Over the past decade or so, as the education reform movement has increasingly splintered along partisan lines, the number of people who support both charter schools and private school choice has shrunk to almost nothing. I think there might be a dozen of us left. (Wait, Jorge Elorza makes thirteen.) One cause of the growing divide, I believe, is that private school choice advocates are making demands that are increasingly outlandish.
It’s not just the push for universal access or for education savings accounts, though that’s part of it. As Nicole Stelle Garnett acknowledges in City Journal, these are big shifts from where the school choice movement started out three decades ago.
As a young attorney, in the mid-1990s, I helped defend the constitutionality of the nation’s first modern voucher programs. Back then, we were fighting to preserve two programs that served a few thousand kids in Milwaukee and Cleveland. Both were means-tested, limited to the poorest students, and animated by what Howard Fuller called the “rescue mission” justification for parental choice in education—that is, the imperative of empowering disadvantaged kids to exit failing public schools—rather than by what he deemed “a fight for broad societal change.”
Nicole still embraces the rescue mission as a “moral imperative,” even as she’s now excited about a more expansive approach, but it seems to me that said mission has dropped to a bottom-tier priority for many in the choice movement.
Consider the policy wish list of the main school choice organizations today. Not only do they want to give parents, including affluent ones, debit cards loaded with taxpayer dollars to be spent on all manner of products and services—they also want private schools to get public funding and still be able to:
✓ Cherry pick their students
✓ Exclude students from religious faiths other than their own
✓ Exclude gay students or students with gay parents
✓ Exclude students with disabilities
✓ Exclude English learners
✓ Charge tuition above whatever public subsidies they receive, potentially excluding poor and working-class families
✓ Refuse to report test scores for participating students (as in Arizona), or refuse to take the state tests (as in all other school choice states save for Indiana and Wisconsin)
That a lot of demands. And note that not a single one applies to charter schools. This is a big reason why center-left folks like Chad Aldeman strongly prefer the charter model:
Some people argue that private school students shouldn’t have to take state tests. After all, private schools don’t have to follow state standards or regulations in other ways, and they face accountability through parental choice.
But policymakers should be clear about the trade-offs they’re making. The research literature from recent large-scale voucher programs finds negative effects on achievement scores, even while showing more positive impacts on longer-term outcomes like attainment.
Would you accept that deal? Public investment, lower math scores?
I wouldn’t. I would want to know how my investments are working. Most states can’t do that right now. But if states aren’t collecting achievement data, all they have to judge their private school choice programs by is enrollment growth. And if that’s the only metric that matters, then sure, everything looks like sunshine and rainbows.
Yet the private school choice folks are asking for even more. Because now Marty Lueken has declared that funding parity is “the next frontier for school choice”:
Over the past decade, choice policies have expanded rapidly. More families than ever can choose schools outside their assigned district. But while access has grown, funding systems have largely stayed the same. And those systems quietly signal that some students are worth less than others.
Furthermore:
In most states with private school choice programs, students who use those programs receive substantially less funding per pupil (around two-thirds less on average) compared to what their residentially assigned public schools receive in total funding from all sources.
To be clear, I support private school choice, and I like the idea of money following the child. I certainly agree that it’s well and proper to debate the appropriate level of funding for private school choice programs. Even Charlie Barone—who opposes vouchers and the like—admits that private school choice is underfunded:
Tennessee’s newly enacted Education Freedom Act provides families with about $7,300 per student through its universal ESA program. Texas offers about $10,800 annually. Florida’s Family Empowerment Scholarship delivers approximately $8,000 as does Iowa’s Students First program. These figures sound substantial until confronted with an inconvenient truth: the national average private school tuition for 2025-26 stands at approximately $15,000 per year.
This gap, between $5,000 and $8,000 annually per child, fundamentally undermines both the abundance and affordability narratives.
Back to Marty’s argument: Is it unfair that private schools receive two-thirds of what public schools get? Well, in part it depends on the kinds of kids that private schools are serving. Marty laudably supports sending extra dollars to schools with more kids with greater needs; it’s a fact that private schools tend to serve fewer such children—in part because they are allowed to exclude them. So it’s possible that student composition explains much of the funding gap. (That’s not true for charter schools, which generally serve similar students as traditional public schools do, but still aren’t close to funding parity.)
But what if a sizable public/private funding gap remains, even after adjusting for pupil composition? Do we really think that private schools deserve parity with traditional public schools and charter schools, given private schools’ ability to exclude students and their unwillingness to be held accountable for academic results? Life is full of trade-offs, and if private schools want to protect their admissions policies and lack of public accountability, they should accept fewer public dollars in return.
I would also be happy for states to provide incentives such that private schools to receive more public funding if they agree to accept all comers and/or participate in state accountability systems. I bet a bunch of urban Catholic schools would take that deal.
That would be a great way to re-prioritize the “rescue mission” that Dr. Fuller advocated, with a particular focus on getting poor and working-class kids into Catholic schools and other high-quality institutions with a history of boosting upward mobility.
