As the nation celebrates National School Choice Week, the school choice movement is on the cusp of hitting a major milestone. By the end of 2025, it is likely that more than half of K-12 students nationwide will be eligible for private school choice.
In the past five years, the number of students benefitting from school choice has more than doubled. In 2020, fewer than 600,000 children nationwide were accessing the learning environment of their family’s choice using a K-12 education savings account, tax credit scholarship, or school voucher. Now there are about 1.2 million K-12 students benefiting from school choice.
Source: EdChoice, “ABCs of School Choice: 2025 Edition”
Much of this enrollment growth has been driven by the recent rise in universal school choice policies, which make every K-12 student in the state eligible. In the past five years, the number of states with a publicly funded universal school choice policy has increased from zero to 11. Additionally, Montana has a privately funded tax credit scholarship policy for which all students are eligible, and more than 95% of Indiana students are eligible for a school voucher.
Nationwide, more than 27% of students are currently eligible for some form of publicly funded private school choice, including K-12 education savings accounts and school vouchers. If we include tax credit scholarship policies, which create an incentive for taxpayers to contribute to nonprofit scholarship organizations, then about 37% of students are eligible for private school choice.
As more than a dozen states consider new or expanded school choice policies, that figure could exceed 50% by the end of the year. Lawmakers in Georgia, Indiana, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and Wyoming are considering expanding eligibility for their education choice policies to all students. Additionally, lawmakers in Idaho, Kansas, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Texas are considering new choice policies. Several of these states are considering universal choice policies.
Nearly 11% of K-12 students in the nation live in Texas. If Texas alone enacts a universal school choice policy this year, then about 48% of U.S. students would be eligible for school choice. That seems extraordinarily likely as Gov. Greg Abbott and legislative leaders have made school choice a top priority.
After the Texas Legislature failed to pass a school choice bill last session, Abbott campaigned vigorously to replace anti-school choice members of his own party in the Republican primaries. School choice has become a litmus test issue for Republican primary voters, so Abbott succeeded in replacing nine of them with pro-school choice challengers. Additionally, pro-school choice candidates won five open seats that had been vacated by anti-school choice incumbents. The Texas Legislature now has the votes to pass a robust education choice policy.
If just a few of the other states listed above join Texas, the 50% threshold will be crossed. This could be the tipping point for school choice because it will normalize the concept. When the first modern school choice policies were adopted in Milwaukee and Cleveland in the early 1990s, the idea of school choice was on the fringe of American politics. As more states adopted school choice policies during the 2000s and 2010s, the Overton window shifted to make school choice more mainstream within policy circles, but few Americans had access to it or even knew it existed. By 2020, barely 1% of American students were participating in a school choice program.
The most common and effective argument against school choice is that it will “destroy” traditional public schools. The argument only works because so few people know that nearly every study of the effects of school choice on the academic performance of public school students finds statistically significant positive effects. In other words, just as in every other area of our lives, more choice and competition leads to higher quality. School choice is the rising tide that lifts all boats.
Reprinted with permission from The Daily Signal by Jason Bedrick.
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of AMAC or AMAC Action.
American public education began its inevitable decline when it placed greater emphasis on polluting students minds with “behavioral objectives “ than educating them with the basic principles and disciplines of the learned foundations.
Throwing Money at skulls filled with Mush doesn’t buy brains.
Today in our public schools (which are among the highest funded on the planet) are experiencing their subject test scores ranking horribly in the bottom third (and falling dozens of levels) lower than any other so called civilized nations.
That’s not the case with private school educated and parent home schooled graduates who are scholastically greater in testing and accomplishment.
The federal department of education is a failed social experiment that must be eliminated.
Teacher’s unions and the teachers who support them have done an un calculable amount of damage to the youth of the USA for at least the last 40 years. And, their disastrous performance is what is driving school choice. For me, I hope they keep it up because eventually they will make themselves irrelevant and very dispensable.
I am all for student and parent choice in schools. BUT, stop making us seniors pay for their kids! Parents get all sorts of tax benefits to have the kids, so THEY should be paying for their kids to go to whatever school. I never had kids and I just paid $1100. this year in property taxes to a school district that has 626 students in southern OR. Plus $300 MORE for a 8 million dollar bond measure to build a new gymnasium for these 626 students!!!! Absolutely NOT FAIR! Oregon needs a homestead or other property tax program that reduces or even eliminates property taxes for seniors. This exemption is one of the few things California does right.
This is so important! While my kids are grown adults with kids of their own, we now worry about our grandchildren and what kind of educational system they might have to endure. Our educational system has obviously gone downhill since the federal government took it over, like most things they touch. It’s past time to return it to the states and clean house of those currently not performing. We must get rid of those who do not perform from administrators down the line.
Should the place of indoctrination and political instructions alone not be called by it’s rightful name and be a private enterprise? Let the school be the place of academics only , with standards and expectations the same right across, if the Dep. of education is funded by federal money. Then the child moving from Maine to Nevada will be on the same page. Academics only and acknowledging the fact that not all children perform on the same level, keeping those who can’t in the same class helps no one , only keeps those who can behind, even if they are the ones who in the future be responsible and taking care of those who can’t. Right now the whole system costs enormous amount of money with no bang for it. Let’s go back to sanity and accountability, that’s what many teachers who should not be near children fear.