Posted on Tuesday, January 28, 2025
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by Outside Contributor
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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.
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