Arizona has a system like what the General Assembly wants and it blew a hole in their budget. Also, most of the monies go to already well off peoples who have their kids in private school. Amendment 2 was basically a "Vote to give a tuition break to your rich neighbor" and people in rural areas, which don't have many private offerings (if any), soundly rejected it as such.
I'm a capitalist but no degree of competition is going to make schools better for the simple reason that schools have to take who is in their geographic footprint. If you are in an area with a lot of poverty, disengaged parents, a community that doesn't value learning, etc. then you are not going to have a good mix for a school. There's a reason why the test scores that come out every year are well correlated to high income zip codes. If schools just kick out any person that was violent or a problem or apathetic or whatever, I guarantee the bad test scores people talk about would magically improve. But guess what? You can't. State law says kids stay till 18 now and the state constitution guarantees a right to an education. There are also federal rules to enforce that. So lots of public schools are just stuck.
I'd also highlight that KY has a massive teaching shortage now. How does this fix any of that? People aren't going to take jobs at these alternative places with less pay and even fewer benefits.
None of this means that schools can't do better. But there are some really bad incentives that hurt schools right now such as schools being penalized by graduation rates, leading to pressure on teachers to pass everyone lest a kid fail and hurt the accountability metrics. State tests need an overhaul as existing social studies standards were created by people that think history is meant to turn kids into activists and the science standards are so terrible that even high achieving kids aren't passing them (look at this past year's results). There needs to be a more thorough study of where money is going as little is reaching the classroom as some districts have too much top heavy administration. We need a different paradigm but for me Amendment 2 didn't cut it at all.
