The education landscape is rapidly evolving as state policymakers enact and significantly expand private education choice initiatives. These initiatives, currently operating in 29 states and counting, provide public dollars directly to families to support approved educational purchases, including, but not always limited to, private school tuition.…

Education Savings Accounts (ESAs) are government-funded accounts typically established for parents who opt not to enroll their children in public kindergarten through grade 12 (K--12) schools. ESAs allow parents to spend funds that the state would have spent for their student to attend their local public school on a broad array of educational…

Given the significant growth rate and geographic expansion of private school choice programs over the past two decades, it is important to examine how traditional public schools respond to the sudden injection of competition for students and resources. Although prior studies of this nature have been limited to Florida and Milwaukee, using multiple…

Universal voucher policies allow any student, regardless of their family income level or history of attending public schools, to be eligible to use public funding to attend private, often religious, schools or home schooling. From 2021 to 2025, the number of statewide universal voucher programs has gone from zero to thirteen. These efforts have…

Washington, DC's Opportunity Scholarship Program (OSP), the only federally funded school voucher program in the United States, has provided private school scholarships to low-income students in DC since 2004. From its inception, the program has received significant attention in national debates and has been the subject of rigorous evaluations…

Over the last 30 years, the school choice movement has been one of the most prominent large-scale reform efforts in American education. In recent years, charter schools and voucher programs, in particular, have been a focus of policy makers and philanthropists. Mark Berends presents an overview of these two models, their prevalence, and what…

The Indiana Choice Scholarship Program (ICSP), which began in fall 2011, is a state taxpayer-funded financial aid program that helps low and lower-middle income Hoosiers to send their children to the private K-12 school of their choice. This voucher program has been extremely popular among families, as the number of students receiving scholarships…

The Louisiana Scholarship Program (LSP) offers publicly funded vouchers to moderate- and low-income students in low-performing public schools to enroll in participating private schools. Established in 2008 as a pilot program in New Orleans, the LSP expanded statewide in 2012. Drawing upon the random lotteries that placed students in LSP schools,…

Using a rich dataset that merges student-level school records with birth records, and a student fixed effect design, we explore how the massive scale-up of a Florida private school choice program affected public school students' outcomes. Expansion of the program produced modestly larger benefits for students attending public schools that had a…

Even the most effective education reforms and initiatives are unlikely to have a uniform effect on all students. In fact, much like in medicine, some beneficial efforts can have adverse side effects. Yong Zhao takes up this idea as it applies to school choice and voucher programs. When researchers tout the benefits of vouchers, they focus on the…

School vouchers are state-funded programs--often called scholarship programs--that allow students to use public monies to attend a private school. The state provides a set amount of money, typically based on the state's per-pupil amount, for private school tuition. There are currently 27 voucher programs in 16 states and the District of Columbia.…

After recent experimental evidence suggesting that private school students using the Louisiana Scholarship Program (LSP) performed worse than their public school peers in math, some legislators discussed cutting the program as a way to reduce state education expenditures in Louisiana, spinning it as a way to save taxpayer money. While cutting the…

The North Carolina Opportunity Scholarship Program is a private school voucher program that provides state-funded vouchers worth up to $4,200 to eligible students entering kindergarten through 12th grade. Because the public and private school sectors administer different assessments, we recruited approximately 700 students to take a common,…

In 2016, Maryland adopted the Broadening Options and Opportunities for Students Today (BOOST) voucher program that helps pay K-12 private school expenses for low-income households. BOOST vouchers target low-income families. Funds are available to public school students as well as children in private schools and homeschools who qualify for free or…

Researchers from across the country have published at least 187 empirical studies on the effectiveness of private school choice programs. The "EdChoice Study Guide" is an annually updated guide to the available research on private school choice programs in America. In this guide, one can learn what the body of rigorous research says…