Welcome to National School Choice Week!

The annual commemoration of parental choice in education began in 2011 and, like school choice itself, has grown into a national movement, with government proclamations, rallies, seminars, and school fairs. The celebrations this year will be especially festive, as school choice is having a moment.

School choice takes a variety of forms. The most common way to choose your child’s school is by moving into the residential assignment zone of a preferred district-run public school. This approach is descriptively called “school choice by mortgage” and technically called “Tiebout Choice,” after Charles Tiebout, the economist who first called attention to the fact that families move into communities that maximize their lifestyle preferences. Other forms of school choice within the public-school sector include inter-district choice, which allows parents to choose schools in other public school districts without having to move, intra-district choice including magnet schools, and public charter schools. Public school choice policies are common throughout the country, especially in urban areas where transportation is easily available.

Much of the focus and controversy lately has been on private school choice, defined as any government program that provides resources to families to facilitate their child’s enrollment in a private school of their parent’s choosing. Private school choice comes in four general flavors: government-issued tuition vouchers, tax-credit funded tuition scholarships, individual tax deductions or credits, and flexible Education Savings Accounts.

In the 12 years since the first National School Choice Week, private school choice has grown dramatically in the U.S. The number of programs operating in the country has more than doubled, from 30 in 2011 to 80 in 2023. The number of students participating in private school choice programs has exploded from fewer than 240,000 in 2011 to nearly 1 million today. Thirty-two states plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico host one or more private school choice program. In ten states–Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Ohio, Oklahoma, North Carolina, Utah, and West Virginia–all or nearly all K-12 students are eligible for private school choice. These are the universal school choice states.

With private school choice becoming ubiquitous, the question arises: “How should choice programs be regulated?” Here there is a lively dispute among policy advocates and scholars.

Supporters of heavy regulation argue that government accountability should accompany public dollars. Any private schools that receive school choice subsidies, whether in the form of a directly-funded tuition voucher or through private funding induced by tax-credits, should be subject to government requirements including accepting all school choice students who apply to their school, being limited in the ability to expel students for academic or disciplinary reasons, not requiring payments from parents on top of the voucher or scholarship amount, administering the state accountability tests to school choice participants and reporting the results, and being prevented from enrolling additional school choice students if the test scores of existing students are unsatisfactory. In short, these commentators say, private schools receiving public monies should be subject to the same major accountability requirements as public schools.

Supporters of light regulation of private schools participating in choice programs respond that parental choice itself is a stronger guarantor of accountability than is a raft of government regulations. Choice programs instigate a flight to quality, as parents vote with their feet in favor of the schools that serve their children well and against the ones that don’t. Since the money follows the student from school to school, private schools face a powerful incentive to satisfy the expectations of parents regarding their child’s education or risk losing customers, revenue, and the ability to continue operations. They further argue that private schools should be able to apply their normal admissions standards to students in choice programs to ensure that the school is a good fit for them, and should be able to counsel out or expel students whose behavior or academic performance fail to meet school norms. Voucher and scholarship amounts typically include less than 60% of the amount of money that would be spent on the child in public school, so private schools should be able to require families to contribute additional resources, if they have the means to do so, so that the child’s education is adequately resourced.

Supporters of light regulation object to the requirement that private schools administer the public-school test because most private schools use alternative curricula that are not aligned with the content of public-school accountability tests. Private schools would be forced to adopt an educational program like the public schools that parents are trying to leave or risk producing low test scores that would damage the schools’ reputation and limit its ability to enroll new Choice or fee-paying students. In short, these commentators view heavy regulatory strings attached to school choice programs as a Hobson’s choice for the private schools.

The more important question is: “Which set of regulations will produce the best outcomes for families?” Since a private school choice program is only as good as the set of private schools that choose to participate, and private schools do have a choice to participate or not, the question is what set of regulations will enhance the fairness and effectiveness of the program without scaring away quality providers. Fortunately, research points the way towards such “smart regulation” of private school choice programs. 

That evidence comes from a series of survey experiments that I conducted with colleagues that show which regulations are most likely to prevent school choice programs from attracting a robust set of high-quality private schools. The three government regulations that are anathema to private school leaders are open admissions, prohibiting additional charges to parents, and state accountability testing. Private schools are less likely to participate in choice programs that include one or more of these regulations, especially if the school is a high-quality provider that already attracts a strong base of fee-paying customers. Since high-quality and popular private schools are exactly the kinds of schools we should want to be a part of the choice set available to parents, policymakers would be wise to avoid including these regulations in their private school choice policies.

To illustrate, three states have distinctive approaches to regulating private school choice. Louisiana adopted the heavy regulation approach described above. More than two-thirds of Louisiana private schools refused to participate in the Louisiana Scholarship Program under those restrictive terms. As a result, the test score effects of the program on student participants were negative, causing Choice enrollments to decline in the state. Arizona took the opposite approach of light regulation. While the Arizona school choice programs are popular, we don’t know how effective they are because participating private schools are not required to provide data about student achievement or educational attainment. 

Finally, Florida has taken the smart regulation route. Private schools are free to apply their admissions standards to Choice students, higher-income parents can be required to augment the funding provided by the state, and participating private schools can choose the national or state test best aligned with their curriculum to conduct the mandatory accountability testing. Under this smart regulation regime, Florida’s school choice programs have grown every year. Evidence from multiple studies indicate that the program improves the test scores and attainment levels of participants while simultaneously improving outcomes for students who remain in public schools through the pressure of market competition. As private school choice continues to expand across the country, more policymakers should be saying, “I’ll have what Florida is having.”