With vouchers and other school choice policies, read the fine print

Private school choice policies are sweeping the country, quietly unwinding two centuries of American education tradition. Seventeen states and counting have adopted universal vouchers in the form of “education savings accounts” (ESAs) and “scholarships.” The federal Education Freedom Tax Credit also takes effect Jan. 1, and at least 30 states have signaled interest in participating.

This comes on top of 35 years of expanded choice mostly within the public realm—charter schools, virtual schools, and open-enrollment public schools. Combined with homeschooling, microschooling, and the new voucher/ESA programs, we calculate that at least a third of American students no longer attend their neighborhood public school. The debate over whether to have some form of school choice has, for practical purposes, been settled.

But “school choice” is more a concept than a policy. The policy question requires us to first ask, what do we want these policies to accomplish? The answer to that is much less settled. Is the aim to serve marginalized students who may be “stuck in low-performing schools” because they cannot afford private ones—a focus on equity? Or is the aim to increase efficiency? Finally, once we clarify those aims, how can we design policies to best achieve them?

We and our colleagues at the National Center for Research on Education Access and Choice (REACH) have been grappling with these questions for a decade or more. In a new report, “The Details Matter,” we synthesize REACH’s own studies and provide a technical report with more than 90 additional high-quality studies, organized around nine policy elements that shape the number, type, and quality of options families actually have.

It turns out that the labels dominating public debate—charters, vouchers, ESAs—tell us remarkably little about who or how the programs will serve, or to what end.

Two policies with the same name can produce opposite results because they have such different fine print. Louisiana enacted a voucher pilot in New Orleans in 2008 and expanded it statewide in 2012 as the Louisiana Scholarship Program. Eligibility was narrow: Family income had to be below 250% of the federal poverty line, and the child had to be entering kindergarten or leaving a public school the state had graded a C, D, or F. Because applicants far outnumbered seats, students were placed through a single statewide lottery, and participating private schools could not pick among the applicants sent to them. At the end of the school year, those schools had to give their voucher students the same LEAP exams that public school students took. And the state kept score: A school that had been in the program at least two years and whose voucher students posted a Scholarship Index below 50—an F on the public school scale—could not enroll any new voucher students the following year, though the students already there could stay.

The combination of three features—lottery admission, a common assessment, and a state agency with the power to cut off a low performer’s supply of new students—sounds like a charter school policy. But it was a voucher program, and every school in it was private.

Now consider what replaced it. In June 2024, the state created the LA GATOR Scholarship Program. Eligibility is phasing up toward every student in the state regardless of income. There is no lottery: A student participates if a participating school agrees to enroll them, and schools set their own admissions criteria. On testing, schools and families choose from a menu—the state assessment or one of several nationally normed tests—and, with state board approval, a school may substitute an assessment “substantially aligned with its program of study.” Participating schools will not receive letter grades based on the results. The statute does let the department restrict or end a school’s participation for “gross or a persistent lack of academic competence,” but that is a discretionary finding for egregious cases, and may or may not be enforced.

Same state, same word, “voucher”, on the press release, and but the answers to the three questions that matter most differ completely: what students get in, what schools can participate, and whether parents or anyone else outside the school can tell how it is doing.

This isn’t a new issue. Another recent review of 150 years of voucher legislation identifies three waves of these programs—with the new vouchers/ESAs being just the latest. It would be difficult to claim these programs share a common purpose, mechanism, constituency, or a likely effect on children. They only share a label: “voucher.”

Rather than argue about labels, we need to look at how policies are actually designed. We began by identifying nine elements of choice policy that theory suggests should matter for almost any educational objective, then carried out a systematic review of the rigorous evidence on each one—90 studies beyond our own at REACH.

Some of these elements, such as accountability, impact the set of schools that can participate in a choice program (referred to as the “supply side”) while others, such as transportation, impact how families choose across schools within that set (referred to as the “demand side”). The full element-by-element findings are in the report. Here, we highlight five conclusions that cut across all nine policy elements, because each one bears on decisions states are making right now.

1. Many elements of choice policy can improve access to schools, but they vary dramatically in cost. Transportation, information, centralized enrollment, and school accountability all show evidence of small improvements in access to desired schools or academic outcomes, especially for marginalized students. In New York City, for example, bus availability made families about 3 percentage points more likely to choose a given school. But transportation is far more expensive than the other three options in this list, so choosing it is also likely a decision to shift money away from teacher hiring and other resources—and it does less than accountability or information to shape what options exist and which ones families select.
2. There is considerable room to make choice policies better serve marginalized students. Many dimensions of policy, enrollment systems above all, have real potential to improve access to quality schools for marginalized students. That potential is underutilized. When our colleagues interviewed state education leaders about their choice landscapes, we heard about innovation, market efficiency, and parental freedom. Equity, meanwhile, almost never came up. In interviews across Denver, Detroit, and New Orleans, our team learned that the enrollment system that emerges when nobody designs one—every school running its own process, on its own deadline, with its own paperwork—does real damage by setting up an obstacle course that filters by parent income, employment, and flexibility more than anything else.

   Centralized enrollment fixes much of this, and it measurably increased access to high-demand schools for Black students in New Orleans. But even there, lottery priorities still worked against Black applicants. And underneath all of it sits a harder trade-off. Seats in the schools that families most want are finite, which means choice policy operates as a sorting mechanism: It improves access for one group by reducing it for another. Efficiency, equity, and the other objectives states say they are pursuing do not all move together.

3. Some policies can improve efficiency and equity simultaneously. Information is the clearest example. If families make better decisions when they have better information about schools, and if information is unequally distributed to begin with—which it plainly is—then providing better and more widespread information has potential to improve equity and efficiency at the same time or at least achieve one without sacrificing the other. In New Orleans, families whose schools were closed or taken over, and who received hands-on counseling from the organization EdNavigator along with enrollment priority, were more likely to apply to and land in highly rated schools than comparable families who left low-rated schools on their own without guidance.
4. Effects on access to schools usually don’t translate to effects on academic outcomes. The clearest example of this is with virtual schooling, which expands access about as far as it can go but seems to leave students worse off in educational attainment, employment, and earnings. That is not a paradox or a sign of failed implementation. It aligns with a long line of evidence that families treat academic results as one consideration among many: safety, proximity to home, school culture, extracurricular programs, after-school care, and more. Deciding whether to judge a program by access or by test scores is itself a judgment about how much weight to give family preferences relative to broader social objectives.
5. Implementation appears to be at least as important as policy design. For all the talk and policy about the curriculum, textbooks, teaching strategies, and class size, when the bell rings to start the school day, educators decide what happens. The same is true of school choice where parents, educators, and government officials exercise discretion at every stage of the choice process, and that discretion can swamp the guidance and restrictions in statute. In the appendix of our technical report, we outline a long list of such examples. Educators decide what types of charter and private schools they wish to open. Charter authorizers decide which of these schools to open and receive public funds. And parents choose from those they make available. A great deal of flexibility arises at every stage.

One complication in all of this is that the nine elements are interconnected, so the right setting for any one of them depends on the others. If schools may use essentially any admissions criteria they like, for example, then a centralized enrollment system matters much less. There is no optimal design for a single element considered in isolation, which is why the fine print must be read as a package.

The new federal Education Freedom Tax Credit marks a major expansion of school choice but provides scant detail. If a state opts in, this new program allows individuals to receive a federal income tax credit for donating to approved organizations that then provide scholarships for K-12 students. Students whose families earn up to 300% of the area’s median household income are eligible and can use these scholarships for private school tuition and other educational expenses. It has been adopted into law and will start disbursing funds in 2027, but most of the key rules have not been written. The goal has apparently been to create as much choice as possible as fast as possible and see what happens. The good news is that, through legislative accident, states will be allowed to control some of the rules (though we don’t yet know which or how much).

Governing bodies represent one of our nine elements and perhaps the most important one because almost all the others are directly connected to it, especially those influencing the supply of schooling options available to families. The scholarship granting organizations (SGOs) will likely be key to any accountability mechanism, but will they be allowed or inclined to act more like: (a) hands-on charter school authorizers that try to make sure the funds are used well; or (b) banks that try to bring in as much money as they can, disburse funds to anyone with an account, and hope for the best?

The intent of its advocates seems to be more like the bank approach, but the more hands-on approach could emerge, especially in blue states. It’s noteworthy, too, that SGOs will have a strong incentive to bring in as much funding as they can. Like banks, they get a share of the proceeds. They will also have extremely wide latitude on how they use those funds and for whom and without the usual transparency required by public institutions.

Could the tax credit do anything new on the demand/consumer side? This is unlikely regarding information or enrollment systems. But the funds could be used for transportation, perhaps even in public schools.

The point here is not to predict the future, but to point out that this future can and should be shaped based on real, and sometimes conflicting, policy aims—as well as research evidence.

States choosing whether to participate in the federal tax credit will decide who qualifies, what the funds can be spent on, and which organizations can award scholarships. Those three decisions will do more to determine who benefits than anything in the program’s name.

Our goal in this report isn’t to tell states whether to expand choice. It’s to point out that the decisions being made right now—the ones filed under administrative rules, the ones that get resolved in a conference committee at 2 a.m.—are the decisions that determine which children this program helps and how.

The label will be on the press release. Read the fine print.