Just the FAQs—School Choice

The following are answers to some frequently asked questions (FAQs) regarding school choice and what choice means for students, parents, educators, schools and communities. The answers to these FAQs are intended to provide only an introductory overview of key school choice issues. Links with additional information are provided for those who are interested in learning more.

What Does School Choice Mean?

The term “school choice” means giving parents the power and opportunity to choose the schools their children attend. Traditionally, children are assigned to a public school according to where they live. People of greater economic means already have school choice, because they can afford to move to an area with high quality public schools, or to enroll their children in private schools. Parents without such means, until recently, generally had no school choices, and had to send their children to the schools assigned to them by the district, regardless of the schools’ quality or appropriateness for their children.

School choice creates better educational opportunities for all students, because it uses the dynamics of consumer opportunity and provider competition to drive service quality. This principle can be found anywhere you look, from cars to colleges, but it’s largely absent in our public school system and the poor results are evident, especially in the centers of American culture – our cities. School choice programs foster parental involvement and high expectations by giving parents the option to educate their children as they see fit. It reasserts the rights of parents and the best interests of children over the convenience of the system, infuses accountability and quality into the system, and provides educational opportunity where none existed before.

What Kinds of School Choice Exist Today?

• Full school choice programs, also known as tuition vouchers, provide parents with a portion of the public educational funding allotted for their child to attend school, and allows them to use those funds to send their child to the school of their choice. It gives them the fiscal authority to send their child to the educational institution that best suits their need, whether it is a religious or parochial school, another private school, or a neighborhood or magnet public school. These programs empower the family and, in so doing, infuse consumer accountability into the traditional public school system. Twenty-one voucher programs serve 115,580 students across the country, and several states offer choice scholarship programs specifically for students with special needs. 

Access to full school choice programs is often restricted based on geography and income. Although most programs require residency in the district to qualify for vouchers, expanding numbers of statewide programs offer more flexibility. Many programs also have restrictions on income. For instance, the Milwaukee voucher program only offers scholarships to families below 300% of the poverty line.

• Private scholarship programs, locally based and privately funded, also provide opportunities for quality education where none existed before by making the excellence of the private sector available to families of lower socio-economic status. A non-comprehensive list of available private scholarships can be found here.

For more information about and links to voucher and individual scholarship programs, check out School Choice Programs Across the Nation.

• Charter schools are public schools that provide unique educational services to students, or deliver services in ways that the traditional public schools do not offer. They provide an alternative to the cookie-cutter district school model. Charters survive — and succeed — because they operate on the principles of choice, accountability and autonomy not readily found in traditional public schools. (See Just the FAQs – Charter Schools.) Find a charter school and join the nearly 3 million students who have chosen to attend one of the more than 6,500 charter schools in the United States.

• Public School Choice: Forty-six states and DC have adopted public school choice, which allows parents to enroll their children at any public school in a district, or in some cases, in other districts.

• Tuition Tax Credits and Deductions: A number of states offer support of parental school choice through various tax credit or deduction processes. For more information on tax credit scholarship programs visit Tax Credit FAQ. 

• Education Savings Accounts (ESAs): A handful of states offer ESAs, which take a child’s state education dollars and create an individual education account that parents can use as they see fit to cover private school tuition, textbooks, tutors, or a variety of education-related expenses as deemed applicable by each individual state law. Arizona was the first state to enact an Education Savings Account program.

A Matter of History
Publicly-Sponsored Secular School Choice (2), Maine; Vermont

The longest running, and least controversial, full school choice program is in Vermont. In order to meet the demand of parents who live in towns too small to support a local public school, the state pays the tuition expenses for children to attend any public or non-sectarian private school (including schools outside the state). Vermont’s initial tuition statute, adopted in 1869 to ensure that both urban and rural school children could receive a quality secondary education, did not distinguish between religious and secular schools. In 1961, a court ruling banned religious schools from participating. The citizens and school board of Chittenden attempted to challenge the ban, but in 1999, the Vermont Supreme Court upheld the ban on religious schools under the Vermont constitution’s “compelled support” clause.

Maine’s tuition system has existed in some form for well over 200 years. During colonial years, and throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, many towns provided for the education of their residents by paying tuition for students to attend “private tuition schools,” many of which were operated by religious organizations. As the public education system grew, it became apparent that many of the state’s rural towns could not afford to build high schools, and so a tuition system was developed that paid the child’s tuition to any school of the parent’s choosing, in-state or out-of-state. But in 1980, the department of education ruled out religiously affiliated schools in towns that have public high schools, limiting many of the traditional choices for quality education that Maine f
amilies once exercised. On April 23, 1999, the Maine Supreme Court ruled that the ban on religious schools is not unconstitutional, but did not say whether the inclusion of religious schools would be unconstitutional. The decision does not support the right of parents to send their children to a religious institution and receive a tuition reimbursement. In November of 2006, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case.

Do School Choice Programs Work?

Yes. While most of the programs in question are young, evidence suggests that they provide educational opportunity to those that need it most.

One choice success story comes from the largest and longest running voucher program, the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program. Students in this program tested 9 to 12 percent higher in math, reading and science than their equally disadvantaged peers. Students also graduated at an 18 percent higher rate. The District of Columbia’s Opportunity Scholarship Program (OSP) is another school choice success. A 2010 study from the Institute of Education Sciences found that students who were awarded a scholarship graduated from high school at a 12 percent higher rate than those who applied for the scholarship lottery but did not receive it.

Don’t Choice Programs Just “Cream” the Best Students?

Skeptics often argue that school choice programs only succeed because they “cream” the best students, those with the most involved parents or the best academic talents, and leave the hard-to-educate behind in the troubled traditional public school system. By measurements of student academic progress, parental involvement, constituent satisfaction and public school reaction to competition, the above mentioned studies show that choice programs do not succeed by “creaming,” but by providing quality education to all students. Consider:

•  While a third of traditional district public school students nationally are minorities, more than half of charter school students are minorities and 14 percent have identified special needs.

• Established choice scholarship programs in Cleveland and Milwaukee target at-risk children, exclusively from low-income families.

• The older programs in Vermont and Maine provide schooling in rural locations where public schooling was unavailable.

• Private scholarship programs specifically target low-income, at-risk children.

School choice does not “cream;” rather, it allows parents of at-risk children to choose the schooling that best suits their child’s educational and emotional needs, and in many cases parents are able to explore schooling alternatives before their child’s problems become too severe.

Don’t These Programs Just Subsidize the Tuition of Rich People and Leave the Poor Behind?

School choice programs are aimed at serving those least served by the traditional public school system. The two modern programs in Milwaukee and Cleveland help poor and needy children. In Cleveland, students from low-income families receive larger scholarships. 6,377 students participated in the program in the 2013-14 school year, and vouchers can be worth as much as $4,250 per elementary school student, and $5,700 for students in high school. Priority is determined by family income; the student’s family income must be below 200 percent of the poverty line. Low-income students also have a better chance of winning the initial lottery. Because this lottery received considerable attention by the local press, low-income families were more likely to find out that they had won a scholarship.

In Milwaukee, eligibility is limited to Milwaukee families with incomes at or below 300 percent of the federal poverty level. Though more students are eligible, 24,938 students participated in Milwaukee’s voucher program in the 2013-14 school year, receiving an average voucher of $6,442. The original program’s participation was limited to 1.0 percent of MPS enrollment, but the cap has since been removed.

Research Continues to Show Success and Satisfaction

In Evaluation of the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program: Impacts After Three Years, (March 2009) researchers Patrick Wolf, Babette Gutmann, Michael Puma, Brian Kisida, Lou Rizzo, Nada Eissa, and Marsha Silverbrg, found:

• Across the full sample, there was a statistically significant impact on reading achievement from the offer of a scholarship and from the use of a scholarship. These impacts are equivalent to 3.1 and 3.7 months of additional learning, respectively. However, there was no significant impact on math achievement.

• Parents of students offered a scholarship were more likely to report their child’s school to be safer and have a more orderly school climate compared to parents of students not offered a scholarship.

• The scholarship program had a positive impact on parent satisfaction with their child’s school as measured by the likelihood of grading the school an “A” or “B,” both for the impact of a scholarship offer and the impact of scholarship use.

School choice programs have become more common, especially in 2011, when 13 states passed voucher programs and almost 30 more have legislation pending. Indiana passed a voucher bill that has the broadest base of eligibility of any program to date, with no cap on participation by 2013. Vouchers have shown success and are poised to become more and more common in the coming years.

Voucher programs are expanding, but special education still receives priority: The John M. McKay Scholarships for Students with Disabilities Program, put into statewide practice in 2000, provided vouchers to 27,040 students with disabilities in 2013-14 with a total expenditure of $168,890,916.. These students are most in need and receive more direct assistance.

Are Choice Scholarships Programs Constitutional?

The strongest critics of choice scholarship programs claim that they violate the First Amendment (establishment of religion) if dollars are used for religiously affiliated schools. The First Amendment provides freedom of religion, not freedom from religion. Choice scholarship programs let parents choose where to direct their children’s education funds. The state is not imposing religion upon its citizens (a concern of the Founding Fathers), nor does offering parents the choice of a religious education for their children substantiate federal funding of religious institutions. As Clint Bolick, Vice President for Litigation at the Goldwater Institute observes:

All credible contemporary school choice proposals are constitutional.[Contemporary school choice programs] do not propose subsidizing religious schools, but merely include such schools within the range of educational options made available to a neutrally defined category of beneficiaries (usually economically disadvantaged fa
milies). No public funds are transmitted to religious schools except by the independent decisions of third parties. As the U.S. Supreme Court repeatedly has affirmed, such “attenuated financial benefit[s], ultimately controlled by the private choices of individual[s]“…are simply not within the contemplation of the Establishment Clause’s broad prohibition.

In 2002, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the Cleveland, Ohio school choice program, ensuring that laws returning parental stewardship of state educational funds for their children will not be overturned at the federal level.

Wouldn’t it Be Better To Put More Money Into the Existing School System Instead?

The “money issue” is politically charged and requires careful consideration and clarification. Many fiscal issues, from labor contracts to program mandates, are more a function of larger systemic barriers than of money, so increasing or tinkering with funding will likely do nothing to resolve perpetually mediocre education systems. In the last few decades, spending on K-12 public education has grown substantially without improving academic achievement. Expenditures have increased from $162 billion in 1982 to nearly $543 billion in the 2009-10 school year. The United States spent a higher percentage of its GDP on education than Italy, France Hong Kong, Canada, the Netherlands, or the UK in 2007 (the last year that official data is available).

Meanwhile, national indicators of academic progress have been disappointing. National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) scores have shown little overall improvement for students aged 17 since 1971. According to the 2012 PISA report, students in the U.S. scored only in the “average” category in reading, below countries like Finland, Canada, Japan, and Poland. In science categories, the U.S. is trailing Slovenia. Twenty-seven countries outperformed the U.S. in science literacy. Thirty-five jurisdictions outperformed the U.S. in mathematics. Twenty-three jurisdictions outperformed the U.S. in reading. Eighteen countries outperformed the U.S. in all three subjects. While money is important, America’s educational performance over the last few decades shows that “more money” is not the solution to our nation’s educational problems.

The following are answers to some frequently asked questions regarding school choice and the greater issue of education opportunity, and what choice means for students, parents, educators, schools and communities. These answers are intended to provide an overview of the basics and more links to the abundance of data, research and practice that exists across the US. These issues are not new – and they are well documented.

 To learn more about the extent to which every state gives families better and more abundant educational options, visit our Parent Power! Index

What Does School Choice Mean?

Some call it “school choice”, but it’s really about educational opportunity– and giving parents the power  to choose the schools their children attend. Traditionally, children are assigned to a public school according to where they live. People of greater economic means already have school choice, because they can afford to move to an area with high-quality public schools or to enroll their children in private schools. Parents without such means generally do not have the same access to choices and must send their children to the schools assigned to them by the district, regardless of the school’s quality or appropriateness for their children.

School choice creates better educational opportunities for all students because it uses the dynamics of consumer opportunity and provider competition to drive service quality. This principle can be found anywhere you look, from cars to colleges, but it’s largely absent in our K-12 public school system and the poor results are evident, especially in the centers of American culture – our cities. School choice programs foster parental involvement and high expectations by giving parents the option to educate their children as they see fit. It reasserts the rights of parents and the best interests of children over the convenience of the system, infuses accountability and quality into the system, and provides educational opportunity where none existed before.

What Kinds of School Choice Programs Exist Today?

• Vouchers:
  
  Voucher programs provide parents with a portion of the public education funding allotted for their child to attend school and allows them to use those funds to send their child to the school of their choice. It gives them the financial autonomy to send their child to the educational institution that best suits their need, whether it is a religious or parochial school, another private school, or a neighborhood or magnet public school. These programs empower the family and, in so doing, infuse consumer accountability into the traditional public school system.  There are currently 28 voucher programs serving approx. 230,000 students in 16 states and Washington D.C.

  Access to voucher programs is often restricted based on geography and income. Most programs require residency in the district to qualify for vouchers, by expanding the capacity and breadth of statewide programs parents can be offered more flexibility. Many programs also have restrictions on income. For instance, the Milwaukee voucher program only offers scholarships to families below 300% of the poverty line.

• Tax-Credit Scholarships
  
  Tax- Credit Scholarship programs allow individuals and businesses to reduce their tax liability by contributing to organizations that disperse funds to families to help them pay for their children’s education. State legislation determines the scholarship cap, which affects the size and scope of scholarships.There are 24 tax credit scholarship programs serving approx. 300,000 students in 19 states

  Because donation tax credits create a pool of funds that is explicitly meant to help families pay for their children’s education, they offer more opportunities for low-income families to have the same choices in schooling that their wealthier counterparts enjoy. Many tax credit programs are limited to low-income or special needs students.

• Individual Tax Credits & Deductions
  
  While not a typical school choice program, some states offer support of parental school choice through Individual Tax Credits/ Deductions. Tax Credit Deductions help families pay for educational expenses by making them itemized deductions. The qualifying criteria cover educational expenses such as tutoring, texts, and computers; some also cover private school tuition. State legislation determines the amount of credit and what can be included in the deductions. It also states whether private school tuition qualifies.

  There are 9 Individual Tax Credit/ Dedication programs in 8 states, with over 780,000 participating taxpayers.

• Education Savings Accounts (ESAs)
  
  A handful of states offer ESAs, which take a child’s state education dollars and create an individual education account that parents can use as they see fit to cover private school tuition, textbooks, tutors, or a variety of education-related expenses as deemed applicable by each state’s laws. Arizona was the first state to enact an Education Savings Account program, which served 6,400 students, including approx. 3,700 with special needs, in FY 2019.

  There are 6 Education Savings Accounts serving approx. 22,000 students in 5 states.

• Private scholarship programs: Locally based and privately funded scholarships provide opportunities for quality education where none existed before. Scholarships make the excellence of the private sector available to families of lower socio economic status. A non-comprehensive list of available private scholarships can be found here.

For more information about school choice programs in states check out School Choice Programs Across the Nation.

OTHER FORMS OF SCHOOL CHOICE 

• Charter Schools:
  
  Charter schools are public schools, open by choice, free from most rules and regulations that hamper traditional public schools and held accountable for results.Since 1991, when charter schools were first established in Minnesota, the principle has remained the same — increased operational autonomy in exchange for increased accountability for outcomes. This freedom to innovate allows academically excellent charter schools to flourish.

  As of 2020, there were more than 7,300 charter schools across the country with more than 3.3 million students, with demand higher everywhere they are located. Forty-six states, including Washington, D.C. have charter school laws. West Virginia enacted the most recent law in 2019. All charter laws are not created equal, however, and in fact, many are so flawed that they allow for only minimal opportunity for parents.

  For a complete assessment and explanation of charter school laws and where each state ranks see CER’s newest Parent Power! Index and Charter School Law Rankings and Scorecard, produced just this summer, 2020. (Also see Just the FAQs – Charter Schools.)

• Micro Schools & Learning Pods
  
  Just like charters were the new reform in the 90s, micro schools and learning pods are the way of the future. Micro schools and learning pods reference the same idea of creating alternative learning environments where students convene in small groups to learn. Although they existed pre- Pandemic, COVID-19 quickly pushed micro schools into the spotlight as a valuable education model. Micro schools and learning pods have much more flexibility and freedom than traditional schools and often promote personalized, student- centered learning.

  Students in charter schools and private schools are significantly more likely to be in learning pods during the pandemic than traditional public school students. According to the Edchoice 2020 Schooling in America Survey, 11% of public district school parents currently have children in learning pods, compared to 30% charter school parents and 43% private school parents. Socialization and community report is the main reason parents indicated interest in learning pods, followed by education to keep kids learning.

To learn more about Micro Schools & Learning Pods, including state policies, visit  National School Choice Week.

• Public School Choice & Open Enrollment
  
  Open enrollment is a form of school choice in the traditional public school system by allowing families to enroll their students at any public school within their district, or in some cases, in other districts. Open enrollment laws vary by state, some of them being mandatory for school districts and others voluntary. As of 2019, thirty- three states and D.C have some form of intradistrict open enrollment policies where students can attend a school in their assigned district. Forty-three states have adopted interdistrict policies, allowing students to attend schools in other districts.

  Additionally, Magnet schools are an alternative option for students to attend a different school than their assigned one, often offering innovative   Magnets are public schools run by school districts that concentrate on a specific subject area such as STEM, Fine and Performing Arts, International Baccalaureate, International Studies, Career and Technical Education and World Languages. Magnet schools are free to attend, and students are often picked through a lottery system after they apply due to high demand. Some magnet schools have specific eligibility requirements based on the focus area. Magnet schools must follow state regulations and requirements.

  To learn more about options in your state, visit The Ultimate Guide to Public Magnet Schools by the National School Choice Week team.

Do School Choice Programs Work?

Scores of data demonstrate that programs that allow students to attend the school of their choice not only boosts their chances of success but the success of those in their communities. 

• A recent study from Urban Institute examining long- term effects on students in school choice programs demonstrated that students in the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship program were more likely to go to and graduate from college than traditional public school students. Specifically, 57% of students in FTC enrolled in college vs. 51% of students not in the program. Results also showed that enrollment and graduation rates increased with the number of years students participated in the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship program. 

• Another choice success story comes from the largest and longest-running voucher program, the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program. Research shows that third through eighth grade students in this program were more likely to attend and graduate college. Additionally, “private school choice program students also graduated from college at higher rates, especially from four-year institutions, where there was a 38 percent increase,” Urban Institute found. 

• An additional example comes from a 2019 study evaluating the relationship between the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program and crime rates. Scholar Corey A. DeAngelis found that “mere exposure to private schooling through a voucher is associated with lower rates of criminal activity, but the relationship is not robust to different analytic samples. Students who used the program through 12th grade, however, were much less likely to have criminal records than their public school peers. These results are apparent when controlling for a robust set of student demographics, test scores, and parental characteristics.” 

Don’t Choice Programs Just “Cream” the Best Students?

No. While skeptics and opponents  often argue that school choice programs only succeed because they “cream” the best students, those with the most involved parents or the best academic talents, and leave the hard-to-educate behind in the troubled traditional public school system, the data shows otherwise. School choice does not “cream;” rather, it allows parents of at-risk children to choose the schooling that best suits their child’s educational and emotional needs, and in many cases, parents are able to explore schooling alternatives before their child’s problems become too severe. Visit the following links for more research and information: 

• “Charter schools are diverse, and historically serve proportionately more students of color and more low-income students than district schools. According to the most recently available data, 68.7% of charter school students and 52.4% of district school students are students of color, while 59.3% of charter school students and 54.3% of district school students were economically disadvantaged students (“EDS”), says researchers from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. 
• Far from being enclaves of privilege, private schools extend opportunity to some of America’s most disadvantaged students. EdChoice explains “in one study, participants in Florida’s McKay voucher program, which serves special needs students, were surveyed to see how likely they were to get services in their private school compared to their previous public school. Only 30 percent of voucher participants said they received all services required under federal law from their public school, whereas 86 percent reported their choice school provided all the services they promised to provide.”
• The University of Arkansas 2019 study Do You Get Cream with Your Choice? Characteristics of Students Who Moved into or Out of the Louisiana Scholarship Program  found that  “LSP applicants are less advantaged than their public school peers regarding their family socioeconomic status and initial test scores. No consistent evidence indicates that the LSP private schools are “skimming the cream” or “pushing out” students based on their family social status or initial test scores.”
• The 123’s of School Choice 2020 Edition states “ Elise Swanson surveyed the literature on the effects of various school choice sectors (magnet, charters, and private) on integration in schools. In her review of studies on voucher programs, she reviewed eight studies, finding that seven studies found voucher programs improved school integration and one study was unable to detect any effects. She notes that “it is perhaps unsurprising that traditional public schools exhibit, to this day, high levels of racial segregation, and that choice programs, including vouchers, that decouple the link between address and school actually increase racial integration.”

Research Continues to Show Success and Satisfaction

“Support for School Choice Remains Strong During a Volatile Year”, reports American Federation for Children on their newly released 2021 National School Choice Poll. The survey revealed high bipartisan and minority support for school choice. Major findings include: 

• “Fully 65% of K-12 parents back school choice, including 66% of public-school parents. Parental support is even higher among K-12 parents who work full-time and among middle school and high school parents (both 72%).
• African Americans and Latinos remain very enthusiastic supporters of school choice. This year, 74% of African Americans favor school choice, and 71% of Latinos support school choice.
• School choice continues to enjoy bipartisan support: Republicans continue to be the most enthusiastic supports (82%), but 69% of Independents (69%) and Democrats (55%) favor school choice.”

A recent EdChoice survey Schooling in America: Public Opinion on K–12 Education During the COVID-19 Pandemic provides compelling evidence that school choice programs receive high levels of public support and parent satisfaction. Results also highlight the importance of information; the more people know about programs, the higher the support. For example: 

Education Savings Accounts (ESAs):
• “ESAs received the highest level of public support (81%) of any other type of educational choice in the eight years we have polled on the policy type. 
• Our first question about ESAs asked for an opinion without offering any description. On this baseline question, 54 percent of respondents said they favored ESAs. Current school parents expressed a slightly higher support (58%). In a follow-up question that described how an ESA program operates, support rose by 27 points among all respondents, and increased 28 points (to 86%) among parents.
• Those who favor ESAs are most likely to do so because of “more freedom and flexibility for parents” (32%) or “access to better academic environment” (27%).”

Vouchers

• Support for vouchers is higher than ever before, “− On the baseline question about school vouchers—without any description—52 percent of all respondents said they favored the policy. Current school parents expressed higher initial support (59%). In the follow-up question that described how vouchers work, public support rose by 21 points (to 73%) and increased 19 points (to 78%) among current school parents.”

Tax-Credit Scholarships

• “Two-thirds of all respondents (74%) said they support tax-credit scholarships, while 24 percent are opposed to the policy type. Current school parents were significantly more likely than the general public to favor such a policy (78%). There has been a significant increase of support since last year.”

In the 2020 policy analysis Toward Equitable School Choice, Harvard scholars found: 

• “Choice schools, as compared to assigned ones, have adapted more quickly in the face of extreme emergencies, such as Hurricane Katrina and the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic.
• Parental satisfaction of those using vouchers and tax-credit scholarships to attend private schools is substantially higher than for comparable students attending assigned district schools.
• Most high quality evaluations of school voucher and tax-credit interventions find either positive or null effects on student achievement, with positive effects identified more frequently for minority students.
• Attendance at a private school, whether or not aided by a choice intervention, is nearly always found to have either a positive or no effect on important civic values: political tolerance, political participation, civic knowledge and skills, voluntarism, and social capital.
• Effects of school vouchers and tax credits on the achievement of students at nearby district schools are usually positive, though some studies find null effects. Only one study has found some adverse effects.

The study A Win-Win Solution: The Empirical Evidence on School Choice examined the effect of private school choice programs and academic outcomes (for both participants and traditional public school students), fiscal impact on taxpayers and public schools, racial segregation in schools, and civic values. Specifically: 

• “Eighteen empirical studies have examined academic outcomes for school choice participants using random assignment, the gold standard of social science. Of those, 14 find choice improves student outcomes: six find all students benefit and eight find some benefit and some are not visibly affected.
• Thirty-three empirical studies (including all methods) have examined school choice’s effect on students’ academic outcomes in public schools. Of those, 31 find choice improved public schools.  
• Twenty-eight empirical studies have examined school choice’s fiscal impact on taxpayers and public schools. Of these, 25 find school choice programs save money… No empirical study has found a negative fiscal impact.
• Ten empirical studies have examined school choice and racial segregation in schools. Of those, nine find school choice moves students from more segregated schools into less segregated schools, and one finds no net effect on segregation.
• Eleven empirical studies have examined school choice’s effect on civic values and practices, such as respect for the rights of others and civic knowledge. Of those, eight find school choice improves civic values and practices.”

Last but not least, data and research from CER’s 2020 Parent Power! Index exemplifies the continual expansion of private school choice programs across the nation. In particular: 

• Since 2016, six programs in five states have been enacted. Nationwide student participation has increased more than 81,000 students over the past few years.

• 
  1. Florida launched two programs; the Hope Scholarship Program in 2018, and the Family Empowerment Voucher program in 2019, which further expanded in 2020. The Family Empowerment program is providing 18,000 students life-changing education opportunities. 

  2. Illinois launched the Invest In Kids Scholarship- Tax Credit Scholarship in 2018. 

  3. North Carolina launched the Personal Education Savings Account program in 2018. In 2020, there are 282 students participating. 

  4. Tennessee launched the Education Savings Account Program was passed in 2019 and set to launch in 2021. 

  5. Utah enacted the Special Needs Opportunity Scholarship Program in 2020 and set to launch in 2021. 

• Student participation in private school choice programs have increased in twenty-one states over the past few years (AZ, AL, AR, FL,IN, OH, PA , GA, LA, OK, ME, MD, NV, SC, MS, MT, NH, SD, TN, VA, WI)

Specifically… 

• • Arkansas: A small voucher program enacted in 2015 nevertheless grew in two years from 178 in 2018, to 427 students this year, increasing by 140%

• • Florida: The Family Empowerment program expanded in 2020 and is providing 18,000 students life-changing education opportunities. 

• • Georgia: an effort to expand the Special Needs Scholarship Program Voucher program is underway.

• • Idaho: Since the Idaho Advanced Opportunities program launched in 2016, the number of students taking dual credit classes has quadrupled. This year, Idaho expanded the Idaho Advanced Opportunities program to include workforce development and appreciation programs.

• • Pennsylvania: In just two years, there has been more than a 20% increase in participation in both the Educational Improvement and Opportunity Scholarship tax credit programs.

• • South Dakota: South Dakota Tax Credit Program increase since 2018 from 481 to 720 students.

• • Virginia: Since 2016, the tax credit scholarship program has seen student participation more than double in size from 2,419 to 4,710 students.

• • Wisconsin: statewide voucher program increased by 2500 students, more than 30% since in the past couple years. The special needs voucher program has small numbers, but a quadruple increase from 2018! (252 participants to 1,058).

For more information, visit the Choice & Charter Achievement page 

Are Choice Scholarships Programs Constitutional?

The strongest critics of choice scholarship programs claim that they violate the First Amendment if dollars are used for religiously affiliated schools. The First Amendment provides freedom of religion, not freedom from religion. Choice scholarship programs let parents choose where to direct their children’s education funds – not the government. The state is not imposing religion upon its citizens as the Founding Fathers were concerned about when writing the constitution, nor does offering parents the choice of a religious education for their children substantiate federal funding of religious institutions. As Clint Bolick, Vice President for Litigation at the Goldwater Institute observes:

All credible contemporary school choice proposals are constitutional. [Contemporary school choice programs] do not propose subsidizing religious schools, but merely include such schools within the range of educational options made available to a neutrally defined category of beneficiaries (usually economically disadvantaged families). No public funds are transmitted to religious schools except by the independent decisions of third parties. As the U.S. Supreme Court repeatedly has affirmed, such “attenuated financial benefit[s], ultimately controlled by the private choices of individual[s]“…are simply not within the contemplation of the Establishment Clause’s broad prohibition. 

The U.S. Supreme Court has consistently supported state school choice programs as a constitutional use of public tax dollars. In 2002, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the Cleveland, Ohio school choice program, ensuring that laws returning parental stewardship of state educational funds for their children will not be overturned at the federal level. 

Wouldn’t it Be Better To Put More Money Into the Existing School System Instead?

The “money issue” is politically charged and requires careful consideration and clarification. Many fiscal issues, from labor contracts to program mandates, are more a function of larger systemic barriers than of money, so increasing or tinkering with funding will likely do nothing to resolve perpetually mediocre education systems. In the last few decades, spending on K-12 public education has grown substantially without improving academic achievement.

 In 2020, US Census data showed  per pupil spending increased for the sixth consecutive year. According to the Census, spending “increased by 3.4% to $12,612 per pupil during the 2018 fiscal year.” and “the increase in spending was due in part to an overall increase in revenue. In 2018, public elementary and secondary schools received $720.9 billion from all revenue sources, up 3.8% from $694.3 billion in 2017.”

Meanwhile, national indicators of academic progress have been disappointing. National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) scores have shown little overall improvement for students since 1971. On the most recent assessments, only 34 percent of 8th-grade students are proficient in Math and Reading, and 15 percent in U.S History. 

For high school seniors, only 37 percent of 12th graders are at above proficient in reading.  The report card found that “in 2019 twenty-six percent of all twelfth-graders in the nation reported that they never read stories or novels, and fifty-one percent of twelfth-graders reported that they never read poems outside of school. Larger percentages of lower-performing students (below the 25th percentile) than higher-performing students (at or above the 75th percentile) reported never reading these types of literary texts.”

On a global scale, the 2018 Programme for International Students (PISA) report revealed students in the U.S. scored above average in reading–– below countries like New Zealand, Finland, Canada, Ireland and Poland. 38 countries outperformed the U.S. in math; 17 countries in science literacy, and 12 countries in reading. 7 countries outperformed the U.S. in all three subjects. 

While money is important, America’s educational performance over the last few decades shows that “more money” is not the solution to our nation’s educational problems.

Funding disparities between district schools and private schools under choice programs are significant: “ Families participating in private choice programs typically receive subsidies worth 50 percent less than the per-student subsidies given to district schools. For example, the average voucher amount for students participating in Indiana’s Choice Scholarship Program is 35 percent of the average per-student total cost in traditional public school districts .” (The future of K-12 Funding, 2019)

Studies have also shown that voucher programs are saving the school system money. According to the 2018 EdChoice report “Fiscal Effects of School Vouchers: Examining the Savings and Costs of America’s Private School Voucher Programs,” “The 16 voucher programs in the analysis generated net savings worth $3.2 billion through FY 2015, or about $3,400 for every student who received a voucher.” 

Finally, a 2020 EdChoice report explores the fiscal effects of private school choice programs on taxpayers and school districts:  “A report released last year updated a previous fiscal analysis of the Pennsylvania Educational Improvement Tax Credit Program and included a new analysis of the Opportunity Scholarship Tax Credit Program. Based on a range of assumptions about the share of scholarship students who would have enrolled in public schools in a world without the scholarship programs, the EITC and OSTC combined generated overall net fiscal benefits worth between $4,000 and $6,800 per scholarship. Another fiscal analysis, of Arizona’s four tax-credit scholarship programs, estimated these programs generated an overall net fiscal benefit worth between $35 million and $285 million for FY 2018 for the state.”