Education choice policies have won victory after victory over the last 30 years and especially in the last five. Since 2021, 18 states have signed universal programs into law, and now more than half of all American schoolchildren are eligible to participate in a private-school choice program.
When our organization was founded in 1996 to advocate for school choice, only around 10,000 students participated in choice programs in select areas of Maine, Vermont, Ohio, and Wisconsin. During the 2024–25 academic year, more than 1.2 million students across the country did.
We’ve come a long way, and it feels like the road couldn’t be any smoother. But, there are major potholes ahead. The choice movement has had great success vanquishing its enemies. Unfortunately, the new threats are now coming from within.
We see two roads forward for education choice. Down the well-travelled road, we see the potential “charter-ization” of private school choice. Down the other, the less-traveled road of Frost’s imagining, we see a truly decentralized education system. It’s worth sketching out what each road portends.
Charter schools have been a school choice success but a limited one, facing increasing challenges through the years with overregulation and limited growth. Hailed initially as a way to dramatically remake education, particularly urban education, charter schools have been stymied in their impact by an authorizing and regulatory framework that has buried potential operators in the very bureaucratic structures charter schools were created to avoid. The sector has empowered a limited set of unelected functionaries to say no for arbitrary and capricious reasons. And, it has curtailed ways in which schools can experiment and try to educate children differently.
There are many great charter schools. The world of American education is much better for having them, and for having charter schools in general. But there should be more—so many more—and thousands of charter schools never came into existence because of risk aversion, turf protecting, and regulators with a circumscribed view of what makes a good school. The worst of it is that much of this was the charter sector committing an own goal, kicked into the wrong net by the very reformers that passionately advocate for charters.
This exact same regulatory creep is encroaching like brambles on the edges of the road that private-school choice is traveling. During this spring’s legislative season, at least five states introduced measures to limit existing programs in some fashion. Oklahoma tried to limit the types of accreditors for private schools, which would have led to more than a thousand students losing access to the school of their choice. Arkansas passed SB 625, a bill that increased restrictions on how funds in the state’s education savings account program could be spent by families. (To be clear, there has been, to our knowledge, no evidence that families are misspending funds, or that any problems with poor use of funds have cropped up whatsoever.)
Earlier, the state of Utah passed a bill that increased restrictions on their new choice program, and we have seen bills and efforts to increase regulations on programs in Arizona, Indiana, Iowa, and Florida. On a much grander scale, states like Iowa and Texas have required that private schools participating in their voucher programs be accredited, which sets an expensive and onerous barrier to entry into their program.
Sledgehammers-in-search-of-a-tack legislation and policy like this evince a charter-like ethos in regulating private-school choice. Protectionism is bad, regardless of where it is done.
