Because of a zip code, no parent wants to feel as though their child is enrolled in a failing school. It makes sense and is a human instinct. Why the nation continues to spend billions of dollars on a policy whose academic record is still, at best, unclear is more difficult to comprehend.

Right now, school choice vouchers are rapidly expanding across the United States, and the trend seems unstoppable. President Trump signed an executive order on January 29, 2025, rerouting federal funds toward programs akin to vouchers, advancing an agenda he had attempted but mainly failed to achieve during his first term. A few weeks later, Texas invested $1 billion in a universal ESA program.

Tennessee became the thirteenth state to enact legislation pertaining to school choice. Over a tenth of Florida’s total education budget, or nearly $4 billion, is spent on ESAs. The figures are substantial. There is genuine political energy. However, the study? It continues to tell an increasingly intricate tale.

Giving parents the money that would otherwise go to public schools and allowing them to send their children to private or religious institutions instead is the fundamental promise of vouchers: competition will push everyone to get better. On paper, it seems elegant; it’s a market logic applied to education. The issue is that the market isn’t acting as the theory predicted in real life.

Introducing voucher-like programs actually correlated with lower academic achievement, according to a 2023 Brookings Institution review of ten years of research. This decline was comparable in scope to the learning disruption brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. That is not a small disclaimer. That is a significant discovery.

In 2017, Stanford economist Martin Carnoy came to similar conclusions. Although his review revealed slight increases in graduation rates, he contended that the harm done to public school funding outweighed those gains. Taking funds away from districts that are already underfunded, especially in rural areas, makes it more difficult to maintain programs, hire and retain qualified teachers, and accomplish nearly all of the tasks that schools are expected to perform.

Some children might benefit more from a voucher than others. It appears obvious that many more kids, those who remain behind in a public system that is now in worse shape, wind up in worse situations.

After her second child was placed on a waitlist in 2024, Rachel Brady, a mother from North Carolina who used the state’s choice program to enroll her kids in a private school, went to the state capital with other families to protest for funding. After clearing the backlog, the state added $248 million to the program; however, the funds arrived too late for many families.

Though she admitted that others couldn’t, Brady herself managed to make it work. That picture of parents organizing, lobbying, rallying, and navigating bureaucracy in order to gain access to a program that was marketed to them as freedom and simplicity is both poignant and unsettling. The brochure is more tidy than the actual situation.

The history of vouchers is even more complicated. There was no noble theory of educational competition that gave rise to the first wave of American voucher programs. They first appeared in the 1950s and 60s as a direct reaction to Brown v. Board of Education, which allowed Southern states to continue funding segregated schools for white families. Instead of integrating,

Prince Edward County, Virginia, closed all of its public schools for five years while providing state tuition grants that primarily benefited white families. It would be a stretch to refer to that history as “school choice.” Policies intended to maintain exclusion were layered with language of freedom and parental empowerment.

While this history does not necessarily invalidate all contemporary voucher programs, it does imply that the discourse surrounding choice has always been somewhat detached from the actual results. Vouchers are now framed by supporters as civil rights instruments that help pull low-income kids out of failing schools.

And there are specific instances where that is actually the case. Higher high school graduation rates and higher college enrollment among some voucher recipients have been reported in Florida and Arizona. According to the Urban Institute, recipients of Florida tax-credit scholarships had higher college graduation rates than their peers. These outcomes are significant and merit sincere recognition.

However, the generalizations are still not supported by the total evidence. Concerns about discrimination are rising in the meantime. Many private schools that receive voucher money, in contrast to public schools, are governed by state laws that do not provide comprehensive anti-discrimination protections.

In Wisconsin, there are already documented instances of LGBTQ+ students being excluded from schools. Whether the current federal order or state legislation will effectively close these gaps is still up for debate, as is whether there is even the political will to do so.

It’s difficult not to feel that the voucher debate has shifted from being about facts to being about ideology as you watch all of this. Critics cite data demonstrating the hollowing out of public systems, while supporters point to choice as a fundamental right. Both parties are remarkably consistent in talking past one another. Meanwhile, the number of children enrolled in private school choice programs has doubled from just four years ago to over a million.

That is a significant change. The question of whether it is advantageous is still, stubbornly, unanswered. And before the next state enacts its next voucher bill, it seems worthwhile to stop spending billions of dollars on an unanswered question, even for a short while.

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