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Dubious claims, boorish behavior, multimillion-dollar advertising battles, political and racial division, claims of dirty tricks, even billionaires.

It’s not only the stuff of the American presidential election, but of the pitched battle for and against the spread of charter schools on ballots across the United States.

On the same day they cast their votes for president-November 8-residents of one U.S. state will decide whether or not to remove a cap on the number of such schools, which are given public funding but operate free of the usual restrictions placed on conventional public schools. In other states, candidates for seats at every level, from school board to mayor to governor, are also scrapping over charter schools, often with the involvement of, and large sums of money from, determined pro- and anti-charter forces.

Just as in the presidential race, claims by both sides include vast generalizations, sometimes relying on questionable facts, propelled by millions of dollars in advertising.

This speaks to the high stakes for public schools, which fear a further loss of funding, and for teachers’ unions, observers say-and for for-profit education providers, which covet the contracts under which they may be brought in to operate some charter schools. It’s another vestige of the widening ideological divide in the United States. And it threatens one of the original ideas of the charter movement, which was to serve as laboratories for educational innovations public schools could then adopt.

‘The idea was to innovate: it was doomed from the start’

“The original idea was a bold idea and a good idea: that, to innovate in the local neighborhood schools, you have to create something separate from them as a laboratory and experiment and let that come back to the mainstream,” said Michael Druckman, executive chair of Schools that Can, which connects leaders of public, private, and charter schools nationwide to share their educational approaches. “It was doomed for, in my opinion, the following reason: everybody fighting over limited resources.”

Battles over education “have always been passionate and intense, but they’ve always been more local than statewide and now they’ve expanded to the state level,” said Paul Reville, professor of educational policy and administration at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. “There is an understandable interest of the mainstream in preserving the franchise, up against the desire of competitors to get a foot in the door.”

Reville is the former education secretary of the state of Massachusetts, where 37,000 children are on waiting lists for charter schools, and where voters will decide whether or not to let the existing 80 charters to expand and to allow an additional 12.

Supporters of allowing charter schools to spread have raised nearly $16 million, half of it from a pro-charter New York-based organization called Families for Excellent Schools and much of the rest from conservative donors. Opponents, whose three biggest contributors are local and national teachers’ unions, have raised more than $7 million.

That’s a total of $23 million, a substantial amount, even by American political standards. By comparison, another high-profile Massachusetts ballot measure, to allow the recreational use of marijuana, has attracted $1 million in political contributions.

Charter interests also are directing money to support like-minded candidates, in at least one case in alleged violation of campaign laws. That was in a local school board election in Nashville, Tennessee, in August, where a pro-charter advocacy group spent more than a quarter of a million dollars to help elect four pro-charter school board candidates, exceeding legal limits. All four lost. The political director of the organization, Stand for Children, also exchanged emails with the nonprofit operator of two local charter schools, who by law was not allowed to be involved in a political campaign, the newspaper the Tennesseean reported. Stand for Children denies any wrongdoing.

There are other protests that public schools and public school teachers are improperly involving themselves in charter politics. Ethics complaints have been filed in Massachusetts against public schools that have hung anti-charter signs in their windows and put anti-charter messages on their Facebook pages, and where teachers wear anti-charter campaign buttons; at least one teacher is accused of using his work email account to encourage colleagues to vote against the charter referendum. Their unions say teachers have the right to free speech, even when at school; regulators haven’t yet responded.

Charters battle enters presidential race

The intensity of this battle has spilled into the contentious presidential campaign. Teachers’ unions were among the first to endorse Democrat Hillary Clinton, even before she was chosen as her party’s nominee, but teachers at the National Education Association summer convention booed her for saying that, when schools get good results-whether public or charter-“let’s figure out what’s working and share it.”

Clinton went on to say: “We’ve got no time for all of these education wars.”

But war there is, with an increasing racial tone. Supporters of expanding charter schools contend that they are a particular help to nonwhite students stuck in poor-performing public schools, but teachers say they strip those public schools of funding, shifting money from them to pay for students who decide to go to charters.

The civil-rights group the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People has endorsed a moratorium on privately managed charters. Jeanne Allen, head of the pro-charter Center for Education Reform, shot back that the NAACP was “intimidated by unions” and “misinformed about how opportunities for poor children, in particular, and minorities” are more available at charter than at public schools.

The argument that charter schools take money away from conventional private schools is central to the opposition. Charter proponents say the claim is dishonest, since public schools no longer have to pay for students who opt for charter education.

“From the beginning the charter issue has been susceptible to oversimplification,” Reville said. “Just the term ‘charter school’ is subject to a range of interpretations. The variability in performance and accountability structures makes it impossible to generalize about them. But this is the way civil discourse is conducted now: People exaggerate the faults of their opponents and exploit those weaknesses, rather than having a more nuanced conversation of, ‘Yeah, they’re good in some circumstances and maybe not so good in other circumstances.’”

In Washington State, charter advocates are lining up to defeat a state Supreme Court justice who wrote a decision declaring it unconstitutional for public money to be used for charter schools-which voters there approved in 2012-because their boards are appointed, not elected.

A pro-charter group has spent at least $130,000 on behalf of the justice’s opponent in the campaign for the elected judgeship. Contributors to the effort include Microsoft billionaire Steve Ballmer and his wife, Connie, records show.

No one should be surprised at the intensity of the debate, said Reville; after all, he said, “Most of our disputes in education are very intense. They involve children.”

But Reville also sees an echo of the broader decline in public conversation.

“We seem to be in attack mode, in society and in our civil discourse,” he said. “You’re either for or against, and everybody’s ready to go into their potholes.”