger and I took a twenty-minute drive to Brodhead (population 1,100) to watch the school celebrate its second-place finish.
Inside the gymnasium of the Brodhead Tigers, where the walls are painted neon orange, hundreds of elementary school students stomped their feet on the bleachers to the beat of High School Musical’s “We’re All in This Together.” Their principal, Nick Williams, in gray slacks and a black and orange tie, helped unveil a homemade paper banner on the back wall that bore a large 2 in blue. The crowd of elementary schoolers roared.
The chairman of the school board, Angela Mink, nudged my arm as we watched the spectacle unfold.
“Some of these kids have backpacks sent home with them because they don’t have enough to eat at home,” she said. “They have every excuse not to be successful, but they are.”
“This is public education dollars at their best.”
Callie Shaffer, a 49-year-old pediatric physician—and a mother of four—agrees. Though she’s a registered Republican, she told me that when it comes to Amendment 2, “I will definitely vote no. There is a vacuum of private schools in this area, so that money would totally be diverted from our area to the major cities in Kentucky.”
She added, “I think it would hurt children first in the most vulnerable way. Following the opioid crisis and the poverty we already have, it would be devastating. Because kids are taught so much more than just their basic subjects at school.”
There’s long been a narrative in the United States that rural schools can’t keep up with the schools in the cities, but in Kentucky, it almost seems to be the opposite. Kentucky’s public schools rank 29th in the nation, but the rural schools appear to outdo their urban counterparts in testing. Of the top ten elementary, middle, and high schools across the state, the vast majority are located in rural counties.
Urban schools, however, are a different story. Even before remote learning, schools were a disaster in Jefferson County, where Louisville sits. They still are. Of the ten worst performing schools in the state for each grade level, five elementary schools, six middle schools, and six high schools are all in the county, with the majority located in the West End and other poor neighborhoods. Across the entire school district, proficiency in math and reading falls well below 50 percent—even though the district spends over $21,000 per student.
Despite major investments in federal programs like “No Child Left Behind,” which sought to reduce educational achievement gaps, schools especially in inner cities with high poverty and crime rates have struggled to meet the needs of their students. There’s a host of theories as to why—the lack of two-parent households in poor urban neighborhoods (in Jefferson County, for example, 38 percent of kids live in single-parent homes), overly powerful teachers unions, intergenerational poverty, larger class sizes, and struggles with teacher retention, just to name a few.
If Amendment 2 passes, it could reopen opportunities to families trapped in these failing school districts—but their relief might well come at the expense of rural schools, Ballinger and others fear.
If the Kentucky Legislature passes school choice laws, the Kentucky Center for Economic Policy, a progressive think tank, estimates that public schools statewide could lose up to $1.19 billion dollars—or the equivalent of nearly 9,900 teachers’ salaries. Ballinger’s district could lose up to $6.4 million, the equivalent of about 60 educator jobs.
“Those are people that we love and care about that will lose their jobs,” Ballinger said. It would also obviously hamper the district’s ability to offer the same level of education. “It takes sufficient funding to be able to provide the needs for our community and our kids,” she added.
James Bussell, the principal of Rockcastle County’s only high school, has another worry: that his red-leaning county will vote for the school choice amendment just because it’s seen as a conservative policy.
“They don’t have any idea what they’re voting for,” Bussell said, “and I don’t know that it would benefit anyone around here.”
“They’re good people,” he continued, “and if they fully understood, I don’t think that they would vote that way.”
Eddie Campbell, the president of the Kentucky Education Association, the state’s primary teachers union, argues that schools like More Grace Christian shouldn’t be able to take state money because they lack accountability. “It’s going to take public tax dollars away from our public schools and it’s going to send it to unaccountable, private institutions,” like religious schools, he said. “They have no elected boards. There’s no oversight whatsoever. We don’t know what those dollars, those public dollars, are being spent on.”
But when I tried out that argument on Beanie Geoghegan, a volunteer at More Grace Christian, she quickly pushed back: “There is no greater sense of accountability than a parent being able to say, ‘You are not meeting my child’s needs. I’m taking my child and their education dollars elsewhere.’ ”
In most states that have passed school choice laws, the majority of students who receive education money from the state were already enrolled in private schools, Campbell told me. That means public school districts might not just lose funding for the students who leave after the law passes; they’ll lose even more to those who have already left. It’s also why detractors argue a school choice bill would go to fund the wealthy, who can already afford to pay private school tuition.
But Tod Moore, a felon-turned-minister who started Dream Center Academy Christian School in Louisville’s West End in 2022, said it’s not as simple as that.
“Take a look at their household income and tell me they’re wealthy,” he said, referring to his small school’s 37 students. “When they don’t have underwear to put on to come to school in, they don’t have socks or shoes, we have to buy that.”
Moore stands over six feet tall and has the build of a linebacker. Back in the late ’80s, he led a drug gang and ended up in prison for his involvement in three murders. While in prison, he found God and started a ministry to help his fellow inmates. Kentucky’s then-governor, Republican Matt Bevin, pardoned him in 2019.
His Christian faith is also what inspired him to open his school. Many of the students struggle with learning disabilities or childhood trauma—the kind of kids, he says, public schools largely ignore.
School choice, Moore argues, will make it possible for the “have-nots” to attend schools like his “that will be able to teach them, empower them, and bless them and provide options and opportunities to them,” he said. “I’m telling you, it’s life-changing.”
Blye, the founder of More Grace Christian Academy, agrees. He himself overcame not just poverty but a childhood stutter, and went to Brown, then Harvard, where he studied theology, and finally Brandeis, where he earned a law degree.
Inside his school, there are no computers. The students have only some pencils, paper, work booklets, and a makeshift library full of donated books. High schoolers write all of their essays, no matter how long, by hand. There are just two full-time teachers and a handful of rotating volunteers who come in to teach classes such as reading, math, Bible study, and civics.
But, despite all of the challenges his students face, real learning is going on.
In the basement of his school, amid fly traps dangling from a low-hanging ceiling, I saw three young boys working on their addition and subtraction in paper booklets. In a back room, the boys led me toward their “word wall”—a series of increasingly trickier words, which they diligently read out loud using phonics, a classic approach that’s recently going out of style.
“Os-teo-por-o-sis,” one boy sounds out with steady persistence.
“Ex-cru-ci-a-ting,” the next boy rattles off with ease.
Blye told me that the kids in his school don’t need “politicians or school boards. They don’t need anybody telling them what’s best. They can choose.”
Without school choice, he concludes, “there’s no incentive for the public schools to do any better, because they don’t have competition.”
Frannie Block is a reporter for The Free Press. Read her piece “The Return of the One-Room Schoolhouse” and follow her on Twitter (now X) @FrancescaABlock.
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