States Are Spending Billions on Private School Choice. But Is It Truly Universal?
Six states last school year launched private school choice programs that were open to all students, regardless of much their family earns or where they previously went to school.
They joined two other states with existing “universal” programs. All told, 569,000 students enrolled in universal programs from those eight states, collectively costing $4 billion in state funds.
That’s slightly more than $7,000 per student—compared with $7,700 per pupil that public schools got from state sources in 2022.
Those are some of the key findings in a new analysis of private school choice programs from FutureEd, a research think tank based at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy.
The report, published on Oct. 8, is the most comprehensive to date that zeroes in on states that have school choice programs with no eligibility restrictions. All but two of them began operating these programs for the first time last school year. Most prior school choice research has examined smaller private school choice programs or different forms of choice, like charter schools.
More than half of the 1 million students who used private school choice funds during the 2023-24 school year got them from programs with universal eligibility. “Never in the history of American public education has so much money been available to parents to pay for private school tuition or home-school expenses,” the report says.
Even so, FutureEd makes the case that “universal” might not be the most precise term to describe some of these programs.
Utah, for instance, has so far allocated only $83 million—enough for roughly 10,000 education savings accounts, leaving 17,000 additional applicants without the money they were seeking. And while the state accepts applications from anyone, it prioritizes applicants from low-income families. During the first school year the program was in effect, no one who got an ESA from Utah was from a family making more than 200 percent of the federal poverty level.
Arkansas, Iowa, and West Virginia all have universal private school choice programs on the books—but eligibility is still expanding and won’t open to all students for a couple more years.
All students’ families in Oklahoma can apply for a state tax credit to cover private educational expenses—but the state could only offer $150 million in credits in 2024. That cap will grow to $250 million within two years.
Arizona and Florida are the states closest to having universal private school choice programs. There’s no limit on how many students the state can accept, or how much money the state can spend. They are the only two states to spend more than 10 percent of their overall investment in K-12 schools on their universal private school choice offerings, the FutureEd report shows. And they are the only two states with universal programs that allow students to spend state funds on unaccredited private schools.
But even there, the term “universal” isn’t quite accurate. States only have so much money to devote to these programs, and some like Arizona are already dealing with budget strain as demand for private school subsidies dramatically exceeded expectations.
Also, money aside, private schools have limited enrollment capacity, either by choice or by necessity.
“Even with programs that really don’t have any of those caps, it’s still not truly universal in the sense that the private schools at the end of the day are the ones making the decisions about who’s able to attend their schools,” said Bella DiMarco, a policy analyst for FutureEd and one of the report’s co-authors.
Another wrinkle is that tuition at many private schools costs significantly more than what the state offers to families in the form of vouchers or education savings accounts. Researchers have documented that some private schools in Oklahoma have recently raised tuition in light of the newly available state subsidy.
Ohio is one of the only states whose law anticipates this phenomenon, DiMarco said. Private schools in Ohio are required to accept vouchers from low-income students as full tuition.
“That is a smart policy design choice if one of your goals is to open up opportunities for low-income families,” DiMarco said. “The cost doesn’t become a prohibiting factor for one of those families.”
How the first years of ‘universal’ private school choice are shaping up
Private school choice programs initially rolled out in the mid-1990s as opportunities for low-income parents who couldn’t afford private school tuition to gain wider access to the full landscape of options for their children. Some advocates also pitch them as lifelines for families whose children aren’t adequately served by their local public school and want a change without breaking the bank.
But so far, the majority of participants in most universal private school choice programs were already attending private school before the programs cropped up—64 percent in Arkansas, 69 percent in Florida, 66 percent in Iowa.
Those figures aren’t necessarily surprising, DiMarco said. After all, there’s no reason any parent whose child is already in private school would turn down an opportunity to cut costs for their students’ tuition. Many private schools encourage families to take part.
“If your school is a participating provider, you would also want families to use the ESA money because it takes some of the burden off of you in terms of providing a financial scholarship,” DiMarco said.
Arizona’s program saw an increase in the number of public school “switchers” to private school choice programs during the most recent school year. Roughly 48 percent of new participants were previously enrolled in public school, compared with 21 percent the previous year.
The program might have become more widely known in its second full year. Or some parents might have needed some extra time to smooth the transition from one school to another.
“It is a big decision,” DiMarco said. “Maybe it takes time and parents want to think about it.”
If that’s the case, the share of public school switchers in other states could go up in the coming years as well, she said.
Are these programs working? The answer is far from straightforward
The FutureEd report argues states haven’t clearly defined the primary goals of their private school choice programs, which makes evaluating their effectiveness for students difficult.
If the programs are primarily designed to give public school students a route to private schools, most are not succeeding because the bulk of participants were already attending private school. If the goal is for student recipients to perform better than public school peers on standardized exams, the available data are spotty and inconclusive.
Arizona’s and Oklahoma’s programs don’t require students to take any particular tests.
“Without standardized testing requirements or other performance metrics ... it is nearly impossible to gauge how much learning is taking place” in private school choice programs that don’t report academic outcomes data, the report says.
See Also
Indiana requires private school students to take state exams but doesn’t publicly report test scores.
Even in states like Ohio and Iowa where private school students take the same standardized tests as public school students, and the state publicly reports the data, comparing the results may be misleading. Many private schools operate on the premise that their curricula will be different from that of public schools. Low performance on a standardized test might just mean a private school student is, by design, learning at a different pace or in a different order than their public school peers.
Test scores aren’t the only set of data that could give researchers a fuller picture of how these programs are working.
With more time and data on her hands, DiMarco would have liked to learn more about parents who receive ESA funds but end up not using them. FutureEd researchers found that the families of roughly 5,000 public school students in Iowa, for instance, applied for ESA funds, but only 2,000 ended up using them.
Among the questions that disparity invites: Did they change their minds? Are they waiting until their child is fully ready to make the leap from one school to another? Were they unable to enroll in the private school they had hoped their student would attend? Are the children even attending school at all?
Learning more about how families use these programs would be useful for informing changes to these states’ policies as well as policy design in states that are still looking to expand private school choice.
Lawmakers in Idaho, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Texas have flirted with private school choice in recent years. Advocates believe at least a couple of those states are in a strong position to capitalize in the coming years on the surging political fortunes of private school choice in conservative-led states.
One thing’s for certain—no two programs will look exactly alike.
Some states offer larger sums of money to low-income families than they do to more affluent families, while others offer all students the same amount. Some states draw funding for private school choice programs directly from their education budgets, while others use their general fund, or supply tax credits to private donors who fund student scholarships.
“All these different things are labeled under the universal umbrella,” DiMarco said. “When you dig into it, that universal term looks very different in different states.”
Mark Lieberman is a reporter for Education Week who covers school finance.
States Are Spending Billions on Private School Choice. But Is It Truly Universal? (edweek.org)