It is not inaccurate to say that the future of education reform, at least in the near term, rides heavily on the outcome of the Douglas County School Board race. Gauging by the amount of money they are throwing at it, the teachers unions would agree.

Here’s why: in 2011 the incumbent reform-minded board instituted a voucher system – the Douglas County Choice Scholarship Program – where parents would receive a grant which they could use to send their child to a participating private school of their choice.

The plan, which would afford poor families the same educational opportunities and advantages otherwise available only to the wealthy or those lucky enough to be able to matriculate into a charter school, promised to be so beneficial to the education of the county’s young people that it faced an inevitable legal challenge from the ACLU. It was eventually blocked by the Colorado Supreme Court, citing contradiction with the state’s “Blaine Amendment,” which denies use of public funds to “sectarian” institutions.

Then last June the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the state of Missouri could not bar a religious school from participating in a state-funded program. One outcome of that ruling was to return the Douglas County voucher case to the Colorado high court for reconsideration.

Now whether or not that happens depends on the outcome of the Douglas County School Board election. Should the slate of conservative, school-choice-minded candidates – Grant Nelson, Ryan Abresch, Randy Mills, and Debora Scheffel – prevail, the case stays alive and effective education reform gets its day anew before the courts, under the aegis of the SCOTUS ruling. Should their liberal, union-backed opponents carry the day, the scholarship program, and its court case, will be discarded along with hopes for a landmark court precedent preparing the field for meaningful education reform.

There is a lot wrapped up in all this, not the least of which is the future of the Blaine Amendments, provisions featured in some 38 state constitutions and used by both Missouri and Colorado to deny state funds to schools that happen to be run by religious institutions. Blaine Amendments, probably the last accepted examples of institutionalized bigotry still in effect in the nation, have their provenance in 19th century anti-Catholic sentiment, and have been used as the anvil against which to smash any law allowing state relief to be applied to private schools; lest any be papist, Heaven forbid.

The election, then, exposes a wider discussion on the virtues of reform more generally, encompassing the compendium of vouchers, charter schools, tuition tax credits, and other innovations geared towards reversing the creeping bureaucratization of education and returning decision making to the parents. Voucher systems – expanding, essentially, the basic structure of the GI Bill to include all grades – is naturally at the core of the argument. Opponents of vouchers cling relentlessly to a number of superstitions, such as a fanatical interpretation of the establishment clause, which suggests that allowing the poor to attend private schools potentially administered by one church or another is indistinguishable from establishing a caliphate.

Perhaps the largest issue is the role of union involvement in these elections. The teacher’s unions have made no secret of their contempt for reform and their virulent opposition to vouchers, privates schools, and charters, their efficacy in terms of student outcomes notwithstanding. Hence, they pour thousands of dollars into these local races. In Douglas County, for instance, the national teacher’s union, the American Federation of Teachers, has funneled at least $300,000 to the pro-union slate of candidates, the ironically named “Douglas County Parents’ Slate.”

It’s not just Douglas County that attracts the union’s attention; Mesa County, the conservative hub of Colorado’s western slope, is also embroiled in an off-year school board election, made suddenly competitive by Denver-based unions; a PAC funded by the Colorado Education Association spent $30,000 in the late stages of the election to finance two union-friendly candidates over reformers – one of whom happens to be the only teacher in the race.

It is telling that the unions are funding their candidates in a rather surreptitious manner – the donations come from union-financed PAC’s, rather than as direct donations to the candidates themselves, permitting a degree of pseudo-distance between the candidate and the union the candidate claims no affiliation with.

It is hard to blame them for their reluctance to publicly embrace the endorsement of their play-callers, as more and more people begin to realize that the unions have but a single interest – the union – which is increasingly at odds with goals such as, say, the education of our young people.

And so, school board elections are increasingly vital, calling the question of whether education is to be about the passing along of knowledge and the production of literate citizens well equipped to compete and lead fulfilling lives, vs. perpetuation of bureaucracy, egalitarian experimentation, and gestation of union benefits.

If the unions remain the only ones paying attention, the answer will be the latter.