From RealClearInvestigations. Eight states — including Arizona, Florida, Indiana, and West Virginia — have approved “universal” or near-universal school choice laws since 2021. They open the door completely to school choice by making all students, including those already in private schools and from wealthy families, eligible for about $7,000 to $10,000 in state funding each year for their education.
What’s more, most of these states have also enacted education savings accounts, or ESAs. They give families much more freedom than traditional tuition vouchers, depositing state funds into private accounts to spend on virtually anything related to learning, from homeschooling and online classes to therapy and supplies.
The universal laws amount to a bracing change in school choice. Such programs have existed for decades but until now have been limited to a narrow set of students, such as those from low-income families, or in poor performing public schools, or in need of special education.
By making all students eligible, regardless of their ability to pay for a private education, universal programs in the eight states expand the pool of possible participants by about 4 million students, according to an estimate by EdChoice, an advocacy group. That’s a 40% increase in eligibility since 2021, bringing the total to 13.6 million students after the programs start in the next few years.
But over the years, school choice has suffered from a low participation rate, with fewer than 1 million students partaking in state programs today, mostly to attend religious schools, in a nation with about 50 million public school students. The big question is whether universal laws, paired with the flexibility of ESAs to customized learning, will spur a major exodus to private schooling.
Why Now? This sudden success reflects both long-term trends and recent events. Americans’ satisfaction in public education has slowly eroded over the last two decades. And during the pandemic, student test scores in math and English plummeted as a result of ineffective remote learning, with satisfaction dropping sharply from a majority before COVID to a mere 42% last year, according to Gallup. Advocates in Republican-controlled states seized the opportunity created by COVID, when teachers unions blocked the reopening of schools, spurring parents to search for educational options, including homeschooling, to keep their kids from falling behind. … At the same time, the spread of a woke curriculum following the police murder of George Floyd in 2020 provided some parents with another reason to seek alternatives to public schools.
But just as progressives have embraced a race- and transgender-conscious agenda that has spurred a backlash in many states, the universal choice program pushed by conservatives is stirring much controversy, too. In addition to solid opposition from Democrats, who fear a flight of students and funding from public schools, some Republicans, particularly in rural areas, also object to the costs of giving taxpayer dollars to wealthy families to pay for private schooling.
Although Arkansas, Iowa, Oklahoma, and Utah have joined the four other red states in approving universal choice, Republicans in Texas have joined Democrats in blocking efforts to pass it, suggesting the program may have limited room to run nationwide. Universal choice is also untested. Parents looking to control their kids’ education could find themselves in the dark because there’s little publicly available information about the quality of private and religious education. Homeschools and various types of private instruction are mostly unregulated and don’t require teacher credentialing or student testing in many states, leaving parents without objective ways to evaluate them. … Academic research can only hint at the value of universal choice programs, which have never been studied. The exhaustive research on restricted school choice has shown neutral to negative effects on test scores in statewide programs, which include middle-income students. But the programs have had clear positive benefits on scores for low-income students in particular and have improved high school graduation and college admission rates for some students.
Limited Appeal
But despite the availability of choice programs stretching from Maine to Florida to Nevada, participation hasn’t taken off. On average less than 3% of eligible students actually sign up for school choice after 10 years, according to another study by Lueken. Why such low participation? Wolf says parents are cautious when it comes to their child’s education and will only switch to a private option when they are convinced that it will produce a better academic or social outcome. And many families are simply unaware of the availability of choice programs, according to surveys.
Expanded Participation Takes Off
Universal laws, which hold the potential to significantly expand the number of students who participate in choice programs, were the work of many advocacy groups. … Perhaps the most important role was played by the American Federation for Children (AFC), a conservative campaign finance and advocacy group founded by billionaire and former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. It provided the crucial legislative arm twisting. AFC didn’t hesitate to target Republicans who opposed the universal programs. Rural Republicans in general remain committed to public education because there are few if any private schools in their districts. Some suburban Republicans in areas with good public schools also don’t see the need for universal choice. The lobby group spent $9 million across its affiliates in elections in 2022, its biggest election year investment ever. AFC won 76% of more than 350 state legislative races in which it engaged, and took out 40 anti-school choice lawmakers in the process, Tommy Schultz, the head of AFC, said in an email.
The Cost of Choice
The bigger issue for Republicans who back universal choice is the cost of the program itself.
Universal choice can be expensive because students already in private school at no cost to the state are allowed to sign up in large numbers. This is a new education expense for taxpayers that doesn’t exist in the older choice programs restricted to public school students, in which the state essentially transfers funding from public to private schools.
Arizona, which has finished its first full year of universal choice, shows how the costs of the program can escalate. A legislative committee in Arizona initially said the universal program would increase general fund costs by about $33 million this year and $64 million in 2024. It added that this estimate was “highly speculative” since officials couldn’t determine how many of the state’s 60,000 private schoolers would enroll in universal choice to pay their tuition.
Those estimates were used to sell the program to lawmakers as affordable, but the numbers are now considered nonsense. The price tag quickly skyrocketed into the hundreds of millions of dollars.
The Arizona Department of Education said in May it anticipates a total of 100,000 enrollees next year, or about 9% of all K-12 students. If half of those students are already in private school, it could cost the state about $450 million next year to pay their tuition, according to this reporter’s calculations. That’s seven times the initial government estimate.