After a decade of contentious debate, 30 states and DC—31 including Texas’s impending plans—are in on private school choice, and roughly a dozen offer universal or near-universal eligibility. School choice policy has been hotly contested, and now, widely accepted and implemented. But it has seldom been understood. Indeed, both its detractors and its proponents harbor serious misconceptions about school choice.
This is interesting because, as a concept, school choice is fairly straightforward. Admittedly, as a policy, it varies quite a bit—from modest intra-district transfer policies to the more radical “universal” models—but the underlying concept remains the same: families choose how their education funding is spent, and the money follows the child. They can use their tax dollars to pursue private, charter, faith-based, or other schooling in lieu of district schools—or not. The choice is theirs.
The appeal is obvious; the ability to make choices, like how your education dollars are spent, is what constitutes freedom. When governments make these choices for us, we recoil. Accordingly, some have dubbed school choice the “civil rights issue of our time.” You may reject the analogy, but the sentiment is, as Americans, hard to disagree with.
Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize winning economist behind the modern concept, was confident that school choice would come into favor. Friedman was wrong—up until five years ago. Since 2020, charter public school enrollment is up 400,000 while district schools are down 1.75 million. 2023 was initially heralded as the “year of universal choice” by Ed Choice, only to be outdone by 2024, and again by 2025. Not only are more states embracing school choice, states are expanding their menu of choice options in unprecedented ways. For instance, 13 states now boast “universal” choice systems, extending choice to students of all backgrounds. As recently as 2021, only one state had anything close to universal eligibility.
Choice legislation has advanced prolifically under Republican legislatures—many of which are making up lost ground in education. Recently, Florida’s House Bill 1 rendered its pre-existing choice programs (Family Empowerment Scholarship and Florida Tax Credit) fully universal. In total, Florida reports that nearly 1.4 million students—approaching half of the state’s K-12 population—are taking advantage of some form of school choice. Other states, most notably, Arizona, are actively cultivating even more radical school choice landscapes.
The calculus in these red states is simple. Historically, many low-income students have been confined to their underfunded and mismanaged district schools—schools that have failed students for decades. These institutions are notoriously ineffective, and—unlike their peers in the leafy suburbs—inner-city students often lack the means to enroll in private, faith-based, or other alternatives. Well-executed school choice programs dissolve this link between a student’s zip code and their education.
These programs can also, as Friedman envisioned, benefit district schools. School choice creates competition between schools for students—and by extension, funding—which improves outcomes for all students, even those whose families do not actively choose. This effect has since been confirmed. In this way, the result of school choice could be a rising tide that lifts all boats, coupled with the freedom to choose which boat to board in the first place.
In some cases, it has been this and more. If Arizona charter school students were analyzed as a separate state on the 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), they would rank first in 8th-grade math and second in reading. These students also perform a full grade level ahead of their peers in traditional public schools. Even so, they are not the only ones benefiting.
University of Arkansas Professor Patrick Wolf, having studied dozens of these districts, concluded: “There is overwhelming evidence that competition helps public schools…that claim [that public schools only function without competition] has been completely debunked.” School choice advocates eagerly point to these successes.
Their critics point elsewhere. Even as their charters excel, Arizona’s outcomes, taken as a whole, are unremarkable. Their programs are also teeming with fraud, with fictitious students and expenses—even a golf-simulator—being charged to the Department of Education. Worse, members of Arizona’s DOE were complicit in a handful of these schemes. Meanwhile, in Louisiana, two separate research teams found negative academic impacts as high as -0.4 standard deviations in math among voucher users.
Why the enormous disparity in results? What does this tell us about school choice? Frankly, very little. School choice is sometimes sold as a cure-all for underperforming public schools, other times it is deemed ineffective and a siphon of public resources. Both can be true, but this debate misses the point: school choice is not a guarantor of student success, nor was it ever intended to be. Its purpose is to provide choices, and most agree that choice is good. Not all choices will be good, to be sure. Indeed, there are poor-performing charter and private schools, just as there are ineffective district schools. When systems with school choice features fail, we ought to blame and reform the choices—they are clearly of poor quality—not ban the freedom to choose. It is grossly undemocratic to suggest otherwise.
Let us return to the case of Louisiana. Unfortunately, their program’s design essentially excluded any high-quality quality private schools and, in this way, their failure was predestined. State test mandates, random admissions, and tuition constraints made participation unattractive—save for those schools that were desperate for enrollment. The benefactors of Louisiana’s school choice program were left with some exceptionally poor choices. Ask yourself: is the problem that these families can choose, or is it their limited and inadequate choices? Inherently, the freedom to choose is only as good as the choices available.
What can positively be said is that school choice could be great—provided the choices are reasonable. As states continue to roll out choices—and they should—they ought also to attend to the quality of the choices themselves. In Florida, for one, participating private schools need not be accredited or employ state-certified teachers; students are not required to take state tests; and school-level results are not published. Choice without quality is merely permission to fail differently.
Sam Davis is a Roger Perry Education Intern with the Pioneer Institute. He is a rising sophomore at the University of Chicago, with a double major in Political Science and Philosophy.
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