School Choice Is On The March

In 2021, 621,700 students participated in one of 76 private school choice programs in 32 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico. That is the key finding from the 2022 edition of EdChoice’s comprehensive guide The ABCs of School Choice.

States provide private school choice in several different ways. Perhaps the most familiar type of program is the school voucher, which takes part of the money that the state allocates to educate a child and gives it to his or her parents to help pay for tuition at a private school. Tax-credit scholarship programs give individuals or corporations credits against their tax liability for donations to non-profit organizations that grant scholarships to students. Education savings accounts work like vouchers, but instead of going to one school, funds can be subdivided between multiple providers, like a health savings account. States have even gotten into combining tax credit scholarships and education savings account, issuing tax credits for donations to organizations that create education savings accounts for families. States have also instituted various tax credits and deductions for private and homeschooling expenses.

Taken together, more and more families have more and more support when it comes to finding a school option outside of their traditional public school. There are large school choice programs like Florida’s Tax Credit Scholarship Program that enrolled more than 106,000 students last year. There are small school choice programs like North Carolina’s Special Education Scholarship Grants for Children with Disabilities that enrolled just 1,343 students.

In red states and blue states, northern states and southern states, there are programs to support school choice.

The ABCs of School Choice puts to lie the notion that private school choice is some kind of new experiment. As it demonstrates, the two oldest private school choice programs were created in 1869 and 1878, respectively. But that is not to say that there hasn’t been substantial growth in recent decades. In 2000, for example, there were 10 private school choice programs. By 2010 it was 26. In 2020 it was 65.

School choice appears to be a one-way ratchet. There has never been a year in which there were fewer school choice programs than the year before. Sure, there were periods where there was zero or limited growth, but with each passing decade and each passing year, more and more programs have emerged.

Freedom tends to work like that.

When folks crossed from east to west through the Berlin Wall and found out about Levi’s Jeans and Ramones tapes, it was tough to go back. The same is true for schooling. Once parents get the option to pick their child’s school, it is tough to take that away.

An interesting trend that emerges in the report is the myriad ways in which states have expanded choice within their borders. States like Arizona and Ohio have five and eight separate school choice programs, respectively. They were not enacted at the same time. States start with one program, see how it goes, and then pass more. Sometimes it begins with a small program for a targeted population, like students with special needs, only to create new programs with more expansive eligible populations.

The ABCs of School Choice also points to an exciting future for school choice.

One of the new programs created during the 2021 legislative session was West Virginia’s Hope Scholarship Program. It is the most inclusive private school choice program ever created. Any student currently enrolled in a public school is eligible (93% of the total student population), and they will receive 100% of the state’s portion of school funding (estimated to be around $4,600) into an education savings account. The program is not open for students until the 2022-23 school year, but just seeing a description of what is about to begin is impressive.

As legislative sessions across the country kick into high gear, it is tough to tell if 2022 will be as consequential a year for private school choice as 2021 was. Frustration with public schools struggling to cope with the second school year of the coronavirus pandemic from parents and lawmakers spurred more action in state houses than potentially any other time in the history of the school choice movement. Such momentum is hard to keep up. That said, there appear to be several states already introducing bills, holding hearings, and starting to vote on private school choice legislation. We’ll be watching it closely.