“It is the year of the rabbit in China, but in America, 2023 is the year of school choice,” writes the Heartland Institute’s David Hoyt. “However, it does seem like universal school choice programs are propagating like rabbits.”

That’s true just about everywhere except in Kentucky. While benchmark states with whom Kentucky competes expand educational alternatives for their families and students, the Bluegrass State falls further behind.

North Carolina on Friday became the 10th state to approve universal school choice, allowing almost all families – not just poor ones, a limitation featured in many previous school-choice programs – to use some of their tax dollars to enroll children in schools that best serve them.

But it’s not for a lack of effort by the legislature, where, like in the Tar Heel State, Republicans have a supermajority but must deal with a Democrat in the governor’s office.

The difference is, North Carolina lawmakers don’t have the challenge of dealing with the activism and bias against school choice that’s been on full display by Kentucky’s judiciary. North Carolina’s Supreme Court is laden with conservatives, making it unlikely a legal challenge to the new ESA law would ultimately succeed.

It doesn’t mean progressives will stop trying to use any and all means at their disposal to halt education freedom’s march. A few months ago, the state’s governor, Roy Cooper, tried to stop implementation of a universal Education Savings Account (ESA) bill even after it passed the North Carolina legislature by declaring a “state of emergency,” a tool for use in natural disasters not as political tactics.

The legislature outsmarted Cooper by including the school choice bill in the state’s budget. Since North Carolina’s constitution doesn’t give line-item veto power to the governor, Cooper would have had to veto the entire budget to stop implementation of the newly passed universal Education Savings Account program.

It seems the blatantly biased activism of Kentucky’s courts – from Franklin Circuit all the way to the Supremes – has added fuel to the school choice fire of already-motivated legislators. An increasing number of lawmakers vow to offer the commonwealth’s families the same kind of educational freedom available in a majority of states, including neighboring ones.

Expect lawmakers during the upcoming legislative session to approve an amendment for the November 2024 ballot that will give Kentucky the opportunity to become the 11th universal school-choice state, if some other competitor-state doesn’t do it before then.

And, expect the teachers’ unions and public-school administrators – especially those who comprise the misnamed Council for Better Education, the group leading the effort to erect legal obstacles against educational freedom for Kentuckians, to use the same type of arguments employed by North Carolina’s governor. Expect them, for instance, to continue ignoring that lawmakers have poured tens of millions of additional dollars into K-12 education in recent years.

If the anti-choice ideologues call for a “state of emergency,” they won’t be the first. I already beat them to the punch, writing about a different kind of “emergency” that exists in Kentucky’s public education system:

The latest National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) shows barely 1 in 5 of all Kentucky eighth-grade students – and just 9% of the Bluegrass State’s Black eighth-graders – are proficient enough in math to be on track for future educational or workforce success. An equally low percentage of North Carolina’s Black eighth-graders are proficient on NAEP Math, too.

A “state of emergency” surely exists when Kentucky superintendents interested in protecting their fiefdoms celebrate when they win lawsuits denying parents choice – like they did last year – but offer nary a peep about these generally dire academic results and no substantive plans to address the failure, outside of more spending or less choice, of course.

Is it not dire when our governor and those tasked with leading Kentucky’s education system completely ignore the continuing under-performance of most of its students while mumbling misleading assertions that somehow our public system is making adequate improvement?

 Is this an institutional emperor with no clothes or an intentional effort to deny educational freedom to as many families as possible?