EdChoice just published the school choice reports I wanted to write, and I’m envious

I had an outline sitting on my computer for an evergreen Capital Research Center report on school choice: presenting it as the civil rights issue of our time, covering the history of the movement, Arizona as the case study in surviving repeal attempts, a full map of the opposition’s spending, and a resource vault linking every ally organization. I planned to build it from scratch, state by state.

Then I found out EdChoice had already done the heavy lifting. The nation’s oldest school choice advocate, founded in 1996 as the Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation, just released six 2026 booklets covering much of the ground I was about to spend months working on. This data is better than what I was going to produce on my own, and it deserves a wide audience of readers.

Here is an overview of all six booklets, but I highly recommend downloading and viewing them in their entirety.

School Choice Snapshot

This is the basics of school choice that takes the reader through every type of choice on the table: Education Savings Accounts, tax-credit ESAs, vouchers, tax-credit scholarships, refundable tax credits, and 529 accounts. It also covers the difference between charter schools, microschools, and homeschool pod groups. It introduces the new Federal Tax Credit for Scholarships, which lets any state opt in to a federal tax credit program funding private school scholarships for eligible K-12 students. Thirty-one states have already signed up to participate.

For those unfamiliar with all the logistics and terms of surrounding school choice, this is the report to begin with.

The Friedman Index

Nineteen states claim to have  “universal choice.” The Friedman Index Report weighs that claim against three questions:

• Are all students actually funded, not just eligible?
• Can families spend the money beyond tuition (including homeschool families, who can use the choice dollars as well)?
• Do the dollars come close to matching public school per-pupil funding?

Ask those specific questions and the rankings for school choice freedom drop fast. With 100 being a perfect score, Arizona tops the list at 83. Florida follows at 72. Sixteen states, including California, Illinois, and New York, score zero, and you can easily guess what they have in common.

Alabama is a cautionary story to point out. Every student is technically eligible for its ESA, but the program carries a $180 million budget cap. Do the math against the average award, and only about four percent of eligible students can actually get funded. So, Alabama’s Friedman Index score is 2. A state can pass a law making every child eligible and still fund almost none of them, and that is exactly what Alabama has done. I call that school choice lip service, not real, impactful legislation for educational freedom.

Florida highlights another lesson: although the state has come a long way in its school choice legislation, its score dropped from 77 to 72 this year. The reason? Public school revenue climbed by 9.8 percent, hiking annual spending by roughly $1,000 more per public school student while providing no increase for ESA awards. Vouchers that cannot cover full tuition at most private schools still exclude many families who cannot afford the tuition gap. Many school choice voucher families in Florida are having to pay hundreds of dollars out of pocket to the school of their choice, as the voucher is just not covering full tuition amounts.

The Legal Landscape

Zelman, Espinoza, and Carson v. Maine (U.S. Supreme Court, 2022) closed the door on excluding religious schools from school choice funding. That fight is over and ended in a major victory for families who want their children to be in schools that align with their values and beliefs.

But school choice opponents never quit, and they found a new battle front: imposing “antidiscrimination” mandates requiring any private school that accepts choice funding to comply with policies on sexual orientation and gender identity in hiring and admissions. This would force many religious schools to abandon their own teaching just to stay eligible. The Supreme Court will be resolving this dispute in a case out of Colorado involving a Catholic preschool.

The Legal Landscape report is not just a record of cases already decided. It is a map of the fights that are ongoing and alive, and the Colorado decision is the one I will be watching most closely, right alongside EdChoice’s legal team.

The Fiscal Factbook

Across the 51 programs EdChoice studied in 26 states, choice spending totals $6.8 billion against $417.9 billion in public K-12 spending in those same states. So choice spending is just 1.6 percent of the total. That number alone should retire the claim often proclaimed by our largest teachers unions that school choice is meaningfully draining public education budgets.

Public funding formulas also protect conventional government school districts, even when student enrollment drops. For example, the California formula spent $4 billion in a single year providing funding for roughly 401,000 “students” no longer enrolled in its conventional public schools.

The report also shows that since 1992 national public school enrollment grew by 17 percent while school staffing grew 49 percent, with non-teaching staff growing more than double the rate of teaching positions. As taxpayers, we’re funding more and more high-paid administrators without the student enrollment to justify the spending.

This report makes it clear that School Choice is not the cause of public education’s fiscal problems. We should stop pretending otherwise. The system’s own spending choices are the cause, and the results speak for themselves: only 35 percent of American twelfth graders scored proficient in reading on the most recent NAEP, and nearly a third scored below even the basic level. Billions of dollars are not buying the outcomes families were promised.

As a schoolteacher, my hope is that school choice keeps applying enough pressure that public schools finally wake up and spend what they have on safely and effectively educating children, rather than on growing every layer of staff except the one standing in front of a classroom.

The Polling Primer

Public demand is strongly in favor of school choice. Thirteen years of EdChoice’s Schooling in America Survey show that once Americans hear a plain description of an Education Savings Account, support jumps to 74 percent overall, and to 83 percent among school parents. Support for vouchers sits at 66 percent among the general public and 75 percent among parents.

And this support crosses every line the opposition wants to draw: 77 percent of Black respondents and 76 percent of white respondents back universal ESA eligibility, as do 75 percent of Democrats and 74 percent of Republicans. Meanwhile, 59 percent of Americans think K-12 education is on the wrong track, one of the highest levels of pessimism recorded since the survey began.

These polls compiled by EdChoice make it clear that school choice is incredibly popular with nearly everyone and should be a non-partisan issue.

The Research Review

This is the report to hand to anyone who claims the research on the positive impact of school choice is thin or mixed. It is neither. School choice is a clear winner for American children and taxpayers.

EdChoice catalogs 205 distinct empirical analyses across eight outcomes: test scores, educational attainment, parent satisfaction, public school students’ academics, civic values, integration, fiscal effects, and school safety. Eighty-five percent of the surveys show a positive effect. Zero studies have ever found that vouchers increase segregation.

Ninety percent find that competition from choice programs improves academic outcomes as well. That is the whole point of education, right?

Conclusion

The battle for school choice is never won, never finished. It has to be defended in court every time a new lawsuit gets filed, funded in every legislative session, and expanded against relentless opponents who have not run out of new ways to fight. EdChoice built the tools to track all six fronts of that fight.

Every parent–every American–needs to read these reports.

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/edchoice-just-published-the-school-choice-reports-i-wanted-to-write-and-im-envious/