The number of students using public funds to enroll in private school or pay for home-school expenses has been growing rapidly following a wave of state policies that have launched new private school choice programs or expanded existing ones.
Their impact on academics and public school enrollment, though, remains far from clear—partly a result of how hard it is to study the diverse array of programs.
To date, 19 states have programs on the books that make virtually all their students eligible for state funding to use on private school tuition or home-school expenses, according to an Education Week analysis. And every one of those states made their programs universal within the past four years.
The largest, Texas, opens applications next month for its new, $1 billion-a-year program that will award families education savings accounts of up to $10,500 per student next school year to use on private education and up to $30,000 for families of students with disabilities.
EdChoice, a pro-school choice advocacy group that maintains data on state programs, estimates that 1.5 million students this school year are using private school choice programs in the 30 states that have them. That’s up from about 1 million students a year-and-a-half ago and up from fewer than 500,000 five years before that, in 2018-19. (About 49.3 million students attended U.S. public schools last school year, by comparison.)
In two states, Arizona and Florida, the percentage of K-12 students using private school choice has topped 10 percent.
And continued growth is expected as these programs become more established and as a new federal policy that will allow families to receive private school scholarships funded by tax credits takes effect next year.
As these universal private school choice programs grow, researchers are gaining some preliminary insights into the students they’re serving, their effects on private school enrollment and tuition, where families are spending the state money, and—to a lesser degree—participating students’ academic performance.
Researchers stress that they have a lot more to learn about a new generation of expansive private school choice programs, and that the policies’ biggest effects have yet to play out.
“We are at the front end of this,” said Patrick Wolf, an education policy professor and expert in school choice at the University of Arkansas. “A lot of states went universal in a short period of time, and we scholars are kind of scrambling to put together reliable evaluations of what’s going on.”
How do private school choice programs stack up academically?
The answer is largely unknown at this point, and in a number of states, researchers and the public will never have apples-to-apples comparisons of public and private schools.
Of eight of the first states to launch universal private school choice programs, only two—Indiana and Iowa—require that participating students take the same state tests as public school students, according to an analysis by the Georgetown University think tank FutureEd. Four others—Arkansas, Florida, Ohio, and West Virginia—have testing requirements, but students and schools can often meet them by choosing from a list of approved national tests.
“They want the schools to have as much autonomy as possible, so they want the schools to be able to choose their own test,” said Douglas Harris, a Tulane University economics professor and school choice expert. “But as soon as the schools are choosing their own test, then you lose comparability and you can’t really study the effects anymore.”
Another reason policymakers in several states didn’t require state tests, he suspects, is that “they’re trying to avoid the bad news.”
Studies on an earlier generation of school choice programs that were limited to specific student populations—such as students in individual cities, low-income students, or students with disabilities—tended to show “neutral to negative” effects on students’ state test scores, Wolf said.
One explanation, he said, is that private schools don’t follow the same state content standards that public schools follow and on which state exams are based. “So you’re really giving a major home-field advantage to the public school comparison group,” Wolf said.
But that difference hasn’t explained the entire gap in performance, he noted.
Graduation and college-going rates have been a brighter spot for choice programs. For example, students in Ohio’s EdChoice private school scholarship program between 2008 and 2014, when it was limited to low-income students from low-performing schools, were more likely than their public school peers to attend and graduate from college, according to an analysis published last April by the Urban Institute, a public policy research group.
With the newest universal private school choice programs still in their infancy, however, the academic data are limited.
Iowa students receiving education savings accounts in the program’s first year, 2023-24, outperformed public school students on state math and English exams. In that year, most students receiving the state funds had previously attended private school, and the program was still scaling up to universal eligibility, so it might not capture the program’s true impact.
In Arkansas, students receiving education savings accounts in that state program’s second year, 2024-25, scored in the 57th percentile for math and 59th percentile for English on national tests for which national data are available, meaning they outperformed the majority of students nationally taking those tests, according to a state report Wolf co-authored.
What researchers can’t determine is whether the private school choice programs themselves are driving the outcomes, or whether they’re due to other factors such as the demographics of participating students or private schools’ selection of their students, Harris said.
“It’s hard to deal with the selection bias problems, because there’s so much selection going on,” he said. “The students are selecting schools, and the schools are selecting students.”
Unlike public schools, private schools are generally allowed to turn away students.
How are private school enrollment and tuition levels changing?
Harris and Ph.D. student Gabriel Olivier dug into this question in a recently published working paper that examined eight states that had expanded to near-universal eligibility.
Harris and Olivier found private school enrollment rose faster in those eight states than in non-choice states—but by only 3-4 percent more on average. The enrollment bump was most pronounced in small, non-Catholic religious schools—likely those that were already established, had the most room to grow, and had relatively low tuition that vouchers or education savings accounts worth about $7,000—close to the per-student amount provided in a number of states—would largely cover.
They also estimated that the expansion of vouchers was responsible for a tuition increase of 5-10 percent, but that the COVID-19 pandemic had already driven larger tuition increases as private schools faced elevated technology costs from remote learning and elevated inflation.
All in all, in the first years of expanded eligibility for vouchers, education savings accounts, and school choice tax credits, their overall effect on private school enrollment and prices was small, Harris and Olivier found.
“The effects we’re seeing are just the tip of the iceberg,” Harris said. “We expect these effects to grow over time.”
It takes time for programs to become established, many families are hesitant to change their children’s schools, and the private school market is only starting to respond to expanded vouchers and education savings accounts, Harris and Olivier wrote.
In the aggregate, private school choice has yet to make a big dent in traditional public schools’ enrollment, which has been sliding in recent years due declining birth rates, rising enrollment in charter schools, and other factors. Still, certain districts are already experiencing disproportionate hits to their enrollment.
“District-run schools like enrollment predictability and, if anything, they like gradual increases that can justify more funding,” Wolf said. “What they’re getting instead is gradual decreases overall.”
How is expanded private school choice playing out in the first state to go universal?
Another new study zooms in on the first state to remove all eligibility limits on its private school choice program, looking at who’s using it, how families are spending the money (they can use it for private or home-school expenses), and how much it’s costing.
Arizona’s education savings account program started in 2011 as a program specifically for students with disabilities, sending an allotment of state funds that families could use on private school tuition, home-school expenses, or other education services outside the public school system. (A voucher, by contrast, can only be used on private school tuition.)
Lawmakers made the program universally accessible in 2022, removing all eligibility limits, instituting no cap on total program spending, and requiring no tests for participants. The state spent $886 million in 2024-25—about 10 percent of the state’s total education budget—up from $2 million in its first year when adjusted for inflation, contributing to a state budget shortfall in 2024. Enrollment reached about 90,000; Arizona’s public schools enrolled about 1.1 million students last year.
Researchers at the RAND Corp. also found:
- Last year, about 70% of students newly eligible for education savings accounts had already been enrolled in private school before the state assistance became available to them. About 18%—almost 12,000 students—had switched from public schools.
- Participating students are more likely than Arizona’s student body as a whole to live in school districts that are wealthier, whiter, and higher-achieving than average.
- The percentage of students with disabilities using ESAs has fallen to 18% from the days when the program was specifically for those students. By comparison, about 14%percent of Arizona’s public school students last year had disabilities, according to state department of education data.
- Families spend about 60% of their ESA allotments on private school tuition; this figure was 81% in Arkansas last year, by comparison. Families also use the funds to pay for curriculum materials, tutoring, and other educational services. They can also roll over unused money from one year to the next; in 2023-24, 28 percent of ESA funds that had been awarded were not spent.
- The number of private schools in Arizona has increased about 14% since 2022, to 515 from 451. Private elementary and high school tuition rates have grown 12% and 5% respectively in that time, though the increase isn’t definitively a result of the expanded ESAs. More than 6,000 vendors were set up to receive ESA money in ClassWallet, the state’s ESA marketplace, in 2024. (In Arkansas, where nearly 2,000 vendors are participating, the largest non-school vendors were Best Buy and Amazon.)
2026-01-15 22:38:19
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