The Status of School Choice: Looking Back at Gains in 2024

Parents of children below the age of five choose where — even whether — to send their children to preschool. Likewise, young adults choose whether and where to receive post-secondary education. Even when vouchers or state grants are involved, no one is assigned to a preschool or college based on where they live.

But when it comes to educating children in the 5–17 age range (give or take a bit depending on the state), it’s a completely different story. The government assigns kids in this age group to a school based on their home address. Sure, it’s easy to understand why the system was set up that way in the 1800s when transportation and communication were difficult. If it made any sense in 2024, wouldn’t we see people clamoring to assign people to providers in other sectors based on where they live?

Happily, there’s growing recognition that children should be educated based on their needs, not their addresses. That’s the premise behind school choice, which is an umbrella term for a variety of programs that allow tax dollars to follow children to a variety of educational options. A voucher program created in 1990 to give lower-income families in Milwaukee access to private schools is considered the first modern school choice program in America. According to the advocacy group EdChoice, there are now 80 school choice programs on the books in 31 states plus Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico, with more than a million students participating.

Much of the growth in school choice has happened post-COVID. School closures led to Zoom schooling, which gave parents a front-row seat to see what their children were — or were not — being taught in school. In some cases, this resulted in values clashes, especially around sex education, gender ideology, and how racial issues are discussed. School choice supporters responded to these clashes by pointing out that choice lets people avoid the winner-takes-all political battles that are part and parcel of government-run schooling.

Media stories and union-led opposition campaigns often lump all school choice programs into one category called vouchers. However, there are several different types of programs that are quite distinct. Vouchers, such as the previously mentioned Milwaukee program, use state tax dollars and can only be used for private school tuition.

Tax credit scholarships are funded with donations from businesses or individuals who receive a credit on their state taxes in return for their donations. Education savings accounts (ESAs) are funded with tax dollars, but they can be used for a wide variety of educational expenses, not just tuition. Tax credit ESAs are funded like tax credit scholarships, but they function like ESAs in terms of what expenses they can fund. Individual tax credits or deductions give parents a credit or deduction on their individual state tax returns based on their education-related spending.

Historically, most school choice programs have been limited to specific populations — such as students with special needs, lower-income families, and students assigned to low-performing schools. Starting with West Virginia in 2021, there has been a growing push for programs with universal or nearly universal eligibility, which means all students, regardless of address, abilities, or income, would be eligible. 2023 was dubbed the year of universal choice, given that eight states either expanded programs to universal eligibility or created new ones that are heading toward universality. Unfortunately, funding hasn’t kept up, so some states that have universal eligibility on paper still have waitlists in reality.

On the plus side, there was continued progress in 2024. Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Wyoming created new education savings accounts. Alabama’s and Louisiana’s programs will initially be limited to families below specified income levels before eventually being open to all students. The Georgia Promise Scholarship is targeted to students assigned to the bottom 25 percent of public schools in the state. Only students from families whose incomes do not exceed 150 percent of the federal poverty level are eligible for Wyoming’s new ESA. Several other states expanded eligibility and/​or funding of existing school choice programs.

However, 2024 also saw some setbacks. While political candidates who support school choice fared well in this year’s elections, pro-school choice ballot questions in Colorado, Kentucky, and Nebraska did not. As my colleague Neal McCluskey and I explained recently, there are a lot of reasons why the anti-school choice side won these contests. Beyond that, we pointed out, “education choices should not be based on majority rule. It is simply wrong to compel families to pay for, and de facto attend, government schools — places intended to do nothing less than shape human minds — that they find subpar, or even morally unacceptable, even if the majority is okay with them.”

Despite these losses, the march toward universal school choice continued through 2024. At the same time, there has been increasing attention paid to important issues such as ensuring families know these options exist, encouraging education entrepreneurship so families have a place to use their school choice funding, and working to increase funding so students don’t get trapped on waitlists while their education suffers.

The spread of school choice and related policies is transforming the education landscape in America. Parents are increasingly being equipped to choose the best-fit education for their children instead of being compelled to attend a government-run school they happen to live near. And once families experience having a choice in education, they’re unlikely to want a return to the antiquated system of having their address determine their children’s education.