Ben DeGrow is a Senior Policy Director of Education Choice for ExcelinEd.
The Associated Press recently published a lengthy investigation into the growth of private school choice programs across the country, framed around a central claim: these programs are leaving behind the very families they’re supposed to help.
But a careful read of the AP’s own data tells a more complicated, yet ultimately more encouraging, story than the headline itself suggests. What looks like a verdict is actually a snapshot of school choice in its early stages, doing exactly what serious reformers predicted it would do at this stage.
School choice is one of the most studied education policy issues, especially considering its relatively short 30-year history. Looking at decades of data from dozens of states, we see a longer-term trend emerge that’s important for policymakers to consider as they look at creating or expanding these programs. States looking for a playbook on how to successfully grow school choice over time should start by examining Florida’s track record.
Florida’s choice movement did not happen all at once. It was built over nearly three decades, with each program acting as a building block for the next. It all began in 1996, with a charter school law that has been improved continually over time. Today, more than 10% of Florida’s K-12 students attend one. Three years later, under then-Gov. Jeb Bush, the state extended choice beyond charter schools by launching the McKay Scholarship Program for special needs students, which was followed by a tax-credit scholarship for low-income families in 2001.
That tax-credit scholarship thrived, growing into the largest private school choice program in the country, and the research followed the growth: studies linked it to higher school completion and college enrollment among participating students. Achievement gains in public schools occurred alongside it, as well.
In 2014, Florida converted the McKay model into an Education Scholarship Account, letting families of students with special needs direct funds not only to tuition, but a wide range of educational services. Five years later, Family Empowerment Scholarships opened that flexibility to low-and middle-income families, demonstrating just how much demand had grown for these programs. By 2023, Florida closed the loop entirely, making private school choice available to every K-12 student in the state regardless of income level. Parent satisfaction surveys across Florida’s choice expansion illustrates that families who gain access to choice continue to be pleased by it.
Florida’s success was not built in a single enrollment cycle; it took nearly 30 years of steady expansion and improvement to build the system of choice that exists in the state today. Judging any new program by its first year mistakes a snapshot for the entire picture.
The AP’s core critique is that students already enrolled in private and home schools are disproportionately benefiting from choice scholarships, particularly in newer programs. That observation can be accurate in some cases, but it also depends on how these programs are designed.
When a state legislature passes a school choice bill in the spring, private schools have already closed their enrollment pipelines for the upcoming school year. Families who were already in private school are the only ones who can immediately apply and receive a scholarship. Families considering a switch face a practical problem: the seats often don’t yet exist. As many private schools operate near capacity, they aren’t sitting on thousands of empty desks waiting for a wave of new student applicants.
This isn’t a flaw in the practice of school choice. It’s the friction inherent in any major structural shift in a sector that has been locked in place for generations. The relevant question isn’t whether families are switching on Day One. It’s whether the conditions for switching are being built, and whether the programs are designed to prioritize the families with the greatest need. Considering these features, there is substantial evidence the AP misses.
The AP leans hard on Texas as a cautionary tale. But the program’s participant data tells a different story. Four in five of the 85,000 Freedom Accounts funded thus far belong to students from families at or below 200% of the federal poverty level, which is about $66,000 a year for a family of four. Nearly a quarter of recipients have a documented disability, a rate significantly higher than that of the public school population. After all, the Texas law is designed to fund special needs and lower-income students first.
That is certainly not a windfall for affluent families. That’s a program reaching working families and students with unique needs at rates that most government programs never approach in their first year.
The AP acknowledges these numbers but frames the disability priority as a problem itself. It argues that leaving the public school system is risky for students with special needs because private schools aren’t legally required to provide the same services. That concern deserves honest engagement, but it also reflects an assumption that families don’t understand what they are choosing or how to make choices for their kids.
Families who choose a private school for a child with a disability weigh those tradeoffs themselves. Parents of children with disabilities are frequently the most sophisticated navigators of educational options, precisely because the stakes are highest for them, and they have spent a long time trying to find solutions.
The evidence from Florida and Arizona, where established universal programs have served students with disabilities at rates of 20% or more, suggests this is a path families are deliberately choosing.
The AP’s reporting on why public school families struggle to access these programs is useful. Awareness gaps are real, and application windows can be poorly designed. Some programs inadvertently filter out the families they’re meant to serve.
Oklahoma’s experience is instructive here: when the state shortened its application window for a refundable parent tax credit program, the share of low-income families participating declined. That’s a design failure; however, it’s a correctable one. Dedicated application windows for lower-income families, reserved seats, and outreach in languages other than English are all tools that states have at their disposal.
For example, Utah built a funding cap and income-based priority enrollment into its program from the start; nearly all of the 10,000 students who received choice awards in its first year came from families at or below 200 percent of the poverty line.
The lesson isn’t that choice programs fail low-income families. The lesson is that program design matters and that the work of refinement is ongoing.
One item the AP story largely misses is what the rapid expansion of demand actually tells us. A million more children now have the ability to choose their education. The fact that private schools are near capacity isn’t evidence that choice has failed. It’s evidence that we have unlocked demand that the existing supply can’t yet meet. That is an argument for building more capacity, not for turning off the faucet.
Removing zoning and permitting barriers that stifle the creation of new schools, building financial mechanisms (like those supported by the new Private School Growth Fund) that give private schools the capital to expand, and creating the regulatory environment where emerging providers can enter the market are all elements of the future of school choice policy.
States that get serious about the supply side will see the equity story improve steadily over time, just as Florida’s has. More than half of all K-12 students in Florida now choose an option outside their assigned neighborhood school, according to Step Up for Students. Research there shows that the growing availability of private school choice has produced increasingly positive effects on public school student attendance and achievement: A rising tide lifts all boats.
The AP’s investigation is worth reading. It is not, however, a verdict on the state of school choice policy in the United States. It is a snapshot of programs in early stages navigating real structural challenges, taken by reporters who appear more interested in confirming a conclusion than following the data. The families who benefit from choice programs on Day One are not undeserving of that benefit. The families who haven’t yet accessed them deserve better program design and a more robust supply of options. Both things are true simultaneously and holding both in tension is what serious education reform requires.
The default system where students are assigned to a public school based on where they live instead of their needs has had decades to perfect its equity story. What is now emerging is instead a landscape where families have the power to find and select the option that actually fits their child. That landscape will likely keep expanding as more states adopt new models that provide families with options that didn’t even exist a few years ago.
