Education, and rhetoric that at least sounded like school choice support, appeared to make a big difference in the 2021 Virginia gubernatorial race. As the state was being roiled by COVID-19 masking battles and culture war fights, political novice Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, spoke a lot about empowering parents. Youngkin did not explicitly endorse private school choice, but many people assumed it would be included among his goals since he called for increased choice to make schools more responsive to parents.
More important than what choice mechanism Youngkin did or did not explicitly endorse—since taking office he has pushed quasi-public “lab schools” but also protected the state’s scholarship tax credit from cuts— was how his opponent, former Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe, a Democrat, responded in a debate to a discussion about parents and public schools. “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach,” he declared. The pronouncement, made during major parental unrest, gave Youngkin momentum he would not relinquish.
School Choice: It Isn’t Just for Republicans Any More
That a candidate should not appear averse to parent power seemed to be a lesson learned by at least two Democrats running for governorships in 2022, and not even in close races.
In Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro endorsed Lifeline Scholarships for kids in poorly performing public schools, saying, “I’m for making sure we give parents the ability to put their kids in the best situation for them to be able to succeed. And I’m for making sure we add scholarships like Lifeline Scholarships to make sure that that’s additive to their educations.”
J. B. Pritzker, the incumbent governor of Illinois, ran on ending the state’s scholarship tax credit in 2018 and twice attempted to shrink the credit. In 2022, he changed his tune, at least a bit, answering “yes” to the candidate survey question, “Do you support Illinois’ tax credit scholarship program that provides financial support for students to attend private and parochial schools?” Pritzker’s support was tepid—he said that he would keep the program because it is “relatively small” and that he believed its supporters would endorse more overall education funding—but it was nonetheless a clear change from four years earlier.
Choice in the Courts
The judicial landscape has also become very school choice friendly.
The primary legal objection to school choice has been that, by enabling families to select religious schools, it violates churchstate separation. The U.S. Supreme Court started dismantling this in 2002 with Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, in which it ruled that a voucher program enabling choice of religious and nonreligious schools did not violate the federal Constitution. Families, not government, determined if the money reached religious institutions.
Legal objections based on state constitutions have been defeated over the past few years. Espinoza v. Montana in 2020 saw the Court rule that states cannot invalidate a school choice program on the grounds that it includes religious schools among acceptable options. This year’s Carson v. Makin decision solidified that, ruling that a school that acts on its religion, such as incorporating religion in its curriculum, could not be excluded from a generally available tuition program.
The next major judicial battle may move from defense to offense, tackling not whether choice is constitutionally permissible but whether it is constitutionally required, at least for religious families. If government funds public schools, which must be secular, equality under the law would seem to require that it also provide funding for religious families to choose religious schools.
Just a COVID-19 Bump
Much of school choice’s recent success has, of course, coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic, an unprecedented and, hopefully, not soon to be repeated event. The pandemic has almost certainly had a major impact on where kids are being educated. In September 2022, strategic consulting firm Tyton Partners estimated that traditional public schools saw a roughly 15 percent enrollment drop between the period immediately before COVID-19 and spring 2022, while charter school enrollment rose 57 percent, private school enrollment grew 28 percent, and homeschooling rose a whopping 126 percent.
Has all the progress we’ve seen been attributable to the pandemic? To get a sense of whether choice might be on an upswing even absent COVID-19, it is worth looking at some longer-term trends.
Enrollment since 1999—the earliest year with readily available federal data on enrollment by K–12 school type—shows movement away from assigned public schools had been occurring pre-pandemic but that it wasn’t a sea change. In 1999, 74.1 percent of school-aged children attended their assigned public school, 14.3 percent were in public schools of choice such as magnet or charter schools, 10 percent were in private schools, and 1.7 percent were homeschooled. By 2019, 70.8 percent attended assigned schools, 16.8 percent were in chosen public schools, 9.3 percent were in private schools, and 2.8 percent were homeschooled.
Private schooling saw a decline between 1999 and 2019, though there was slight uptick when combined with homeschooling. Indications of parental schooling preferences have also moved away from private schools over roughly the last decade. The school choice advocacy group EdChoice has asked parents about their preferences among public, private, charter, and homeschooling since 2013, and the share preferring private schools has dropped from 44.6 percent to 34.8 percent today. Meanwhile, the share expressing a homeschooling preference has risen from 7.3 percent to 13.6 percent. Combining private and homeschooling, the share of parents expressing a preference for private education has dipped from 51.9 to 48.4 percent.
This could be a bad sign for future choice expansion. That said, EdChoice has found that when people were directly asked about various school choice mechanisms, including ESAs, tax credit scholarships, and vouchers, support rose for all three between 2013 and 2019. Also, EdChoice suggests a drop in private school preference in 2022 might reflect their asking about choice among public schools for the first time. And even with the reported drop in preference for private education, it is not being consumed at nearly the level parents prefer. EdChoice found that 35 percent of current school parents would prefer that their children attend private school, but in 2020 only 9.7 percent of kids did so; 11 percent preferred homeschooling, but only 2.6 percent did so.
Tempered Optimism
Whatever the long-term trends, it is unreasonable to expect a repeat of 2021 in the next few years.
The primary reason for this is that COVID19 created arguably the least favorable conditions possible for a communal activity like public schooling: a new, highly contagious virus that provoked widespread, sometimes literally deathly, fear of physical proximity to others. This made the stakes of what public schools did extremely high as they chose between sacrificing safety or educational quality, inevitably angering parents worried about their children’s basic needs: health and education.
With COVID-19 declining as a concern, public schools have typically returned to normal operations in the 2022–23 school year, taking away what was likely a major driver of increased home and private schooling. Some parents will likely continue to harbor resentments about how public schools responded to the pandemic, and sometimes how public school officials responded to them personally, but no doubt many just want a return to comfortable normalcy: the local public school.
This is borne out in recent polling. Consistent with long-standing trends, in 2022 Gallup found that while overall adult support of U.S. K–12 education is low—42 percent were “completely” or “somewhat satisfied,” down from about 50 percent in 2020—80 percent of parents with school-aged children reported satisfaction with their schools, up from around 72 percent in 2020. The sample, importantly, was not restricted to traditional public-school parents, but they made up 82 percent of it. Even with this, there is evidence that the COVID-19 experience has left a permanent imprint on many parents’ minds. In another survey by Tyton Partners, 59 percent of parents reported that their preferences for their children’s education had changed due to the pandemic; 52 percent wanted more power going forward to “direct and tailor” their “child’s educational experiences.”
In addition to COVID-19 being less of a motivator, it is likely that we will see renewed political vigor among choice opponents. Politics tends to move in pendulum swings, and things swung forcefully toward choice over the last few years. It is not clear what status quo defenders such the National Education Association or American Association of School Administrators could do to escalate their opposition to choice—they have always been staunchly opposed—but we should not be surprised if anti-choice rhetoric heats up.
What is perhaps most in the school choice movement’s long-term favor is that growth tends to cement itself, creating a broader baseline than before from which to work. Once a program of any kind is in place, it gets a constituency that becomes highly motivated to defend and advance it. For school choice in particular, not only does it get that, but any politician who seeks to dismantle it has to accept being the face of efforts to kick children out of schools that have been their educational homes. This is a major reason that since 1990— when the first modern voucher program was established in Milwaukee, Wisconsin—there has not been a year in which the number of active private school choice programs nationwide has declined, save for consolidations into bigger programs, as happened in Florida and North Carolina in 2022. The reach of choice has consistently grown.
It is hard to conclude that educational freedom has turned a corner from exception to norm. But it has made huge progress over the last few years, and it is almost certainly here not just to stay but to flourish.
