As private school choice policies have proliferated and matured across the country, researchers have looked at the policy side of the process, as well as outcomes for participants and competitive effects on district schools. A new analysis from EdChoice looks at the design and implementation phase, which has been less studied but certainly affects student enrollment as well as school participation.
Analysts Misty Gallo, Colyn Ritter, and Patrick Wolf compiled a near-comprehensive list of private school choice programs from Vermont’s Town Tuitioning Program, established in 1869, to Arizona’s Educational Freedom Account Program established in early 2024—a total of 65 programs comprising standard education savings accounts (ESAs), school vouchers, tax-credit-based ESAs, tax-credit scholarships, and refundable tax-credit programs. They excluded any plans that merely offered a non-refundable individual tax credit/deduction and any that were enacted after March 2024.
They posit two groups of factors that are likely to influence enrollment rates. First is a set of eight program features (which any given program may or may not include): some that are “additive” to the programs (providing transportation to a choice school and allowing private school students to access extracurriculars at their public school, for example), some that serve to limit eligibility (such as IEP status and income limits), state level capacity features (such as total funding caps and enrollment limits), and regulatory features like testing requirements specific to choice-using students. Second is a set of eight statewide factors that indicate the health and quality of public schools and could serve to influence families’ motivation to exercise a non-district choice when it arises: school bullying rates, average NAEP scores in both fourth and eighth grade, levels of parental school choice support (as determined by survey data), poverty rate in public schools, number of participating private schools in a program, a school funding “fairness” grade per state (determined annually by the American Legislative Exchange Council and used here as a proxy for funding support for school choice), and which political party controls legislative and executive branches (a proxy for school choice support at the level of state policy).
In their initial analysis—looking at statewide factors only—the researchers find that levels of school bullying, average NAEP scores, and levels of school choice support are all significant predictors of take-up rates for private school choice programs. These operate in the expected directions for students in year one, year two, or year five after program establishment (the specific time points under examination throughout the report). Bullying rates are the most consistent of these, being highly significant in all benchmark years. Average eighth grade NAEP scores demonstrate a significant association with take-up rates in years two and five, with lower achievement levels predicting increased use of private school choice, as expected. Average fourth grade NAEP scores, however, are positively associated with take-up rates only in year two. All together, these handful of statewide factors seem to be reasonably strong drivers compelling families toward a non-district education choice.
Program features paint a less clear picture, with weak or null significance for most of them, including transportation, requiring a student have an IEP, and requiring accountability testing. Indeed, the analysts actually found negative impacts on enrollment for some factors—including allowing program participants to remain eligible for extracurriculars at their district school, which was expected to boost enrollment but did the opposite in year one across the range of programs that included this facet. The report includes additional breakouts of the results, including by region of the country and by various subsets of the student population in specific states.
This research has a number of limitations, especially on the supply side of the equation. “Number of schools participating,” for example, is an imperfect proxy for availability, especially in ESA-type programs where vendors could just as easily be schools with limited capacity as they could be virtual tutoring companies with no cap on users. It is also noteworthy that an analysis looking at the potential influence of program design features didn’t bother to break out the findings by program type (e.g. ESAs versus tuition vouchers). Nonetheless, the story generally appears to be that the state of public education primarily drives parents to enroll their students in private school choice programs. This tends to reinforce previous research findings that school safety, here measured by rates of bullying, is at the top of their list.
SOURCE: Misty Gallo, Colyn Ritter, and Patrick J. Wolf, “If You Build It This Way, They Will Come,” EdChoice (July 2025).
