Support for education opportunity generally and school choice programs specifically is at an all-time high across our country.

A recent poll showed the public is nearly seven times as likely to support education savings accounts, or ESAs, than oppose them. ESAs are supervised, state-funded flexible spending accounts that families can use to customize and directly pay for a combination of approved educational expenses.

Other school choice policies—public charter schools, open enrollment, and private school vouchers—all enjoy approval ratings of 60 percent or higher.

And yet, as highlighted by Parker Baxter, Michael Hartney, and Vladimir Kogan in Education Next, during the 2024 election cycle, statewide referenda supporting school choice were defeated at the ballot box in Colorado, Kentucky, and Nebraska. Starting back in the late 1970s, no school choice referendum has ever been successful.

How can it be simultaneously true that parental choice is growing by leaps and bounds—Texas just enacted the nation’s 19th and largest ESA program—but voters demonstrate a lack of support for choice when put to a referendum?

Polling data show Americans overwhelmingly believe K–12 education at the national level is on the wrong track; however, they express much higher confidence in their local schools.

There’s also a substantial disconnect between the types of schools parents want to access for their kids and the types of schools in which they are actually enrolled. Although 80 percent of parents report their children attend traditional public schools, only half that number prefer a traditional public school inside or outside of their assigned district when given the choice. In contrast, only 9 percent of students currently attend a private school, but 36 percent of families would choose a private school if they could.

Researchers and school choice proponents cite these findings as proof that families aren’t getting what they want. But empirical data alone doesn’t explain why no state has ever embraced a school choice measure through a ballot initiative.

In their analysis, Baxter, Hartney, and Kogan cite local politics as one factor for these defeats and the wording of ballot questions as another. But an underappreciated explanation for the disconnect between desire and voting habits comes from human psychology and the theory of loss aversion: When given the choice between supporting something new or protecting the status quo, voters have a tendency to sacrifice potential gains to avoid the perceived risk of loss.

The psychological pull of the familiar is strong—and also easy to manipulate. Opponents of choice use ballot referendum campaigns to focus on fictional harm they claim will come to existing public schools if families are allowed more options. They launch bold, attention-grabbing ads warning of threats to public education—predicting teacher layoffs and the closure of neighborhood schools. Supporting school choice is framed as rejecting tradition and undermining the long-established community. Voters are made to feel as though choosing what’s best for their family means turning their back on everyone else—and that doing so makes them the villain.

The public believes those arguments because we are wired that way. We connect with places. We pass along core beliefs to our kids. We hold certain institutions in high regard. We embrace what we know.

School choice upends the longstanding relationship between a guaranteed school funding based on geographic assignment and a brick-and-mortar education delivery model. Flipping that script introduces uncertainty and trepidation, emotions that are easy to capitalize on in statewide political campaigns.

A family’s decision to choose a schooling environment for a child is deeply personal. It can factor in academic quality, support services, extracurricular activities, faith, values, geography, community, friends, and family. Parents may make a different decision for one child than they make for another. These choices are individual actions. But when put to a referendum, the highly publicized potential loss of public schooling outweighs the potential gain of an option that’s not accessible—or even imaginable—yet.

That argument only works before choice is available. Opponents of choice know that they must pull out all the stops to keep things the way they are, because once families have choice, there’s no going back.

I saw this firsthand in my home state of Florida in 2016. More than 10,000 families and choice advocates showed up at the state capitol in Tallahassee to support the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship, which at the time was the largest private school choice program in America. The teachers union and other special interest groups had sued to stop the program; they ultimately were unsuccessful.

I don’t know if voters in any state will ever approve a referendum bringing school choice to fruition. But I do know that millions of families have had and will continue to have conversations about school choice at kitchen tables and baseball diamonds and places of worship across the country. These are the places where families talk about their needs and what’s possible, not the voting booth.

When those voices come together to demand more options for their kids, policymakers would do well to ride, not resist, the wave of progress we’ve seen over the past decade. Only then can we break down barriers so students can access the education that works best for them.

Patricia Levesque is the CEO of ExcelinEd, a national education policy nonprofit.