Education savings accounts (ESAs) are education funding mechanisms that allow families to receive a deposit of public funds to a government-authorized savings account for accessing approved educational services. Using student-level longitudinal data, this paper examines how families participating in the Florida Gardiner Scholarship Program use…

School choice critics argue that choice programs drain resources from public schools and therefore harm students who remain in them. Because policymakers are tasked with balancing their states' budgets and ensuring that their public schools meet educational provisions in their states' constitutions, they are concerned with the fiscal effects of…

The rate of students switching from public schools to private schools because they received a scholarship and would not have switched without the subsidy ("switcher rate") is an integral factor for reliably estimating the net fiscal impact of private school choice programs. Switcher rates observed among students in control groups in…

The goal of "The 123s" is to present the increasingly large body of private school choice research in a clear and easy-to-read format and cite the relevant studies so that anyone who is interested in the individual results can easily find them and read in more detail. This report is divided into 11 sections. The first section summarizes…

This article conducts a fiscal analysis of 10 tax-credit programs in seven states. In total, the 10 programs in the present study represent 90% of all scholarships awarded in tax-credit scholarship programs today. The analysis employs a set of cautious assumptions about switcher rates and students who receive multiple scholarships to generate a…

Critics of private school choice programs argue that they drain resources from public schools and increase taxpayer costs. Supporters of these programs, on the other hand, argue that these programs save taxpayers money because the average amount of scholarships is less than per pupil spending in public schools. Given these fiscal concerns, when…

This paper reports results from a fiscal analysis of Pennsylvania SB 299, a proposal to expand the state's two tax-credit scholarship programs. Pennsylvania currently has two programs in operation, the Educational Improvement Tax Credit (EITC) Program and the Opportunity Scholarship Tax Credit (OSTC) Program. This paper is organized as follows.…

This report follows up on previous work that examined the fiscal effects of private school voucher programs. It estimates the total fiscal effects of tax-credit scholarship programs--another type of private school choice program--on state governments, state and local taxpayers, and school districts combined. Based on a range of assumptions, these…