Applications Are Up: Tracking The Growth Of Private School Choice Programs
Supporters of charter schools rally outside of the Supreme Court on Wednesday, April 30, 2025, in ... More Washington. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)
Across the country, private school choice programs are processing applications for next school year. Some application windows have closed and some remain open, but one fact is clear, private school choice is growing.
Private school choice programs take several forms. Traditionally, states created voucher programs, which provide a state-funded scholarship for students to attend private school. States also instituted tuition tax credit scholarship programs that give taxpayers a credit for donations to private organizations that grant scholarships to students to attend private schools. More recently, states have created education savings account programs that put state funding into flexible use spending accounts that families can use on educational expenses like private school tuition, tutoring, therapies for students with special needs, and more.
This spring, multiple states have created new private school choice programs. Most notably, Texas passed Senate Bill 2, creating a $1 billion education savings account program. But Texas was not alone. Idaho passed a refundable tax credit program to give families $5,000 per child towards qualifying educational expenses. Tennessee passed the Education Freedom Act, creating education savings accounts worth $7,000 per student per year. Applications for the 2025-26 school year opened last week and the state reported that 33,000 families applied for the program on the first day.
In fact, applications are up all across the country.
Last year, Louisiana created the Louisiana Giving All True Opportunity to Rise Scholarship Program (yes, that makes the acronym LA GATOR). The application period for the 2025-26 school year was open from March 1st to April 15th. According to the state department of education, 39,189 students applied and 34,848 were deemed eligible to participate. Of those, 81% came from families at or below 250% of the federal poverty level and nearly 3,000 were students with disabilities. Considering that Louisiana's existing voucher program, which has been on the books since 2008, had only 5,415 students participating in it, this represents massive growth.
Arkansas saw more applications in the first day of this year's application window than total participants in last year's program. It has blown well past last year's numbers since then. There were 16,386 total applications the first day, and according to the state, there have been 41,568 applications in total for the 2025-26 school year.
In West Virginia, where 10,805 Hope Scholarship applications were approved for 2024-25, officials are projecting more than 19,000 participants for this school year.
In Florida, some of the state's private school choice programs' application windows have closed and some are still open. When statistics were reported at the end of March, the state saw more than 120,000 student applications in the first weekend and more than 425,000 in total, with more expected. Of those 425,000, 340,000 were renewing scholarships and 85,000 were applying for the first time.
It is worth lingering for a moment on the large-scale trend line in private school choice enrollment. Total enrollment in private school choice programs doubled from 2020 to 2025, going from approximately 540,000 to 1.2 million students. With the passage of Texas' new program, roughly half of American schoolchildren will be eligible for a voucher, tax credit scholarship, or education savings account. (Not all would be able to attend though, as while several states' programs have universal eligibility, they have funding caps in place that limit total participation.)
And, this is happening while public school enrollment is decreasing. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, overall enrollment in US public schools decreased by 2.5 percent from 2019 to 2023. It does not appear to be rebounding. Some of that is due to a long running baby bust, but families with children are also opting out of the public system in increasing numbers.
A recent Los Angeles Times story quoted Stanford University's Tom Dee, who has looked more closely at these numbers than possibly anyone in the county. His conclusion? 'The public school enrollment losses also reflect an enduring increase in private and home-school enrollment…The combination of private and home-school enrollment is over 4% higher than it was at the beginning of the pandemic.'
If current trends continue, and public school enrollment declines while publicly financed private enrollment grows, we could see a major reworking of our nation's education system in a relatively short number of years.
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