Since then, public schools have struggled to get a significant number of students to attend class regularly. Before the pandemic, only about 15% of students nationwide were categorized as chronically absent, meaning they missed 18 days of school, or approximately 10% or more of the school year.

When public schools reopened from their pandemic closures, chronic absenteeism skyrocketed to unprecedented levels, with 31% of students being labeled chronically absent during the 2020-21 school year. While many schools have reduced chronic absenteeism since then, it remains well above pre-pandemic levels.

The latest data from 40 states showed that, on average, 24% of students were chronically absent during the 2023-24 school year. That means that 8.6 million students missed approximately 155 million days of school cumulatively. Figure 1 illustrates the number of students categorized as chronically absent in 40 states collected from state education agencies so far, and the American Enterprise Institute’s (AEI) Return 2 Learn Tracker.

Figure 1: Chronic absenteeism rates during the 2023-24 school year

Alaska has the worst rates of chronic absenteeism, with 43% of its students chronically absent during the 2023-24 school year. Florida, Michigan, New Mexico, and Oregon were the other states with chronic absenteeism at or above 30% of their students in the 2023-24 school year. 

Notably, absentee data from Texas during the 2023-24 school year, which accounts for 11% of students nationwide, is not yet available. The state’s previous data, however, showed high rates of chronic absenteeism, significantly exceeding pre-pandemic rates. California, which has the most public school students in the country, got its absenteeism down to 21% in the 2023-24 school year. 

So far, no state has returned to pre-pandemic levels of chronic absenteeism. The states to come closest to returning to pre-pandemic rates of chronic absenteeism are Alabama and Virginia. During the 2023-24 school year, 15% of students were categorized as such, just four percentage points more than during the 2018-19 school year in both states.

However, students from the so-called Covid Cohort have suffered fewer consequences for missing 10% or more of the school year than past generations, according to a 2025 analysis of 22 states by AEI researchers, Nat Malkus and Sam Hollon. 

“Our most conservative estimates indicate that if attendance mattered as much as it once did, 100,000 fewer students would have graduated in 2022 alone. That’s more than the total number of 12th graders in New Jersey,” they wrote in The Washington Post.

Malkus and Hollon attribute this shift to a failure on the part of school administrators to roll back temporary policies implemented at the height of the pandemic to accommodate students, such as minimizing consequences for late or missed homework, allowing students to retake tests, or expanding access to online credit-recovery programs.

School administrators who want to improve student attendance desperately need to reverse course if policies like these are still in place. 50CAN’s Liz Cohen argued that if incentives fail to motivate students to attend school, then school officials should impose serious consequences, such as holding students back a year or requiring summer school if they fail to meet the minimum attendance requirements. 

“Think this unfair? It’s hard to conceive of something more unfair to children than passing them from grade to grade without ensuring they accumulate sufficient knowledge and experience,” Cohen explained in The 74.

This autumn will mark the fifth full academic year since schools reopened from their pandemic-induced closures. It’s time that school administrators get students to attend school regularly. 

From the states

In other significant developments, New Hampshire policymakers codified a robust within-district open enrollment law while North Carolina’s tax-credit scholarship proposal was vetoed.

In New Hampshire, Gov. Kelly Ayotte signed Senate Bill 97-FN into law, codifying a statewide within-district open enrollment program. Students can now transfer to any public school within their residentially assigned school district with available seats. New Hampshire is the 17th state to establish a robust within-district open enrollment policy based on Reason’s open enrollment best practices.

North Carolina Gov. Josh Stein vetoed House Bill 87, which would have made North Carolina the first state to opt into the new federal tax-credit scholarship program. “School choice is good for students and parents, and I have long supported magnet and accountable charter schools because public schools open doors of opportunity for kids in every county of the state,” Stein said. “Once the federal government issues sound guidance, I intend to opt North Carolina in so we can invest in the public school students most in need of after-school programs, tutoring, and other resources.” However, Senate President Pro Tempore Phil Berger and Speaker Destin Hall hope to override the veto. The legislature has overridden the governor’s veto eight times this year already.

The latest from Reason Foundation

—New Hampshire could become the 17th state to adopt a strong within-district open enrollment law

—Improving Kentucky’s open enrollment program would help students and families

Recommended reading 

Plenty of schools have no-zeroes policies. And most teachers hate it, survey finds
Kalyn Belsha at Chalkbeat

“The most common practice — and the one that drew the most heated opposition in the fall 2024 survey — is not giving students zeroes for missing assignments or failed tests. Just over a quarter of teachers said their school or district has a no-zeroes policy. Around 3 in 10 teachers said their school or district allowed students to retake tests without penalty, and a similar share said they did not deduct points when students turned in work late. About 1 in 10 teachers said they were not permitted to factor class participation or homework into students’ final grades.”

It’s time for the left to come to the school choice table
Jorge Elorza at the Center on Reinventing Public Education

“If we want different results, then we need a different approach. A system of school choice where ‘the money follows the child’ is one of the most powerful student-centered levers available, and it can help reinvent American education. Progressives who continue to ignore this powerful tool are failing to embrace a 21st-century vision of public education, and they are denying students the academic and civic benefits that follow.”

A brighter future for K–12 education
Matthew Ladner at The Heritage Foundation

“Private organizations have supplanted state efforts to rate schools. The guardians of the education status quo cannot easily subvert private organizations, and the public has a greater degree of trust in them. In addition, private school rating platforms collect reviews, which research shows families value. Innovators have begun to expand these platforms beyond schools into a variety of education-service providers and to collect user reviews.”

Aug. 28, 2025, editor’s note: This newsletter has been updated to remove New York from states that haven’t reported 2023-24 absenteeism data.

The post Funding Education Opportunity: Chronic absenteeism rates remain too high years after pandemic appeared first on Reason Foundation.

However, this loss of public school students and funding for them shouldn’t come as a shock to state policymakers and school districts. Before the pandemic, 17 states, such as Illinois and Michigan, were already experiencing declining enrollment. 

One major contributing factor to declining K-12 enrollments is the birth dearth: fewer babies means fewer students. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the number of births in the U.S. decreased by 16% between 2007 and 2024, resulting in nearly 700,000 fewer children being born in the US in 2024 than in 2007. 

Fewer kids being born, combined with increased competition from private and charter schools, put lower enrollment rates on the horizon for many states. The pandemic exposed parents to many more educational options and made the enrollment decline happen faster and worse than expected in some cases. 

These lower student counts have significant implications for school district finances because education funding is generally based on the number of students enrolled. When school budgets shrink due to significantly fewer students, districts have to rightsize through a combination of staff reductions, school closures, or other cost-cutting measures. 

But many school districts delayed closures, relying on federal COVID-19 relief funds to keep their under-enrolled schools afloat. 

Reason Foundation research examined school closures in the 15 states that provided data, including California, New York, and Florida. Table 1 below shows the relationship between school closures and enrollment fluctuations before and after the pandemic’s onset in these 15 states.

Table 1: Public school closures before and after 2020

For example, as California’s enrollment declined by 0.9%, more than 55,000 students, between 2018 and 2020, the state’s school districts closed 63 schools. Yet only 65 schools closed in California between 2020 and 2024, when the state’s public school student counts plummeted by 5.2%, or nearly 325,000 students.

By contrast, Colorado’s public school districts faced the reality of declining enrollments sooner. Only 12 schools closed in Colorado between 2018 and 2020 as the state’s student population increased by about 0.3%. Yet this growth was reversed after the pandemic. Colorado closed 51 schools, as its public student counts dropped by 5.2%, or almost 48,000 fewer students, between 2020 and 2024. 

Unfortunately, Colorado’s initiative wasn’t the norm. Data from these 15 states showed that most delayed school closures, likely because they had federal funds temporarily bolstering their budgets. If this enrollment and closure trend holds in the other 35 states, it means that widespread school closures will likely need to occur in the coming years, as districts are forced to close or consolidate schools to reflect lower student counts and reduced funding.

To make closures fair and cost-effective, state lawmakers should have a process to identify empty schools. For example, when the student counts in Indiana school districts decline by 10% over a five-year period, they must review school building occupancy and identify schools that could be closed.  

Right-sizing schools and increasing transparency aren’t the only reforms available to policymakers. They can eliminate unfair funding protections, such as hold harmless provisions that provide funding based on outdated student enrollment figures and give districts funding for students who no longer attend those schools, spreading resources thin.

Notably, 15 out of the 16 states with declining enrollment provisions that give districts money based on outdated student counts experienced overall enrollment declines since 2020. These states are ripe for education funding reform. A better policy is to base education funding on current student counts so school districts have incentives to rightsize when their local enrollments drop. 

In the post-pandemic K-12 education landscape, there are fewer students enrolling in traditional public schools than in previous decades. Combined with the birth dearth, it’s unlikely that public school enrollments will rebound in the near future. This makes it imperative that policymakers and school leaders implement reforms that fund students and streamline school closures.

From the states

In other significant developments, policymakers in New Hampshire took a step forward on K-12 open enrollment while Vermont took a step backward, and a federal school choice bill became law.

In New Hampshire, lawmakers passed Senate Bill 97-FN, codifying a statewide within-district open enrollment program. Students can now transfer to any public school inside their residentially-assigned school district with open seats. The bill currently awaits Gov. Kelly Ayotte’s signature.

Vermont Gov. Phil Scott signed House Bill 454, which limits how families can use public dollars to pay for private school tuition. Previously, students who lived in school districts that didn’t serve their grade level could use public education funds to pay for tuition at the private school of their choice. Under the new law, however, eligible students cannot use their education funds to pay for private schools located outside of Vermont or for private schools located inside a school district that offers schooling at all grade levels, likely excluding private schools in areas with denser populations. Moreover, only private schools where 25% or more of students are publicly funded are eligible to receive public funds. This new law is a major blow to Vermont’s private school scholarship program, the oldest in the nation. 

At the federal level, President Donald Trump signed the Educational Choice for Children Act into law, codifying the first federal tax-credit scholarship program. Eligible students must come from households whose incomes don’t exceed 300% of the median gross income of their locality, according to the K-12 Dive. Scholarships are only available to students who live in states that opt into the federal program. Students can use their scholarships to cover approved educational expenses, including tuition, tutoring, transportation, and homeschooling costs.

What to watch

In Ohio, a Franklin County Judge ruled that the state’s EdChoice Scholarship, a voucher program benefiting 140,000 students, is unconstitutional. However, the judge did not order the program to stop until after appeals, acknowledging that shutting down the program would cause “significant change to school funding in Ohio,” according to The74. Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost has appealed the ruling.

In Wyoming, a Laramie County district judge paused the implementation of the state’s private school scholarship program, which was codified during the 2024 and 2025 legislative sessions. The ruling said the program likely violates the state constitution, which “bars the legislature from appropriating money for educational or benevolent purposes to any person or entity ‘not under the absolute control of the state,’” according to the Cowboy State Daily.

Recommended reading 

Democrats’ School Choice Dilemma
Michael J. Petrilli in The Wall Street Journal

“It’s a tough dilemma. Will Democratic leaders opt their states into the new federal school choice program, allowing families to accept scholarships that are funded by charitable donations from taxpayers nationwide—scholarships that don’t cost their state a penny, and therefore can’t be said to be taking any money from their public schools?Or will they bow to the demands of the teachers unions and bar the schoolhouse door instead, creating a grand opportunity for GOP candidates running against them?”

New Federal Tax Credit Boosts School Choice—But Blue States Face Big Decision
Matt Barnum in The Wall Street Journal

“The law, enacted earlier this month, will soon allow taxpayers to redirect a portion of their tax bill to nonprofit scholarship-granting organizations or SGOs. The taxpayer could write a check of up to $1,700 to an SGO but get that full amount back via a reduction of the same amount in their income taxes, instead of a regular tax deduction for the donation. It is a donation that doesn’t ultimately cost the donor anything.”

Parents Win Key Supreme Court Test in Mahmoud v. Taylor
Joshua Dunn at Education Next

“Recognizing what a disaster the case was for the school district and the public education establishment, American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten lamented on X that the case “should have been worked out on a local level, it’s a shame it went all the way to SCOTUS. Parents must have a say about their own kids, they are our partners in education.” Except a belligerent school board that was too stubborn or mathematically challenged to count votes on the Supreme Court made that impossible.”

The post Funding Education Opportunity: School districts slow to close schools despite losing students appeared first on Reason Foundation.

Table 1 shows open enrollment participation in each of these states. 

Table 1: Open enrollment participation in 19 states

Public school transfer laws and policies vary widely by state. These 19 states were examined because they could provide data on open enrollment transfers. Colorado and Delaware have the highest participation rates in their programs, with about one in four students using open enrollment. 

The report also details open enrollment participation in other publicly funded K-12 education options. Between students using open enrollment, charter schools, and private school scholarships, about 16% of students choose publicly funded education options other than their residentially assigned schools in the 19 states examined. 

Figure 1 shows how many students use publicly funded private and public school choice programs in comparison to those who remain in their assigned public schools in these states.

Figure 1: Publicly funded K-12 education options

Of these 19 states, Arizona stands out the most. Over a third, 35% of Arizona’s publicly funded students chose education alternatives through open enrollment, charter schools, and private school scholarships during the 2022-23 school year. Open enrollment accounted for 10% of these students in the Grand Canyon State. 

After Arizona, students in Colorado, Delaware, and Wisconsin chose publicly funded alternatives to their residentially assigned public schools at the highest rates.

As more states expand and adopt universal private school scholarships and strong open enrollment laws, even more students will participate in these programs. In 2025, Texas, Arkansas, and Indiana established or significantly strengthened their school choice laws. 

Reason Foundation obtained data from seven states showing that open enrollment participation generally increases over time, as families become more familiar with their choices. Figure 2 shows open enrollment participation trends in select states.

Figure 2: Open enrollment growth over time in seven states

Wisconsin, which publishes the most extensive open enrollment data, shows that open enrollment participation has increased by about 14% each year, growing from 2,500 participants during the 1998-99 school year to nearly 61,000 participants during the 2023-24 school year. 

Accordingly, states that recently launched their open enrollment programs, such as West Virginia, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas, will likely see increased participation rates in future years. 

More states should maximize students’ transfer opportunities by codifying strong open enrollment policies. These laws can make a big difference in students’ transfer opportunities. On average, about 10% of students transferred via open enrollment in states with strong open enrollment laws, while only about 6% of students used it in states with weaker laws that allow public school districts to reject transfer students. This underscores the importance of adopting stronger open enrollment policies in the 34 states with weak ones. 

In the 2026 legislative sessions, state policymakers should support strong open enrollment policies so more public school students can attend schools that are the right fit, regardless of where they live.

From the States

In other important education and school choice developments, policymakers in New Hampshire, Louisiana and Nevada consider school choice proposals.

In Louisiana, the Senate Finance Committee cut $50 million from the LA GATOR private school scholarship program. The proposal provides $44 million to fund 6,000 scholarships for existing participants, but it eliminates the expansion backed by Gov. Jeff Landry and the House, which aimed to add 5,300 new scholarships to the program. 

Gov. Joe Lombardo signed Nevada Senate Bill 460 into law. This bill would establish a statewide within-district open enrollment program to let students attend public schools inside their district other than their assigned one with open seats. Nevada’s open enrollment program would improve its score by 15 points, improving its overall score to 50 out of 100 points in Reason Foundation’s next annual evaluation of every state’s open enrollment best practices.

New Hampshire Gov. Kelly Ayotte signed Senate Bill 295, which expands student eligibility for the state’s Education Freedom Accounts–private school scholarships—by removing the income cap. Program participation will be capped at 10,000 students during the 2025-26 school year, but after that, the cap will automatically increase “by 25% in any year when applications exceed 90% of the limit,” ExcelinEd in Action reported. According to EdChoice, 5,600 students received an account during the 2024-25 school year, which can be used to pay for private school tuition, textbooks, and other approved education expenses. 

What to Watch

The U.S. Supreme Court was deadlocked 4-4 on St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School v. Drummond. As a result, the Oklahoma State Supreme Court’s ruling that a publicly-funded religious charter school violates the separation of church and state remains in place.  

New data from Step Up for Students, the organization that administers education choice scholarships, showed nearly 1.8 million students, 51% of the state’s K-12 students, used some sort of school choice option during the 2023-24 school year. 

The Latest from Reason Foundation

–Strengthening open enrollment laws is key to unlocking public school choice for kids

–Which K-12 finance systems foster school choice?

–How LAUSD can start grappling with budget deficit, declining enrollment 

–Don’t trust the federal government with the nation’s largest school choice program

Recommended reading 

The pandemic is over. It’s time for schools to get the message.
American Enterprise Institute’s Nat Malkus and Sam Hollon at The Washington Post

“All signs indicate that many more of today’s students are falling behind academically but are still being allowed to graduate. What this means in practice is that more students will leave school underprepared for the world of college or work. School leaders need to act now to reset basic expectations — including consistent school attendance — for graduates, or pandemic exceptionalism will become the new normal.”

ESA rules review: Improving rulemaking for ESA programs
Jenny Clark, Michael Clark, and George Khalaf at State Policy Network

“While procedural and administrative rules are necessary for efficient program management, substantive decisions—such as determining eligible expenses and qualifying education providers—must remain in the hands of elected lawmakers. Otherwise, agencies risk overstepping their bounds, either by imposing burdensome restrictions or by slowly reshaping the program away from its intended purpose. ”

Schools closing in Arizona? Blame the failing schools, not school choice
Heritage Foundation’s Jason Bedrick and Matthew Ladner at The Daily Signal

“Critics claim that school choice “diverts funding.” But public education dollars are meant for students, not systems. In Arizona, when families leave a district school for a charter or private school, or to another district, the funding follows the child to the learning environment that works best for him or her—and away from one that didn’t. That’s not a bug, that’s a feature. That’s the system working to be responsive to the needs of students and their families.”

The post Funding Education Opportunity: Study finds more than 1.6 million students using K-12 open enrollment in 19 states appeared first on Reason Foundation.

Guaranteeing open enrollment for students assigned to persistently dangerous schools

Federal guidance encouraged states to let students assigned to traditional public schools that have been designated as persistently dangerous transfer to safer schools. Under section 8532 of the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), states must let students assigned to unsafe schools, or who are victims of a violent crime, transfer to other public schools. 

However, persistently dangerous public schools have long been underidentified because states set their own definitions of unsafe schools, which are often overly narrow. For example, an Ohio “high school of 1,000 students could have four homicides and 19 weapons possessions without being deemed persistently dangerous,” Reason magazine’s Emma Camp reported. 

Narrow definitions of unsafe, like Ohio’s, mean that many states have avoided designating public schools as unsafe even when common sense says otherwise. Unfortunately, this isn’t a recent practice. 

In 2003, California had the most K-12 students nationwide, yet the state reported no unsafe schools. Students and their families balked at this patent falsehood. “I don’t think there is safety here [Jefferson High School near downtown Los Angeles]. There are always fights,” junior Lorena Guerrero told the Los Angeles Times that year. 

Similarly, a 2019 analysis published by The74 showed that only six states–Oregon, North Dakota, Texas, Georgia, New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Maryland– identified any of their schools as unsafe. It noted that California has never identified any of its schools as unsafe.

Most recently, just five states identified 25 persistently dangerous schools during the 2023-24 school year. These low figures, however, don’t reflect reality as “public school districts reported through the Civil Rights Data Collection nearly 1.2 million violent offenses that school year,” District Administration reported. 

The Department of Education recommended that states review their definitions of persistently dangerous schools to ensure that students are afforded transfer options to safer ones, consulting state data, input from families, and the local community. 

State policymakers can expand the definition of persistently dangerous schools as they wish. They don’t have to limit themselves to homicides, gun infractions, or bullying. They could expand the definition to include failing schools and other situations that significantly hamper students’ learning environments.

Once a good definition is established, policymakers should also ensure that students assigned to persistently dangerous schools have real transfer opportunities. For instance, receiving districts could be required to accommodate these transfers regardless of their available space. 

Maximizing Title I flexibility

Earlier guidance released by the Education Department highlighted flexibility afforded to states under Title I, Part A of ESEA. During the 2021-22 school year, Title I provided $17.9 billion to states, earmarked for school districts with low-income students. However, states can reserve up to three percent of these funds to pay for Direct Student Services (Section 1003A), which can “allow parents to exercise meaningful choice in their child’s education.” 

Two permitted uses under Section 1003A could allow students to use open enrollment, which lets them attend public schools other than their residentially assigned ones, giving them access to academic courses not available in their assigned school, such as Advanced Placement (AP). This would ensure that supplemental dollars follow eligible students across district boundaries. Currently, federal dollars don’t follow transfer; reforming this, however, could create key fiscal incentives for districts to accommodate transfers. 

Similarly, students assigned to schools needing comprehensive support and improvement (CSI) could use these funds to pay for transportation costs to attend public schools not identified as CSI. Currently, 16 states have robust open enrollment laws, but most do not guarantee these students free transportation options. Only Florida and Wisconsin provide small transportation stipends to students using open enrollment. 

According to the federal guidance, Ohio is the only state to use Direct Student Services under Title I. While state education agencies can’t force school districts to use funds to pay for specific services, they could award the funds under 1103.A to districts whose priorities and goals align with the state agencies.

What this means for states 

The Trump administration cannot force states to adopt these recommendations because K-12 education, rightly, remains a state-level issue. Consequently, it’s up to state policymakers to implement the department’s guidance. One challenge in doing so, especially regarding funding, is state-level red tape. Most states layer additional regulations on top of federal ones to minimize non-compliance. Consequently, state regulations related to federal education funds are often stricter than those imposed by Congress. 

This practice unnecessarily restricts how federal funds are used at the state level. To ensure that federal funds provide students with the flexibility intended by Congress, state policymakers should identify and eliminate cumbersome regulations that stifle legal uses of federal funds. States shouldn’t let red tape stand in the way of students’ learning opportunities.

From the states

In other important education and school choice developments, as mentioned briefly above, policymakers recently codified significant public and private school choice laws in several states.

In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott signed Senate Bill 2 into law, establishing the state’s first private school choice law. The program provides $10,000 scholarships to 100,000 students to pay for private school tuition and other approved education expenses. Participants with disabilities would receive an additional $1,500. Home-schooled students are also eligible to receive scholarships of $2,000. 

Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed Senate Bill 624 and House Bill 1945. Under the new laws, students can transfer to any public school across the state. It would also require the state Department of Education to collect and publish key open enrollment data. Moreover, school districts must post their open enrollment policies and procedures on their websites and inform rejected transfer applicants why they were denied in writing. Together, these laws will launch Arkansas’ open enrollment policies from 10th place to second best nationwide in Reason Foundation’s annual rankings. 

Senate Bill 2241 was signed into law by North Dakota Gov. Kelly Armstrong, letting charter schools operate in the state. North Dakota is the 44th state to permit charter schools. 

South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster signed Senate Bill 62, restoring the state’s private school scholarship. Last September, the State Supreme Court struck down the program as unconstitutional because it conflicted with its Blaine Amendment, which prohibits South Carolina from funding religious schools, leaving thousands of scholarship recipients in limbo. The new law, however, transfers state funds to a trustee who then funds the accounts, avoiding the court’s concerns. Moreover, scholarships are valued at $7,500 per student, a 25% increase. During its second year of operation, eligibility will expand to 85% of students. 10,000 scholarships will be awarded during the 2025-26 school year, increasing to 15,000 scholarships the following year. The number of scholarships can increase with demand after that.

Indiana Gov. Mike Braun signed a budget that eliminates income eligibility for the state’s voucher program. This means that every K-12 student is eligible for a $6,000 scholarship to pay for private school tuition. More than 70,000 students participated in the program during the 2023-24 school year. He also signed Senate Bill 1 into law, giving charter schools access to local property tax revenues as of 2028. The funding increases will be phased in over five years. Mind Trust estimated that charter schools would receive “an additional $3,750 per charter school student,” according to Chalkbeat Indiana.

The New Hampshire House approved an expansion of the state’s Education Freedom Accounts so that up to 10,000 students could receive scholarships. Students can use these accounts to pay for approved education expenses, such as private school tuition and tutoring. During the 2024-25 school year, 5,600 students were awarded scholarships.

What to Watch

In Utah, the attorney general’s office petitioned an appeal regarding the Utah Fits All Scholarship, which was ruled unconstitutional by a district court. According to the Salt Lake City ABC affiliate, the petition argues that the constitution doesn’t “limit the legislature’s authority to create educational programs; rather it sets the minimum, which the state has already met through the traditional public school system. Additionally, a 2020 ballot referendum, approved by voters, lets the legislature use income tax to “support children.”

The U.S. House’s Ways and Means Committee approved a budget proposal that would establish a $5 billion federal tax-credit scholarship program. If codified, students whose families’ income is 300% of their area’s median income in all 50 states would be eligible to receive a $5,000 scholarship. These can pay for approved education expenses, such as private school tuition and homeschooling materials.

The Latest from Reason Foundation

–Arkansas’ K-12 open enrollment slam dunk 

–Texas open enrollment bill would significantly increase school choice

–States can expand school choice to millions of public school students

–School choice could help defuse culture war fights

–Frequently asked questions about Montana school finance reform

Recommended reading 

Plenty of Room in District Schools
Ben Scafidi at Education Next

“At least five of these districts—Wichita, Auburn-Washburn USD, Shawnee Mission, Blue Valley, and Olathe—are self-reporting capacity at levels well below their building capacity—because they served many more students a mere five years ago. For example, the Auburn-Washington district experienced a decline of 468 students after fall 2019 yet reported no capacity to serve transfer students five years later. The Andover school district self-reported more open seats (344) than indicated by the change in enrollment method, indicating that the district had open seats back in fall 2019.”

What Would Religious Charter Schools Mean for Education Choice?
Nicole Stelle Garnett and Derrell Bradford at Education Next

“Charter schools ought to fight any suggestion that they are government schools. They are, by design, freed from government control so as to enable innovation. A decision that they are government actors would undermine that goal by placing them in a constitutional straitjacket. And that decision’s ramifications would also threaten the autonomy of government-funded private organizations that provide services other than education, including health care, foster care, community development, and poverty alleviation,” Garnett wrote

The New Frontier Of School Choice: Zoning
Michael McShane at Forbes

“Some cities, for example, require private schools to get a special exception in order to open but allow public schools to open by right (that is, without all of this lengthy process). If new schools cause issues with traffic, or risk ruining the architectural character of the neighborhood, or are hazardous in one way or another, one would think that would be equally true if the school was public or private. When only one sector needs to jump through all of the hoops, it suggests that those hoops are not serving the purpose they purport to.”

The post Funding Education Opportunity: The Trump administration’s role in supporting school choice appeared first on Reason Foundation.

However, this setback hasn’t deterred the Trump administration from taking a sledgehammer to the agency by slashing over a thousand staff and reportedly eliminating dozens of federal contracts. Winding down the Education Department, an agency long considered dubious by many conservatives and libertarians, is welcome news, but the Trump administration’s slash-and-burn technique could have negative unintended consequences that even undermine its own initiatives.

Winding down the U.S. Department of Education

In March, the Department of Education announced that it would cut its workforce by approximately 50% or 1,900 jobs via layoffs or voluntary resignations. The American Enterprise Institute’s Senior Fellow and Director of Education Policy Studies, Frederick Hess, estimated that these cuts would save taxpayers $400 million in salaries and benefits.

However, the layoffs lack precision because the executive branch can’t cut individual staff; instead, it can “only eliminate whole units or ‘subcomponents’” due to civil service rules, Hess noted. Accordingly, the department’s sweeping staff reductions could result in unintended consequences.

For instance, even though U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon claims she is committed to retaining the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)—the biannual exam often called the nation’s report card administered by the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES), which provides insights into students’ progress nationwide—only three employees remain at NCES after the administration slashed its workforce by 97%. 

As a one-of-a-kind study, boasting decades of research that predates the 1980 establishment of the Department of Education, NAEP has often been used by researchers and school choice supporters to make apples-to-apples comparisons of states’ progress and outcomes. Cutting NAEP so sharply shows how the far-reaching layoffs could unintentionally undermine school choice and reform initiatives the Trump administration wanted to retain. 

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) also audited the Department of Education and claims it terminated 89 contracts, valued at more than $881 million. However, AEI scholar Nat Malkus argued that DOGE’s estimated savings are significantly overstated, and that more accurate savings are closer to about $197.6 million in savings, approximately 22% of DOGE’s estimate. 

Altogether, Hess’ and Malkus’ estimated total savings amount to about $600 million or 0.4% of the Education Department’s 2024 budget. 

Hamstringing the Department of Education vs Rebuilding It

While the savings gained through downsizing are underwhelming, the staffing cuts could portend major cultural shifts, especially in the agency’s research branch, the Institute of Education Studies (IES), where 90% of the staff were laid off.

AEI’s Mark Schneider, who led IES during the first Trump and the Biden administration, said he encountered “laziness, [and] corruption” during his tenure there. He even recounts how one staff member openly admitted to being captured by a special interest (which is illegal). 

Bureaucratic red tape often stopped Schneider from implementing even modest reforms, he says. As a result, he argued that the Trump administration’s slash-and-burn techniques at the agency were long overdue. “Every once in a while, you just need to just blow the shit up and rebuild,” he explained.

Rebuilding the Department of Education and its research division, however, is a hotly contested debate on the right. In an interview with the Manhattan Institute’s Chris Rufo, The New York Times columnist Ross Douthat argued that the Trump administration should rebuild the department, filling it with conservatives who would “run the actual bureaucracy.”

Rufo, on the other hand, viewed the department as “beyond reform,” arguing that the Trump administration should cripple the agency as much as legally possible. Unlike Douthat, Rufo believes that conservatives lack the manpower to successfully compete in the Department of Education’s bureaucracy.

So far, Rufo’s arguments seem to have resonated with the Trump administration, especially in light of Secretary McMahon’s recent skepticism of IES’ value to taxpayers. 

Overall, these changes show that the Trump administration plans to run the Department of Education on a skeleton crew and significantly reduce the federal role in K-12 education research. Although future administrations could try to expand the federal department to its previous size, it would likely be a monumental task, especially since many would-be workers could be skeptical of their long-term job security.

What’s next for federal and state lawmakers

While downsizing the Department of Education should be a success, much work remains. Even if the department ceased to exist, many federal grant programs under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), such as Title I, which sent approximately $16.5 billion to school districts in 2021, would continue to operate.

Unfortunately, these funds are allocated opaquely, inflexibly, and lack portability. For example, Title I funds do not follow low-income students who transfer to new schools through public or private school choice programs. 

The next step for Congress is to rethink how federal education funds are distributed. Proposals, such as the A PLUS Act (introduced by Sen. Steve Daines (R-MT) in the Senate and Rep. John Moolenaar (R-MI) in the House), would increase federal education funds’ flexibility so state policymakers can use them for any education purpose under state law.

If codified, most state policymakers would have a chance to change how about 10% of their state education budgets are allocated. Yet, Congress often attaches strings to its funding, and the flexibility of these federal funds would depend much on the federal requirements that accompany them. Plus, to maximize funding flexibility, state policymakers would need to update any related state laws and regulations, which often stifle federal funds’ versatility just as much as federal ones. 

Federal education funding needs to be reformed, and the Department of Education can certainly be downsized, but these efforts should be strategic and student-focused. 

From the States

In other important education and school choice developments across the country, as mentioned briefly above, policymakers advanced public and private school choice laws in New Hampshire, Arkansas and North Dakota. State policymakers are also considering school choice and funding-related proposals in Texas and Alabama.

In Texas, the House approved Senate Bill 2, a private school choice proposal, sending it back to the Senate for concurrence. This is the first time a private school choice bill has successfully passed the state’s lower chamber, according to The Texas Tribune. If signed into law, the program would provide $10,000 scholarships to 100,000 students to pay for private school tuition and other approved education expenses. Participants with disabilities would receive an additional $1,500. Home-schooled students are also eligible to receive scholarships of $2,000. The Texas House also approved a K-12 education funding package amounting to $7.7 billion, increasing per pupil revenues by $395 and providing raises for teachers. 

The Arkansas House and Senate passed Senate Bill 624, which would ensure that students can transfer to any public school inside their school district. It would also require the state Department of Education to collect and publish key open enrollment data. The bill awaits Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ signature. If codified, Arkansas’ open enrollment law would tie for third best nationwide in Reason Foundation’s annual open enrollment best practices rankings with West Virginia and Arizona. 

Lawmakers in the New Hampshire House passed House Bill (H.B.) 741, which would establish a universal open enrollment program, allowing students to attend public schools with open seats regardless of where they live. If codified, New Hampshire’s open enrollment score would rank fifth nationwide per Reason Foundation’s open enrollment best practices. Additionally, the lower chamber also passed H.B. 115 to expand eligibility to students whose families’ incomes are 400% of the federal poverty limit (current law limits participation to students whose families’ income is 350% of the federal poverty limit).

Due to higher demand than anticipated for Alabama’s new private school choice program, the House Education Budget Chair, Rep. Arthur Orr, proposed increasing the program’s funding from $100 million to $135 million. So far, nearly 37,000 students have applied for scholarships, which are valued up to $7,000 per pupil attending an approved private school. 

The North Dakota House approved Senate Bill 2241, letting charter schools operate in the state. Currently, North Dakota is one of seven states that don’t have any charter schools. 

What to Watch

Despite codifying a robust private school choice law in 2024, Louisiana lawmakers are backpedaling and may not fund the scholarships. 

After 33,000 students applied for Louisiana’s LA GATOR private school choice scholarships, state policymakers want to cut the program’s $50 million in funding. Instead of providing the promised scholarships to students, the legislature’s leadership announced they will use the funds to pay for teacher and support staff stipends. Using the funds set aside for the LA GATOR program would only pay for about 25% of the proposed stipends. 

This month, all Iowa students will be eligible to receive an education savings account valued at nearly $8,000 per student. This new expansion lifts income restrictions that previously limited student eligibility. During the 2024-25 school year, almost 28,000 students received a scholarship.

Utah’s Third District Court ruled that the state’s private school scholarship is unconstitutional. The program, launched in 2024, provided eligible students with scholarships valued at $8,000. In her decision, Judge Laura Scott found that the program’s funding came from revenues reserved for public schools. Utah Governor Spencer Cox plans to appeal the decision.

The Latest from Reason Foundation

–Why open enrollment laws that let public schools reject transfer students aren’t good enough 

–Open enrollment can help New Hampshire’s students and school districts

–Kansas schools fought open enrollment but now need it to stay afloat

–The push for greater oversight of homeschoolers

–Missouri’s 2025 K-12 open enrollment proposals

Reason Foundation also testified or submitted public comments on open enrollment proposals in Montana, Nevada, Maine, and New Hampshire.

Recommended reading 

Less Than Half of Student Borrowers Are Paying Their Loans
Preston Cooper at American Enterprise Institute

“In February 2020, the last month before the payment suspension took effect, 60 percent of Nelnet’s [the largest federal student loan servicer] borrowers were in current repayment on their loans. By February 2025, the share in current repayment had dropped to just 38 percent. Current repayment rates have not risen above 40 percent in the past five months since the payment pause effectively ended.”

Trump’s anti-DEI funding threat hit like an earthquake. This is what’s happened since.
Erica Meltzer at Chalkbeat

“The Trump administration is signaling that states should take its threats to withhold funding seriously. In an unprecedented move, the U.S. Department of Education said Friday it was moving to strip K-12 aid from Maine following an investigation under Title IX — the federal law banning sex discrimination in education — into the state’s policy for transgender athletes.”

The Supply Side of School Choice: What Happens To Private School Tuition When Demand Grows?
Marty Lueken at Informed Choice

“Economic theory predicts that in the short term, both targeted and universal choice programs will increase tuition prices to some extent. In the short term, supply is relatively inelastic. Private schools can’t instantly add seats, build new classrooms, or hire more teachers. As a result, families at some schools may face higher prices and limited availability while the financial assistance from the choice program may or may not cover the new higher tuition.”

The post Funding Education Opportunity: Trump gutted the U.S. Department of Education—what this means for taxpayers and the public appeared first on Reason Foundation.

Nearly 50 years ago, more than 90% of students were enrolled in public schools nationwide, with less than 10% attending private schools and only 20,000 students homeschooling. 

But during the 1980s and ‘90s, more parents began to look for better fits for their children, and cracks started to show in traditional public schools’ monopoly: charter schools and open enrollment laws were codified, letting students attend public schools other than their residentially assigned ones.

Today, “public education is on the verge of an unprecedented crack-up. In fact, it’s already underway,” the American Enterprise Institute’s Robert Pondiscio argues. In the past decade, state lawmakers in these 14 states expanded targeted private school choice programs so that all or nearly all students could use public funds to pay tuition at private schools. 

These reforms officially broke the dam on private school choice as state after state codified expansive private school choice laws. Already, these laws are changing the educational landscape in those states. 

As Figure 1 shows, more than 1.8 million students in six states used public funds to attend public or private schools of their choice. Delaware and Colorado do not have publicly funded private school choice programs. These states were chosen on data availability.

Figure 1: Students using publicly funded school choice in select states

In these six states, charter schools gained the lion’s share of the students leaving public schools—859,000 students or 45% overall. Open enrollment, meanwhile, was the second most common form of school choice in these states, accounting for 36% of transfers or 686,000 students. Lastly, more than 351,000 students or 19%, used private school scholarships to attend private schools. 

In states that lack private school choice programs, students participated in public school choice programs at high rates. For instance, in Colorado and Delaware, 28% and 22% of traditional public school students, respectively, used open enrollment to attend a school other than their assigned ones.

Today, education marketplaces in states such as Florida and Arizona are experiencing major growth with the introduction of universal private school choice programs. Notably, the number of students using public funds to attend schools other than their residentially assigned ones increased by about 150,000 Florida and 49,000 Arizona students—increases of 19% and 14%, respectively—between the 2021-22 and 2022-23 school years.

Overall, these data indicate that parents and students are increasingly choosing public or private school options other than their residentially assigned ones as they seek schools that are a better fit for their academic and family needs. 

Across the country, declining birth rates and increased student mobility mean that traditional public schools can no longer assume guaranteed market dominance. In this new education landscape after the COVID-19 pandemic, public schools must consider dynamic strategies to attract and retain students. 

There are signs this is happening. For instance, the four finalists for the 2025 National Superintendent of the Year all hailed from public school districts in states with universal or near-universal private school choice programs. According to Edweek, each of these superintendents stated that developing “school-to-career pipelines” were key to making “public schools a competitive option for students.”

This sort of innovation is how charter and private schools have carved out niches in the education marketplace. It’s time that public schools responded in kind, creating a diverse schooling ecosystem that is responsive to students’ needs and interests.

From the States

In other important education and school choice developments across the country,  as mentioned briefly above, policymakers passed private school choice laws in Wyoming, Tennessee, and Idaho. School choice proposals also advanced in Missouri and New Hampshire.

Gov. Bill Lee signed House Bill 6004 into law in Tennessee, establishing an education savings account program. As of 2025, 20,000 students can receive scholarships valued at $7,100 to pay for private school tuition and other approved education expenses. Applicants from low-income families will receive priority. The number of scholarships will increase by 5,000 each year after 2026 if 75% or more of available scholarships from the previous year are distributed.

Idaho Gov. Brad Little signed House Bill 93, codifying a $50 million tax-credit scholarship program that provides recipients with scholarships valued at $5,000, which could pay for private school tuition, tutoring, and other approved education expenses. Students with disabilities are eligible to receive $7,500 scholarships.

Gov. Mark Gordon signed Wyoming House Bill (H.B.) 199 into law, establishing a universal education savings account program. Participants can receive scholarships valued at $7,000 to pay for private school tuition and other approved education expenses. In a victory for homeschoolers, Gov. Gordon also signed H.B. 46, eliminating existing regulations that made homeschooling families share their curricula with the local school district.

Missouri House Bill 711 passed the House and is headed to the state Senate. The proposal would establish a voluntary open enrollment program and let school districts cap the number of departing students at 3% of the previous year’s enrollment.

The New Hampshire House passed House Bill 115, and the state Senate passed Senate Bill 295, both of which would make the state’s Education Freedom Accounts universal. Scholarship recipients can use these accounts to pay for private school tuition and other approved education expenses. If codified, the proposal would expand income eligibility over two years so that all students would be eligible to receive an average account valued at $5,400 per year during the 2024-25 school year. The Senate will now consider the bill.

In Texas, the Senate Education K-16 Committee approved Senate Bill 686, which would establish a strong open enrollment law. It would ensure that Texas students could attend any public school, regardless of where they live, for free—without being charged transfer fees. If signed into law, the proposal would improve Texas’s grade from an ‘F’ to an ‘A’ in Reason Foundation’s open enrollment best practices scoresheet, moving the state up to fourth best in the rankings.

What to Watch

Oklahoma Catholic charter school takes its arguments to the U.S. Supreme Court and the White House seemingly tones down plans to dissolve the U.S. Department of Education.

The U.S. Supreme Court has taken a case about Oklahoma’s Catholic charter school claims that it faced religious discrimination after the Oklahoma Supreme Court ordered the state board of education to rescind its contract. The Oklahoma Supreme Court ruled that the state and U.S. Constitution “prohibit the State from using public money for the establishment of a religious institution.” The U.S. Supreme Court is expected to hear the case on April 30.

After numerous reports that President Donald Trump would issue an executive order calling on  U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon to shut down the Department of Education, the administration did not do so. As many legal experts have noted and the secretary has announced, the agency can not be eliminated unless Congress votes to do so. However, the department announced its plans to cut its 4,133-person workforce in half. According to Chalkbeat, one-third of the agency’s workers will be eliminated due to a “reduction in force,” and additional staffing cuts will occur via “voluntary buyouts.”

The Latest from Reason Foundation

–Open enrollment is a school choice policy that both blue and red states can embrace
While many perceive school choice as a red state phenomenon, K-12 open enrollment bucks this trend. Statewide open enrollment laws, which allow students to attend any public school with open seats, have succeeded in seven states, including California, Colorado, Delaware, and Kansas, whose governments were either purple or leaned blue when the laws were passed.

Figure 2: States’ political leanings when codifying statewide open enrollment laws

–Debunking Missouri’s K-12 open enrollment fears
While opponents of open enrollment in Missouri claim that it would create fiscal chaos for public schools and force school closures, these fears are overwrought. Data from other states show that open enrollment helps rural school districts attract students, helps struggling school districts improve their educational programs, and can serve as a stabilizing revenue stream to districts.

–Nebraska aims to have the third-best open enrollment policy nationwide
Nebraska’s open enrollment policy currently scores a grade of B on Reason Foundation’s open enrollment scoresheet of best practices. However, if Legislative Bill 557 is signed into law, it could boost the state’s score to a grade of A.

–Southern California school districts are serving fewer students and facing massive budget deficits

–California bill would make public school interdistrict transfer program more accessible

–Iowa House File 68 would be a step backward for open enrollment

Recommended reading 

Student Well-Being, School Choice, Higher Ed Top Governors’ Priorities for 2025
Bella DiMarco at The74

“School choice remains a key topic this year, with 15 governors addressing the issue. While initiatives to let families use public money for private schooling dominated the discussion, several governors proposed expanding public-school choice, sometimes alongside private-school initiatives.”

Many Children Left Behind: The 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress Results Indicate a Five-Alarm Fire
Mark Schneider at The American Enterprise Institute

“The 2024 NAEP scores underline a continuing decline in educational achievement in the United States. For years following the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, the nation focused on the noble but unattainable goal of bringing all our students up to NAEP’s proficiency level. This two-decades-long focus on proficiency hid one of the most damaging—and worsening—trends in American education: the growing number of students who don’t even meet NAEP’s “basic” level of performance.”

The Anti-D.E.I. Crusader Who Wants to Dismantle the Department of Education
Ross Douthat at The New York Times

Douthat: “A big reason that American education writ large is left leaning is that many people who go into it are left leaning. You and I know this very well. Some of my best friends are left-leaning graduates of America’s many fine educational schools. It just seems like it’s sort of pre-emptive despair on the part of conservatives to say, Well, we have political control over this agency that has a certain kind of influence over American education, and we’re just going to give it up because we can’t find enough people.”

The post Funding Education Opportunity: Data on 1.8 million students attending schools of their choice across six states appeared first on Reason Foundation.

However, to do this, President-elect Trump will need the support of Congress. U.S. Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) announced plans to introduce a proposal to abolish the department in 2025. Massie told ABC News, “There’ll be one sentence—only thing that will change is the date: The Department of Education shall terminate on December 31, 2026.” Rep. Massie has introduced proposals to eliminate the department since 2017.

This isn’t the first time the department has been on the chopping block. In 1982, President Ronald Reagan supported closing the agency, but Republican lawmakers didn’t have the votes necessary to eliminate it.

Today, President-elect Trump could face the same problem. Even though Republicans control both the U.S. House and Senate after the November elections, they fall short of holding a supermajority in the Senate chamber by seven votes. 

As Cato Institute’s Director of Educational Freedom Neal McClusky explained, it’s doubtful that the Trump administration could convince seven Democratic senators to break ranks with their party and support Republican efforts to abolish the department. 

Even if Republicans managed to collect the necessary votes, shuttering the agency would be a much larger task today than in the 1980s. 

Since its establishment, the department’s appropriation grew from nearly $53.6 billion in 1980 to about $111 billion in 2021 after adjusting for inflation, an increase of 106%. While the Department of Education delivers some funds for K-12 education, most go to higher education. The New York Times reported that “more than 70% of its $224 billion annual budget goes to the federal student aid program.”

However, closing the Education Department wouldn’t eliminate every program or end all federal spending on education. The Heritage Foundation’s Lindsey Burke, who wrote the Project 2025 chapter on dissolving the department, argues that federal policymakers should “reform, eliminate, or move the department’s programs and offices to appropriate agencies.” 

For instance, she suggested block-granting most funding under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) and moving its administration to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Yet others are worried that the juice isn’t worth the squeeze. The American Enterprise Institute’s (AEI) Kevin Kosar explained to The74, “Go ahead, abolish the Department of Education…But if you scatter all of its programs to other departments, you’ve gotten rid of 4,100 people, and you have to hire people in other departments to process those grants and aid applications anyway. So how much juice are you getting from that?”

Plus, some argue that the temptation to use the Department of Education as a cudgel against opponents in deep blue states may prove too great for Trump, as AEI’s Rick Hess pointed out in Education Next.  “We’re likely about to see something we’ve never seen before: a Republican Department of Education aggressively and unapologetically exploiting every last bit of its executive authority,” Hess writes. 

The president-elect has yet to announce his plans to eliminate federal agencies, large or small. Regardless of the scope of his ambitions, the incoming president and his supporters should anticipate dogged attacks from teacher unions and school districts that support a large federal role in K-12 education. At the end of the day, the agency should pursue policies that are in the best interest of students and their families.

From the States

In other important education and school choice developments across the country, North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum called for universal school choice and North Carolina policymakers sent more funds to the state’s private school choice program.

After the South Carolina Supreme Court ruled the state’s private school choice program unconstitutional, the Chairman of the Senate Education, Sen. Greg Hembree (R-District 28), is exploring alternatives. Specifically, he aims to introduce a private school choice proposal with different funding mechanisms to circumvent the issues raised by the court.

In North Dakota, Gov. Doug Burgum called for universal school choice earlier this month in his budget address. Last year, the governor vetoed a school choice proposal because he said the bill didn’t “go far enough.” In his address, Gov. Burgum explained, “This is not about public versus private education. This is about ensuring that every student has what they need to support a pathway to career, college or military readiness. We recommend the Department of Public Instruction develop a program that drives an ESA [education savings account] forward to continue putting North Dakota on the map for serving all students — public, private and homeschool.”

The North Carolina General Assembly overrode Gov. Roy Cooper’s veto and codified a proposal that sent $95 million to public schools and an additional $463.5 million to the state’s Opportunity Scholarship. According to EdNC, this likely ensures that all children on the program’s waitlist will receive a scholarship.

In Mississippi, House Speaker Jason White (R-District 48) announced plans to introduce a proposal to establish a targeted private school choice program in 2025. The program would provide education savings accounts to students assigned to failing public schools.

What to Watch

New Hampshire policymakers will divvy up education-related proposals by funding and policy.

This year, education-related bills in New Hampshire will be split between two House committees, one focusing on policy and the other on funding. Between 2008 and 2022, the number of education-related bills introduced increased by about 160%, overwhelming committee members. The Speaker of the House decides which committee bills will be sent to.

In January, students can submit applications to Alabama’s new private school scholarship program. Eligible applicants’ families’ income can’t exceed “300% of the federal poverty line for the preceding tax year,” 1819 News reported. 

The Latest from Reason Foundation

–The most consequential school choice and education freedom bills of 2024 at Reason Foundation
Reason Foundation tracked 156 bills across 35 states. Twelve of these proposals were signed into law, expanding both private and public school choice for students.

–The most important public school open enrollment laws and proposals of 2024 at Reason Foundation
Three states significantly improved their open enrollment laws this year. These reforms included key changes, such as making public schools free to all students, establishing statewide within-district open enrollment, and improving transparency.

Recommended reading 

“Education Should be Handled at the State and Local Level”
Frederick Hess’s interview with Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC) at Education Next

“Sending 300 percent more funding to K–12 schools than what is typically allocated by the Department of Education without instituting strong transparency and accountability measures is reckless. Money is not a cure-all, and it is irresponsible to throw more money at a problem and call it a solution.”

Red-State Referendum Defeats Are Cause for Contemplation, Not Bravado
Frederick Hess at Education Next

“For what it’s worth, it strikes me that, in Kentucky and Nebraska, choice advocates forgot what had fueled their recent success. The tough work of navigating legislatures has brought a healthy discipline to choice advocacy. In wooing individual legislators, advocates have focused on program design, showing minimal short-term budget impact on district schools, and delivering the practical, reassuring message, “We just want to give families more options.” The referenda fights lacked that tight focus. The appeals got too online and too abstract.”

School Closures Are Way Down, but Delaying These Hard Choices Makes Things Worse
Chad Aldeman at The74

“Too many district leaders closed their eyes to financial reality and hoped for societywide population trends to suddenly reverse. But there are signs they may be starting to grapple with the harsh budget truth.”

The post Funding Education Opportunity: Will Trump shutter the U.S. Department of Education? appeared first on Reason Foundation.

Table 1: Status of 2024 Education-related Ballot Measures in States

All school choice-related ballot measures failed.

With seeming momentum at the state level, these school choice losses may seem counterintuitive, especially since voters in multiple states elected candidates expected to pursue school choice policies. For instance, after primarying and opposing members of their party who previously opposed school choice, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee strengthened their pro-school choice legislative coalitions and have said school choice proposals will be priorities in 2025.

As to why voters rejected school choice, Cato Institute’s Neal McCluskey told Reason magazine that “referenda for school choice are always at a disadvantage because you’re trying to take on entrenched, easily organized interests who defend the status quo and they can put a lot of money into defending the status quo and a lot of boots on the ground.”

In Kentucky, voters rejected Amendment 2, a constitutional amendment that would have let the legislature fund K-12 students outside of traditional public schools. According to the Courier Journal, only 35% of voters supported the amendment. Kentucky has no charter schools, and its open enrollment law is weak.

Similarly, almost 57% of Nebraska voters supported a referendum that struck down the state’s private school scholarship program, passed in 2023 but never implemented. Like Kentucky, Nebraska is one of the few states with no charter schools. While the state has a good open enrollment law, its strength is due to recent improvements during the 2024 legislative session.

In Colorado, by contrast, Amendment 80 fell short of voter approval. Theoretically, the higher support in Colorado than places like Kentucky could be because 334,000 students used public school choice, such as charter schools or open enrollment, during the 2023-24 school year, making voters more friendly to and familiar with school choice.

Yet, EdChoice’s Mike McShane argued the reason Colorado’s ballot measure failed was because it “fell victim to unclear ballot language, poor coalition management, and a lack of a clear ‘why.’” The purpose of provisions about school quality was unclear, leading many charter schools to take no position on the amendment and the Christian Home Educators of Colorado to oppose it. 

While it is disappointing these school choice ballot measures lost, school choice is still positioned to make significant gains in state legislatures in 2025.

Six of the 11 governor-elects have publicly supported robust private school policies, and seven fully support public school choice. 

Table 2: Support for Robust School Choice Reforms Among 2024 Governor-Elects 

Policymakers in states where governors are friendly to school choice should establish private school scholarship programs or strengthen existing ones, such as those in Indiana, Montana, and Utah.

For example, Texas’ Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said, “School choice is my top policy priority.” Additionally, “[Gov. Greg] Abbott said there are now more than enough votes to pass school choice in Texas,” Fox26 reported. 

Similarly, in Tennessee, the majority leaders in both chambers introduced a proposal that would give private school scholarships, valued at more than $7,000 each, to more than 20,000 students. 

At the same time, policymakers should codify strong open enrollment laws that let students attend traditional public schools other than their assigned ones with open seats. 

Most states that elected governors this month have weak open enrollment laws and received grades of ‘C’ or worse based on Reason Foundation’s 2024 open enrollment best practices. Open enrollment allows students to transfer to public schools with open seats. 

For example, Indiana’s and Missouri’s open enrollment laws received grades of ‘F’ on Reason’s scoresheet. Both states could significantly improve their open enrollment policies by ensuring students can transfer to any school with open seats in their grade levels.

Additionally, open enrollment can succeed in blue states, as evidenced by the strong policies in Colorado and Delaware. Accordingly, policymakers shouldn’t miss a chance to partner with governors, such as Colorado Gov. Jared Polis or Vermont Gov. Phil Scott, who are open to further strengthening open enrollment options for students.

In particular, the six states with newly divided governments, such as Michigan or Minnesota, give state policymakers a chance to introduce bipartisan proposals that appeal to conservatives and liberals and are popular with voters.

In 2025, policymakers should strengthen school choice policies so children can attend schools that are the right fit.

From the States

In other important education and school choice developments across the country, Texas and Tennessee policymakers identified school choice proposals as priorities for the 2025 legislative sessions.

As mentioned, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott primaried and campaigned against fellow Republicans who had opposed school choice and strengthened his coalition as “26 pro-school choice Republicans were voted into the Texas House, resulting in a net gain of two Republicans in the lower chamber,” The Texan’s Cameron Abrams reported. Abbott said, “With last night’s election results, Texas will finally be able to provide school choice for every Texan.” Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who presides over the Texas Senate, issued a statement “naming school choice Senate Bill 2” and urged Gov. Abbott to declare school choice an emergency for the 2025 session.

With the support of Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee, the House and Senate majority leaders introduced identical proposals that would provide private school scholarships to 20,000 students. The scholarships, valued at more than $7,000 each, could pay for tuition at state-accredited private schools. The proposal would also provide a one-time bonus of $2,000 for all public school teachers.

What to Watch

North Carolina policymakers may push through a school choice proposal before the end of the year.

After losing their supermajority, North Carolina Republicans may try to pass a private school choice proposal before existing members’ terms expire in January. GOP leadership would aim to override Gov. Roy Cooper’s veto and codify House Bill 10, providing private school scholarships to 55,000 students waitlisted from the program. Gov. Cooper claimed the bill would be “devastating for education across the board.”

The Latest from Reason Foundation

–Grading every state’s public school open enrollment laws at Reason Foundation

Reason Foundation released its latest open enrollment rankings and best practices, including letter grades for each state’s open enrollment laws. Oklahoma has the best open enrollment policies, and four other states received ‘A’ grades. Many states, however, still have much work to do— 33 states received grades of ‘F.’

–California’s open enrollment laws have room for improvement at The Orange County Register

Gov. Gavin Newsom recently made California’s District of Choice cross-district open enrollment program permanent. However, California policymakers can do more to expand open enrollment and strengthen their laws. California currently scores a ‘D-” on Reason’s scorecard.

Virginia’s K-12 funding system needs an overhaul, not tweaks at Reason Foundation

“Virginia continues to fund its public schools using its outdated Standards of Quality (SOQ) formula that was developed in the 1970s. This system is non-transparent, inflexible, and unfair. The state can do better by its students, but that requires ripping off the band-aid and pursuing a comprehensive school finance overhaul.”

Recommended reading 

What’s Ahead for Colleges, School Choice, and the Department of Education?
Frederick Hess, director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, at Education Next

“So, what will get done? The likeliest scenario is a substantial tax-credit program (presumably along the lines of the Educational Choice for Children Act) getting folded into next year’s extension of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. The program would allow donors to deduct contributions to scholarship organizations from their federal taxes. A bill which included something like a $5 billion tax credit would be small beans in terms of the budget impact but represent a major win for school choice.”

Study: Charters Hastened Catholic School Decline. Will ESAs Slow the Process?
Kevin Mahnken at The74

“Between 1998 and 2020, an average of 3.5 percent of students left their Catholic school within two years of a charter opening nearby, according to the paper’s authors. As the number of families transfering to charters grew, the Catholic establishments became significantly more likely to close.”

Public Schooling Culture War Appears to Be Cooling—Why?
Neal McCluskey at Cato Institute

“There is a clear leap in battles in 2021, after lulls in a generally upward trend between 2012 to 2018. We reached new records in 2021, 2022, and 2023. But the 2024 bar—a projection for the entire year based on our current pace—is well below 2023. Just 329 conflicts, compared to 540 a year earlier.”

The post Funding Education Opportunity: How the 2024 elections affected the K-12 reform landscape appeared first on Reason Foundation.

Today, between declining birth rates, fiscal chaos, and competition from charter and private schools, public education bears little resemblance to what it was before the pandemic. These challenges will deepen in the coming years, and widespread school closures and staff reductions are likely. But the most daunting task will be convincing parents to enroll their children in public schools.

The birth dearth

Nationwide, public school enrollment has declined by 1.2 million students—about 2.3 percent—since 2020. Research suggests that 40 percent of these students switched to private schools or homeschooling as parents grew weary of prolonged school closures, masking policies, and curricular battles. However, demographics also played a key role, with about one-quarter of the decrease attributable to a declining number of school-aged kids thanks to the birth dearth.

The number of births in the U.S. dropped by 17 percent between 2007 and 2023. This means that 720,000 fewer births occurred in 2023 than in 2007. This baby bust also extends to U.S. immigrants. In 2019, immigrant fertility rates dropped below replacement levels for the first time.

Additionally, some states have experienced significant student attrition because of domestic migration between states. For instance, California and New York lost nearly 342,000 and 244,000 students, respectively, between fiscal years 2021 and 2022 due to outmigration, according to Bellwether.

The bad news for public schools, which largely rely on per-pupil funding, is that the enrollment decline is far from over. With the lower number of school-aged kids as the driving factor, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) estimates that K-12 enrollment will drop by another 2.7 million students by the 2031-32 school year, with states such as California, New York, and New Mexico all projected to lose more than 10 percent of student enrollment. NCES projects that only nine states will see increases in public school populations, with Idaho, North Dakota, and Florida topping the list. 

All told, declining enrollment will be a major blow to public school budgets across the country. School districts such as Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), the nation’s second-largest, are already shells of their former selves. While it still serves about 530,000 students, LAUSD lost more than 100,000 students between the 2015-16 and 2022-23 school years, staying afloat financially thanks to generous state and federal education funding policies. But, for LAUSD and countless other school districts, the fiscal reckoning has arrived.

The fiscal storm

In recent years, public school budgets have been shielded by the $190 billion in federal COVID relief funding received during the pandemic. But these funds are expiring and researchers from Edunomics Lab estimate this will result in an average single-year funding reduction of more than $1,000 per student in the 2024-25 school year. School districts that spent the one-time cash infusion on things like new hires, salary increases, or plugging budget holes will have to scramble to balance their books in the months and years ahead. The loss of federal pandemic-relief funding coupled with fewer students are why public school closures are on the horizon in places such as Seattle, San Francisco, and San Antonio. 

To make matters worse for public school budgets, inflation has wiped out many recent state and local education funding increases. Between 2020 and 2022, nominal nonfederal funding grew by $1,485 per student, but that’s an increase of only $55 per student after adjusting for inflation. Before the pandemic, most public schools had grown accustomed to frequent funding bumps, with inflation-adjusted education revenue increasing nationally by an average of $3,212 per student from 2002 to 2020. But with many state budgets tightening, public school lobbyists will have an uphill battle to secure more funding despite their soaring costs.  

There’s also another challenge lurking for public school budgets: universal school choice programs. Just four years ago, these programs seemed like a libertarian pipe dream. Now, in many states, they’re fundamentally changing public education and putting further strain on enrollment. 

A competitive K-12 marketplace

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, 65 school choice programs operated across 29 states, allowing students to access public dollars for private education. But virtually all of these policies were narrowly targeted, with eligibility limited to low-income students or students with disabilities. This changed in 2021 when West Virginia passed the first school choice law providing for near-universal participation. Since then, states like Arizona, Iowa, and Oklahoma have followed suit, bringing the number of states with universal or near-universal programs to 12.

According to EdChoice, 40 percent of all U.S. students are now eligible to participate in private school choice programs—that’s more than 22 million students and counting, with Texas and possibly other states likely to join the mix in 2025. 

When it comes to K-12 education, American families have more options than ever. The rise of homeschooling and private school choice—combined with charter schools, open enrollment, and other forms of choice—means that public schools will increasingly have to compete for students and their funding. 

Adapting to a new reality in K-12 public education

School districts must right-size in the coming years, ensuring that costs align with funding. For many districts, closing under-enrolled schools—a politically fraught process—will be an unavoidable part of the journey to fiscal sustainability. A study by the Brookings Institution found that between 2018-19 and 2021-22, 12 percent of elementary and 9 percent of middle schools saw enrollment declines exceeding 20 percent of their populations. As difficult as it is, school district officials should address this challenge head-on and dismiss vague or misguided calls for equity that delay the inevitable tough decisions and closures. 

Public schools must also embrace a competitive K-12 marketplace, which research suggests they can do with effective leadership. In a recent study by David Figlio, Cassandra Hart, and Krzysztof Karbownik of Florida’s tax credit scholarship program, which gives students scholarships to attend private schools, researchers found that competition among schools helped improve public school performance over a 15-year period, including improvements in test scores, student absenteeism, and other measures.

A separate study by California’s Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO) found school districts that lost students to the state’s District of Choice program, which allows students to transfer to public schools outside of their assigned school districts, took steps to mitigate these declines by engaging their communities and revamping their programmatic offerings. For example, community meetings revealed that families wanted more college preparatory or math and science courses. Additionally, families wanted increased transfer opportunities to other schools inside the school districts. The LAO reported that “districts made the implementation of changes to address [their community’s] concerns a priority” and, in some cases, were able to significantly reduce the number of students transferring out afterwards. Between extended school closures and controversial policy decisions, many families felt betrayed by public schools in recent years.

In the post-COVID era, public schools must examine their shortcomings and find ways to serve families better, especially as there are fewer students and the education marketplace becomes more competitive. This will become increasingly important as states adopt education policies that give families more options.

A version of this column first appeared on TheDispatch.com.

The post What the birth dearth means for public schools appeared first on Reason Foundation.

Kentucky Amendment 2 would authorize the legislature to fund K-12 students outside of the traditional public schools.  

Amendment 2 would allow the legislature to fund alternative schools like charter schools or provide tax-credit scholarships, vouchers, or education savings accounts that families could use at schools they chose, including private schools.  

Fiscal Impact 

This amendment has no direct fiscal impact. 

Proponents’ Arguments 

Proponents argue that this measure is necessary since it will create an environment whereby families can choose their children’s schools. Until now, the government has assigned students to their schools based on where they live. If this amendment passes, the legislature could fund education options other than traditional public schools, such as charter schools, tax-credit scholarships, vouchers, or education savings accounts. This could create a fairer system since students and their parents could select schools outside the state’s traditional public school system that are a better fit, giving families agency in school selection. Parents know what is best for their children, including which schools are the right fit.  

Moreover, this reform would remove the 130-year-old “handcuffs” binding legislators today and prevent them from funding alternative schools or school choice. Freed of these constrictions, Kentucky policymakers can pass education laws supported by the people who elected them.  

Opponents’ Arguments 

Opponents argue that Amendment 2 would let policymakers divert funds from public schools, investing in private schools that are unaccountable to taxpayers. Experience from other states that have passed such laws finds that the fiscal costs associated with vouchers are high, often ballooning more than estimated projections, and they subsidize the education costs of existing private school students at the expense of public school students. Moreover, these new costs will especially hurt rural public schools, which are already in need of additional funding.  

Critics argue that, ultimately, the amendment would undermine K-12 public education, the backbone of Kentucky’s communities. Voting against it will protect the state’s public schools, taxpayer dollars, and local communities. 

Discussion  

Families in Kentucky have limited educational options if they cannot afford to pay for private education. This means that even though Kentucky law requires parents to send their children to school, they often lack real education options other than their assigned schools. Many families use school choice policies to attend schools that are a better fit, reflect their religious convictions, are safer, or have better academics. Kentucky should ensure that families have a diverse array of choices for how to use state funding for their child’s education, even if that is to send them to a religious school. Amendment 2 would be a step in the right direction since it would let the legislature direct public funds to schools outside of traditional public schools.  

Private school choice programs offer an array of benefits, such as access to safer schools, better academics, or increased graduation rates. As of 2023, 84% of the 187 studies on private school choice programs showed positive effects, 10% showed null effects, and only 6% showed negative effects. At the same time, competition between private and public schools can encourage schools to improve, benefitting both private and public school students. 

Moreover, a 2021 analysis of Florida’s tax-credit scholarship program traced the program’s effects on students for 15 years. Most notably, the report found that the private school choice program benefitted public school students’ behavior and academics. While all students benefitted, low-income students showed the most improvement. The authors attribute these gains to the ripple effects of competition, which encourage all schools to improve.  

While private schools don’t have the same bureaucratic accountability required of public schools, they face a more immediate form of public accountability: parents who can take their education dollars to a competitor. Private schools that fail to meet the needs of students close since dissatisfied families leave.  

The additional cost of school choice programs depends on varying factors, such as appropriations, student eligibility, and program type. For instance, a universal voucher could initially increase costs as current private school students use it. However, a universal tax-credit scholarship, like the one proposed in 2022, would not incur increased costs to taxpayers since the accounts are funded by tax-free donations.  

Fears that school choice policies will destroy local communities are overwrought. Most public schools, including rural ones, already compete with nearby private schools for students. In fact, seven in 10 students living in rural areas live within 10 miles of a private elementary school. Data from states with robust school choice programs show that public schools can successfully navigate a more competitive education marketplace. For instance, since charter schools were introduced in Arizona 30 years ago, the state has only consolidated rural school districts in two counties, closed one school district (which had no charter or private schools in it), and created one new school district. This illustrates that school choice is not a death knell for public schools or their communities. 

The post Kentucky Amendment 2 would allow state funding for non-public education appeared first on Reason Foundation.

This begs the question, ‘How exactly is the head of a federal agency fighting for public education?’ Even the chancellor of New York City Schools recently emphasized that K-12 education should remain a state issue. “Ultimately, I go back to the fact that education is still within the full purview of the states,” Chancellor David C. Banks told The New York Times.

Accompanied by Becky Pringle, president of the nation’s largest teacher union, the National Education Association (NEA), Secretary Cardona revealed some of his cards at a roundtable in Michigan, “When we talk about fighting for public education, we gotta fight for our educators too,” he said. 

In particular, Cardona emphasized how Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) programs signal a strong federal investment in K-12 education by forgiving eligible teachers’ student loans. To date, the PSLF program has covered approximately $4 billion in debt for nearly 470,000 teachers.

Unfortunately, we can’t say that PSLF for teachers paid off for students. “Despite decades of reform efforts, substantial public investment, and increased staffing levels, outcomes in public schools, especially those serving disadvantaged communities, have barely budged in half a century,” the American Enterprise Institute’s Robert Pondiscio explained.

For instance, Reason Foundation’s K-12 Spending Spotlight shows that, on average, 4th- and 8th-grade students taking the National Assessment of Educational Progress failed to make significant progress, if any, between 2003 and 2019 in math and reading.

Given this failure to improve national test scores and student learning, recently exacerbated by pandemic-induced learning loss, Secretary Cardona’s joint bus tour with the NEA’s president, campaigning for federal handouts for teachers, appears tone-deaf at best. There are important differences between fighting for public school students and fighting for teachers’ unions.

To make matters worse, PSLF programs help subsidize a broken system where teachers are rewarded for earning degrees that might not even help them improve student learning.

For instance, at least 46 states pay teachers with master’s degrees more on average than teachers with only bachelor’s degrees. However, Stanford University’s Eric Hanushek’s research showed that teachers’ master’s degrees don’t improve student outcomes. “Perhaps most remarkable is the finding that a master’s degree has no systematic relationship to teacher quality as measured by student outcomes,” Hanushek finds.

Taxpayers should not pay double for degrees that fail to impact student learning. Instead of promoting policies at the state and federal levels that encourage degree inflation, policymakers should reconsider how to make careers in public education more attractive and accessible. 

For one, state policymakers should ensure that increases in education revenues make it into instructional salaries. Teachers in many states have not seen salaries increase even as there have been massive increases in overall education funding. Reason Foundation research showed that total K-12 revenues increased by 25% between 2002 and 2020. However, “inflation-adjusted spending on instructional salaries hardly budged, increasing from $4,920 to $5,145 per student,” an increase of just five percent for teachers.

Additionally, state policymakers should remove unnecessary barriers to the teaching profession, such as requiring teacher licenses. These exams are poor predictors of candidates’ teaching abilities and impose financial barriers to entering the profession.

Reforms like these can help states attract and retain good teachers who can help students recover from learning loss and improve in the years ahead.

From the states

North Carolina policymakers vote to expand private school scholarship funding.

In North Carolina, the state Senate and House passed a supplemental spending plan that includes $248 million for the state’s Opportunity Scholarship, which parents can use to pay for student’s education expenses, such as private school tuition or transportation. This new funding aims to provide scholarships to the 55,000 children who were waitlisted for the program after the General Assembly removed eligibility caps from it. The proposal now goes to Gov. Roy Cooper’s desk, and the Associated Press reported that Senate leader Phil Berger anticipates a veto and “an override vote would be more likely in November.”

What to watch

Arkansas’ Attorney General Tim Griffin announced that private schools participating in the state’s private school choice program are not subject to Freedom of Information Act requests. He argued that even though private schools accept state funds, they are not intertwined with the state since private schools existed and operated independently of the state before the scholarships were established. Moreover, he argues the state did not delegate its education authority to private schools since public schools will continue to operate free of charge to students and “under State control,” Griffin announced, according to the Democrat Gazette. Opponents say private schools that accept taxpayer dollars should have to follow the same rules as public schools.

South Carolina’s Supreme Court ruled that the state’s Education Scholarship Trust Fund Program, a targeted education savings account, is unconstitutional. Codified in 2023, the program would have provided eligible recipients (students whose families earned 200% or less of the Federal Poverty Limit) with scholarships valued at $6,000. In a 3-2 ruling, the state Supreme Court stated that the program financially benefits private schools in violation of the South Carolina Constitution.

Recommended reading 

A Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy?
Jay P. Greene at Education Next

“If [Joshua] Cowen were to critically examine his own argument, he might consider alternatives to his contention that school choice has only spread across the country because billionaires used their wealth to weave a vast conspiracy that has hoodwinked people into ignoring the “overwhelming” evidence against vouchers. He might consider the possibility that other people interpret the evidence differently and also assign different importance to various kinds of outcomes.”

Should Schools Hire More Staff or Pay Teachers More?
Paul Peterson at Education Next

“We are still refining our analysis, but our early results indicate that the recent run-up in non-teacher employment is not as troubling as it seems. In states without a duty-to-bargain law, hiring other school employees yields at least as much gain in math achievement as hiring additional teachers. If districts have a shortage of employees who provide nutritional, medical, social, psychological, and other needed services, then hiring more of them may be beneficial. The need for additional hires may be especially large in states without duty-to-bargain laws.”

The Miseducation of America’s Teachers
Daniel Buck at National Affairs

“Our nation’s teacher-preparation system is broken. Our educators enter the profession woefully unprepared for their jobs. The large majority attend programs at university schools of education, where they read and discuss esoteric academic literature that contains no references to classroom-management techniques, lesson pacing, learning assessments, or other practical knowledge. These schools are boxing academies that don’t teach their students how to duck and weave.”

The post Funding Education Opportunity: Student loan forgiveness is not the answer to strengthening public education appeared first on Reason Foundation.

New research from the American Enterprise Institute’s Nat Malkus revealed that public school students nationwide have missed school at unprecedented rates. The number of students missing at least 10 percent of a school year nearly doubled, “increasing from 15 percent in 2018 to 28 percent in 2022,” Malkus found. 

Even though K-12 students’ attendance increased during 2023, chronic absenteeism rates “remained 75 percent higher than the pre-pandemic baseline,” he wrote. If student attendance continues to slowly rebound, Malkus estimated that chronic absenteeism would not return to pre-pandemic rates until 2030.

Describing chronic absenteeism as the true “long COVID,” Malkus pointed out that missing school regularly exacerbates learning loss and lower test scores. Unfortunately, learning loss won’t just affect students’ grades. It will also affect their pocketbooks.  

Stanford University’s Eric Hanushek estimated that pandemic-induced learning loss could result in a five to six percent slump in students’ future earnings. In fact, Hanushek estimated that, on average, students in 33 states would experience an income loss of five percent or more.     

Kevin Mahnken wrote in The74, “If Hanushek’s analysis proves correct, those costs will be borne unevenly. The largest state economies, such as California, Texas, New York, Florida and Pennsylvania, are all projected to absorb losses greater than $500 billion; their disproportionate burden reflects both the scope of their learning setbacks to this point and the number of future workers living in each.”

Part of the solution to getting kids back on track is for schools to partner with parents to get students back in school, especially students from low-income families who were most negatively impacted by school closures. 

At the same time, school administrators need to ensure that school time is used efficiently to maximize student learning. Even though students spend as much time in U.S. schools than those in other advanced nations, they have less to show for it. 

This is partially due to the fact that U.S. schools often use school time very poorly. In his book, The Great School Rethink, the American Enterprise Institute’s Rick Hess noted that only about 60% of a school day is actually used for student instruction. “This means that a 1,080-hour school year amounts to a 650-hour school year,” Hess wrote.

Students lose time learning for a variety of reasons. In Providence, Rhode Island, researchers estimated that students lose 10-20 days of instructional time due to classroom disruptions, such as intercom announcements, staff visits, or student behavior. 

In other cases, unnecessary bureaucratic red tape encroaches on learning time. For example, an internal review of Nevada public schools found that each principal spends approximately 19 full workdays annually filling out duplicative teacher evaluations because of onerous laws.

Time is precious, but even more so for students who face lifelong ramifications due to learning loss. Hess’ research indicates that reducing avoidable classroom disruptions could be the most efficient way to help get students back on track. 

With more children missing school, the value of each school day increases significantly. Accordingly, educators need to ensure that each school day is maximized and that student time isn’t wasted. 

From the states

In other important education and school choice developments across the country, Georgia policymakers passed an education savings account proposal, Wyoming adopted a weakened income-based ESA, and the Louisiana House passed an income-based private school scholarship.

Georgia legislators passed Senate Bill 233, which would provide eligible recipients with a scholarship valued at $6,500 annually. According to the Georgia Recorder, the bill provides enough funding for approximately 21,500 students each year, while the program would expire after 10 years. Gov. Brian Kemp has yet to sign the bill.

Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon signed House Enrolled Act 53 into law, providing education savings accounts valued up to $6,000 for families whose income is at or below 150% of the federal poverty level. However, Gov. Gordon eliminated provisions that would have expanded eligibility to students whose families exceeded that income threshold. The governor cited constitutional concerns as the reason for his line-item vetoes.

The Louisiana State Senate is reviewing House Bill 745, which was passed by the House. If passed and signed into law, the proposal would provide recipients with scholarships based on their family’s income. Scholarships for students from low-income families could be worth $7,500, those from middle- and upper-income families could be worth $5,200, and students with disabilities could receive scholarships valued at more than $15,000. Gov. Jeff Landry supports the bill.

In Nebraska, the legislature passed L.B. 1402 in its final round of reviews, which would establish education scholarships for students. The bill prioritizes applicants who are from low-income families, in foster care or have disabilities. Each scholarship amount would not exceed 75% of the state’s per-pupil formula. Gov. Jim Pillen has said he supports the proposal.

Despite last-minute negotiations last week, Tennessee’s voucher proposal is officially dead. Gov. Bill Lee said, “I am extremely disappointed for the families who will have to wait yet another year for the freedom to choose the right education for their child, especially when there is broad agreement that now is the time to bring universal school choice to Tennessee.” The governor added that legislative leaders expressed support for revisiting the bill next year.

What to watch

In Alaska, a circuit court judge ruled that the state’s correspondence program, established in 2014, is unconstitutional. More than 22,000 students currently use the program, which reimburses parents for education related expenses. The students using correspondence programs are homeschooled but under the authority of local school districts. The State Supreme Court may pick up the case. In the meantime, Rep. Justin Ruffridge, co-chair of the House Education Committee told the Alaska Beacon that this issue could “quickly become a No. 1 legislative priority.”

Texas school district employees face criminal charges for electioneering. Denton County Independent School District administrators were indicted after a whistleblower exposed emails allegedly sent by them telling other school district staff members how to vote in the March Republican primary election. State law prohibits school districts from using resources and state and local funds to electioneer for or against any candidate. The Texas American Federation of Teachers has defended the principals.

Recommended reading 

Arizona’s Battle Against School Choice for Special Needs
Aaron Garth Smith at Reason Magazine

“Suffice it to say the entire special education apparatus is rigged against students. IDEA only provides accountability if parents have the time, financial means, and doggedness to navigate a highly bureaucratic system that’s tilted against them. But even then, nothing is guaranteed—California’s Irvine Unified School District spent over $1 million in legal fees fighting a single family just to make a point to other parents.”

The Public Purposes of Private Education: a Civic Outcomes Meta-Analysis
M. Danish Shakeel, Patrick J. Wolf, Alison Heape Johnson, Mattie A. Harris & Sarah R. Morris at Educational Psychology Review

“Our search identifies 13,301 initial target studies, ultimately yielding 531 effects from 57 qualified studies drawing from 40 different databases. Using Robust Variance Estimation, we determine that, on average, private schooling boosts any civic outcome by 0.055 standard deviations over public schooling. Religious private schooling, particularly, is strongly associated with positive civic outcomes. The evidence is especially strong that private schooling is correlated with higher levels of political tolerance and political knowledge and skills.”

Exclusive: Microschools Fill Niche for Students with Disabilities, Survey Shows
Linda Jacobson at The74

“Almost two-thirds of operators say their programs draw students considered neurodivergent, according to the latest snapshot of the movement from the National Microschooling Center, an advocacy organization. The survey of 400 microschool founders in 41 states also shows that children with other disabilities represent one of the next largest populations served, with 53% of school operators reporting that these students are enrolled in their schools.” 

The post Funding Education Opportunity: To combat learning loss, schools need to use time more wisely appeared first on Reason Foundation.

North Carolina House Bill 793 would establish mandatory cross- and within-district open enrollment. If signed into law, this proposal would expand education options for the almost 1.4 million students enrolled in North Carolina’s public schools. Moreover, the Tar Heel State would improve its open enrollment ranking from 0/5 to 2/5. 

South Carolina House Bill 3843 and S.0315 would allow mandatory cross- and within-district open enrollment. They also would require school districts to post their open enrollment policies and procedures and the number of available seats by grade level on their websites. If signed into law, these proposals would expand education options for the nearly 800,000 students enrolled in South Carolina’s public schools. The state would also improve its open enrollment ranking from 0/5 to 3/5. 

Tennessee Senate Bill 973 would implement mandatory cross-district open enrollment, letting students transfer to schools outside their school district that have available capacity. If signed into law,  this would expand the schooling options for the more than 900,000 students in the Volunteer State and improve the state’s open enrollment ranking from 2/5 to 3/5. 

Virginia H.B. 659 and S.B. 552 would establish within-district open enrollment, boost transparency, and curtail tuition costs for students using it.  

The open enrollment proposals, in particular, would vastly improve the education options for the 4.3 million students enrolled in public schools throughout these states. Already, students benefit from strong cross-district open enrollment laws in 16 states. During the 2021-22 school year, more than one million students used open enrollment or some sort of public school transfer law in 11 states. 

The number of students using open enrollment is likely much higher since data on open enrollment is scarce and several programs are just beginning. For instance, robust cross-district open enrollment went into effect in fall 2023 in five states. Moreover, Kansas’ strong open enrollment law signed into law in 2022, will become effective during the school year beginning in the fall of 2024. 

More states should establish strong open enrollment laws so students can attend public schools that are the right fit for them, regardless of where they live.

The K-12 School Choice Calculator by Reason Foundation and EdChoice

Policymakers considering school choice proposals want to know about the fiscal effects of these programs on taxpayers and public school districts. Enter the new K-12 School Choice Calculator (SCC), a dynamic tool released today for legislators, fiscal analysts, and others who are interested in learning about the fiscal impact of private school choice programs across all 50 states. This tool represents a collaborative effort between EdChoice’s Fiscal Research and Education Center and Reason Foundation.

“The SCC allows users to design an ESA program for any state and provides a range of estimates for the fiscal effects of an education savings account (ESA) program on state and local taxpayers combined,” writes Martin Lueken, director of fiscal policy and analysis at EdChoice. “We hope this tool can be useful for lawmakers and stakeholders and help inform program design.”

The K-12 School Choice Calculator is here, and Lueken’s overview on using it and the methodology is here.

From the states

In other developments across the country, Kentucky policymakers are considering a constitutional amendment, and Florida may expand eligibility for its private school choice programs.

In Kentucky, 15 policymakers introduced House Bill 208, a constitutional amendment that would open the door to private school choice. This proposal is the state legislature’s response to the Kentucky Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling that the state’s tax-credit scholarship program is unconstitutional. Currently, Republicans control both legislative chambers and passed the original tax-credit scholarship after overriding Gov. Andy Beshear’s veto.

The Florida House Choice and Innovation Subcommittee approved H.B. 1403, sending it to the House Education and Employment Committee. The bill would expand eligibility for the Family Tax Credit Scholarship, Family Empowerment Scholarship (FES) for Educational Options, and the FES for Students with Unique Abilities to include the children of active duty military personnel who are stationed in Florida or list Florida as their state of residence. The bill would also eliminate the Hope Scholarship Program, transferring its funding to the state’s tax-credit scholarship program.

While Indiana policymakers heard Senate Bill 255 last Thursday, they will likely not return to it until next year, according to Chalkbeat. If signed into law, however, the bill could drastically transform the state’s education system by streamlining existing private school choice programs into one and letting students use “state funding to purchase classes and services a la carte from schools, tutors, and other approved organizations,” Chalkbeat reported. 

The New Hampshire Senate chamber voted in support of S.B 442, which would expand student eligibility for the state’s Education Freedom Accounts (EFAs). Under the proposal, any public school student denied a school reassignment becomes eligible for an EFA. Currently, student eligibility for the program is limited to those whose families’ income is 350% of the federal poverty level. 

What to watch

Kansas school districts prepare as robust open enrollment law becomes effective. The new law required school districts to post their open enrollment policies and procedures on their websites beginning January 1st this year. As of June 1, school districts will have to publish their available capacity by grade level as well. Students can apply to transfer to schools outside their school district with open seats.

Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs’ budget proposal would gut the state’s Empowerment Scholarship Accounts (ESA) program by limiting eligibility to students who were enrolled in public schools for at least 100 days. “Hobbs has also proposed eliminating prior-year eligibility. Those changes would disqualify about 49,500 ESA students who were not previously enrolled in public schools, saving the state an estimated $244 million,” Cronkite News reported.

Recommended reading 

Exclusive Data: Thousands of Schools at Risk of Closing Due to Enrollment Loss
Linda Jacobson at The74

“Among districts with over 50,000 students, those with the greatest share of schools that declined by 20% or more are concentrated in the South. They include Memphis-Shelby in Tennessee, the Dekalb County schools near Atlanta and several in Texas. Other large and mid-size districts topping the list include Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Albuquerque and the Granite Public Schools in Utah.”

Covid-19 Hit Hardest at the Most Vulnerable. So did School Closures
Rebecca Jack and Emily Oster at Education Next

“All of these pieces taken together emphasize the fact that school closures exacerbated existing inequalities. Access to in-person schooling was not equal for all children, and those with more access to in-person schooling were typically the same students who already had more access to other academic resources. The Covid-disrupted school year widened existing gaps in access to education.”

Emergency-Hired Teachers Do Just as Well as Those Who Go Through Normal Training
Chad Aldeman at The74

“In other words, making it harder to become a teacher will reduce the supply but offers no guarantee that those who meet the bar will actually be effective in the classroom. The recent COVID-related waivers should cause policymakers to re-evaluate whether barriers into the teaching profession actually serve a meaningful purpose or if they’re keeping potentially talented educators out of the classroom.”

The post Funding Education Opportunity: The best open enrollment proposals of 2024 and the new K-12 School Choice Calculator appeared first on Reason Foundation.

In response to the pandemic, school districts received the largest influx of federal K-12 education dollars in history–nearly $200 billion, with little federal oversight. With the federal money flowing freely, school districts spent on facility upgrades, teacher bonuses, backfilling budgets, and even repaving parking lots. Yet, many districts struggled to implement programs to stop learning loss. 

According to a Dec. 2022 National Institute for Education Sciences (NIES) survey of school staff, just 37% of school districts provided high-dosage tutoring—defined as one-on-one or small group tutoring and considered the most effective form of tutoring— and even fewer students took advantage of it. NIES reported that only 10% of public school students used high-dosage tutoring. For instance, in the School District of Philadelphia, less than one percent of students took advantage of the district’s free tutoring services. “District officials aren’t sure why its tutoring program, which is free for the district’s K-12 students, isn’t reaching more of them,” Chalkbeat reported.

Overcoming these barriers is challenging, but some school districts are reaching students by partnering with other community institutions. For example, during the pandemic, a small, rural Illinois school district, Monmouth-Roseville, partnered with a local church, using “COVID relief funds to facilitate a[n in-person] tutoring program,” The74 reported.  Since then, Monmouth-Roseville used about half its COVID relief funds to implement various tutoring programs during and after school hours, partnering with the local college and community center to get students back on track. 

Monmouth-Roseville’s efforts are now paying dividends. Despite 96% of students in the district being from low-income families and 20% being English language learners, The74 found: “Monmouth-Roseville students receiving tutoring outpaced their peers’ growth in literacy and math in 2022, according to standardized tests. And low-income students in the district made faster progress than comparable students statewide.” The school district paid recent high school graduates from the church to tutor students, which helped students and parents overcome language barriers.

In North Carolina, some school districts and schools have similarly partnered with churches in rural areas to improve student literacy during the summer. Since 2012, North Carolina teachers have run reading camps at churches, where volunteers and pastors provide students with meals. Harvard literacy researcher Helen Chen noted that church communities can sometimes overcome barriers that school districts cannot, and research is being done to see how to scale the efforts.

These examples highlight a few examples of how thinking outside the traditional schoolyard can assist educators in reaching students effectively. School districts across the country should examine partnering with non-school institutions and every other option available that may help students recover from pandemic-induced learning loss.

From the states

School choice policies will benefit more families in the new school year.

In Nebraska, public school advocates want to put the state’s new school choice law on the 2024 ballot. To do so, they need to collect 90,000 signatures in the next 90 days. In May, state policymakers signed the Opportunity Scholarship program into law, which provides tax-credit scholarships to private school students.

The New Hampshire State Senate passed an expansion of the state’s Education Freedom Account (EFA) program. Families with incomes at or below 350 percent of the federal poverty level will now be eligible for EFAs valued at about $5,000. New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu is expected to sign the proposal into law.

Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey signed an expansion of the Alabama Accountability Act into law. This tax-credit scholarship lets students assigned to a public school ranked as “D” or “F” enroll in a private or public school outside their residentially assigned area. The law also expands eligibility so that students with a household income (family of four) of up to $75,000 and those with disabilities have more options.

In Wisconsin, the legislature passed a proposal that increased the state’s K-12 funding by $1 billion. This proposal includes additional funding for the state’s voucher program. Voucher recipients in kindergarten through 8th grade would receive an additional $1,000 annually, and recipients in high school would receive an extra $3,000 annually if the law is passed. Gov. Evers is expected to sign the bill this week.

What to watch

The Arkansas Supreme Court removed the pause on the LEARNS Act. A lower state court had temporarily paused the school choice law’s implementation after a lawsuit claimed the Arkansas state legislature failed to follow proper voting procedures when the bill was passed. The state Supreme Court reversed the decision, ruling that “because the appellees failed to meet their burden of proving irreparable harm, the circuit court abused its discretion in granting the motion.” As a result, the LEARNS Act is effective immediately.

Oklahoma established the country’s first religious charter school. Oklahoma’s Statewide Virtual Charter School Board approved St. Isidore of Seville Virtual Catholic School’s application in a split vote. Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt and State Superintendent Ryan Walters expressed support for the Catholic charter school. “Because charter schools are public schools funded by taxpayers, the decision to fund a religiously affiliated charter school is already coming under legal scrutiny,” the National Catholic Register reported.  

West Virginia approved more than 5,000 Hope Scholarship education savings accounts, approving more than 80% of applicants. Each student’s ESA is valued at $4,888. 

Applications for Iowa’s universal education savings accounts exceed projections. When policymakers signed Iowa’s ESA program into law last year, a state analysis estimated that 14,068 students would enroll. However, the state education agency has already received 17,520 applications with time remaining before the June 30 application deadline. Each approved ESA recipient receives a $7,600 scholarship in state funds.

Florida’s third-largest county expects a major uptick in ESA recipients. Officials in Palm Beach County announced they expect the number of education savings account recipients to double this coming school year. Last year, a total of 8,032 students in Palm Beach County received scholarships valued at $8,000 each. However, Palm Beach County officials anticipate scholarship recipients will increase to 16,398 students by the next fiscal year, as income caps are removed.

Yet again, a family is suing Maine’s tuition assistance program for religious discrimination. Shortly before the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Carson v Makin, policymakers revised Maine’s law to exclude any school that discriminates against other religions. This means that if a participating school provides a religious service, such as mass, it must also accommodate any other religious service. The suit argues that this policy intentionally discriminates against private schools with a faith-based mission.

Recommended reading 

What I Learned Running for School Board
Robert Pondiscio in Education Next

“But at the very least, a simple legislative fix also seems in order: move school board and budget votes off-campus. This would level the playing field by making school-district employees travel to cast their ballots, just like everyone else. It would also dull the impact of school district’s de facto get-out-the-friendly-vote efforts.”

Schools Pay More, While Teachers Get Less
Chad Aldeman at Bellwether

“In fact, states have been cutting benefits for workers even as they face rising costs, thanks to negligence in how they fund their teacher pension plans. States collectively now face more than $800 billion in unfunded pension liabilities. These pension debt costs are crowding out other potential investments in education.”

Bright Horizons for School Choice
Frederick M. Hess at Law and Liberty

“It’s a lot easier to tolerate heterodoxy when educational choice is racking up one unprecedented triumph after another. Those gains also make this a crucial time for no-nonsense reflection. After all, the stakes have been raised. Success will be more visible and failure will be more devastating.”

The post Funding Education Opportunity: Unconventional education partnerships, states’ school choice legislation, and more appeared first on Reason Foundation.

Nationwide, the Household Pulse Survey estimates that in May 2023, 85% of students are enrolled in public schools, 9.6% attend private schools, and 5.4% are homeschooled.

HPS figures aren’t directly comparable to data collected by the National Household Education Survey by the U.S. Census Bureau due to methodological differences but suggest that the homeschooling rate has increased substantially from 2019, pre-pandemic, when 2.8% of students learned at home. Research published by the Urban Institute supports a surge, finding that homeschooling increased by 30% between the 2019-20 and 2021-22 school years in the states examined. 

Broken down by demographics, a few trends emerge from HPS survey results. 

First, there is an inverse relationship between income and public school enrollment, with lower-income families being more likely to attend public schools. For instance, 85.4% of families of students in the lowest income bracket attend public schools, compared with only 74.2% of families in the highest income bracket. But homeschooling appears to be less popular among higher-income households, with those making less than $100,000 reporting the greatest participation rates. Chart 1 summarizes these figures.

The data also indicate that more than 1 in 10 black and Hispanic students in the U.S. are now enrolled in private schools or homeschooling. While these student groups still attend public schools at higher rates than white students, the observed gaps aren’t quite as stark as they are with income. For example, the difference between black and white students attending private schools—2.5 percentage points—is less than the private school participation gap between the highest and lowest income brackets, 14 percentage points. In short, income seems to be a stronger predictor of public school participation than race. 

Finally, while state estimates can fluctuate considerably across survey administrations, this state-level data from HPS suggest that these trends vary substantially across the country. For instance, estimated homeschooling rates for May 2023 range from less than 5% in states such as California and Connecticut to over 9% in states such as Alaska and North Carolina. These figures might lack precision, but it’s reasonable to think that differences in demographics, culture, and policy also influence what options are available for families and their decisions. 

Pre-pandemic data published by National Center for Education Statistics highlight that families choose to homeschool for diverse reasons, such as concerns about school environment, dissatisfaction with academic instruction, and a desire to provide moral instruction. While much has changed since 2019, the reasons parents cited for homeschooling in 2019 are displayed in Chart 3.  

Recent studies also suggest that parents are increasingly interested in non-traditional learning options for their children. For instance, polling by EdChoice has found that parents’ views toward homeschooling grew more favorable during the pandemic, and in a survey of 3,000 parents by consulting firm Tyton Partners, 52% of parents indicated a desire to direct and curate their child’s education.

The rise in homeschooling and other approaches to K-12 education seems to persist, even as the COVID-19 pandemic recedes. The Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey data should be interpreted cautiously, but it does equip policymakers with real-time information and support research showing a growing demand for diverse approaches to education.

You can further explore these trends with Reason Foundation’s latest education data tool found here. 

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This high “switcher” rate—the share of school choice program participants who were previously enrolled or would have enrolled in public schools—saves taxpayer money because choice scholarships are cheaper than public schools. That’s why proponents have been able to argue that both participating families and taxpayers benefit from private school choice.

But in today’s policy environment, where states are adopting universal school choice programs—like Arizona, Arkansas, West Virginia, and Florida have recently—the taxpayer savings argument becomes more complicated.

By definition, universal school choice is available to all students. This makes it a far more impactful and widespread choice program but complicates the key variable responsible for fiscal savings—switcher rates. When fully implemented and assuming there are no cost caps, universal school choice programs are open to entire populations of students already attending private schools or being homeschooled, and these students weren’t previously receiving taxpayer support.

This is new territory for school choice proponents since past programs were primarily designed to target low-income families or students with disabilities who were likely to be enrolled in public schools. By making choice scholarships quickly available to non-public school student populations with little incentive not to take the taxpayer funds, universal school choice programs have lower up-front switcher rates and higher up-front costs for governments and, thus, taxpayers.

To be sure, it’s far too soon to know how much lower (if at all) public-school switcher rates will be under universal school choice programs in the long run. Some critics responded to early Arizona data showing that most initial ESA applicants were already non-public-school students by worrying the program would cost the state a lot while primarily benefiting families who could already afford private school. But those responses were rebuffed by subsequent data showing that many more students who had been in public schools had signed up and accounted for half of the state’s ESA participants. This share will likely climb as more parents become familiar with the program and available options.

The mechanics of state K-12 funding formulas are also related to the costs of choice programs. If large shares of education dollars don’t follow students to their schools, that can increase costs for taxpayers. Ultimately, whether the high up-front costs of universal school choice is a down payment toward future savings is yet to be determined. At the very least, the growing costs suggest a strong appetite for education choices.

From the states

In South Carolina, Gov. Henry McMaster recently signed S. 39, a law creating an Education Scholarship Trust Fund to fund ESAs for students who are eligible for Medicaid. Participating students will receive up to $6,000 in scholarship funds that can be used for instructional services, materials, private school tuition, and other purposes. The legislation limits the total number of scholarships that can be granted to 5,000, 10,000, and 15,000 from 2024 to 2026.

In Oklahoma, state legislators sent House Bill (HB) 1934 to Gov. Kevin Stitt last week. If signed, as expected, the bill would create a refundable tax credit program where families can receive up to $5,000 or $7,500 per child to pay for private school tuition, depending on their household income. The bill would also establish a $1,000 per child income tax credit for homeschooling families to pay for qualifying expenses such as tutoring or instructional materials. For the tax credits, the legislation caps the total value of credits that can be claimed at annual amounts of $150, $200, and $250 million per year from 2024 to 2026. For homeschool tax credits, the bill caps the total credits at $5 million per year.

Indiana lawmakers passed HB 1001 on April 28, a two-year budget bill that expands the state’s multiple school choice programs to near universality. The state’s voucher, tax credit scholarship, and ESA programs are now available to families below 400% of free and reduced lunch eligibility.

Montana lawmakers sent HB 393 to Gov. Greg Gianforte. The legislation would create an ESA for Montana students with disabilities. The ESA amount of roughly $7,000 per student includes state and local funds from a participating student’s school district of residence. Gov. Gianforte already signed HB 203, which standardizes and strengthens the state’s public school open enrollment policy. 

In North Carolina, legislators are considering three significant pieces of school choice legislation: House Bill 219, which would provide more funding to charter schools; HB 823, which would expand the state’s ESA program to be universal; and HB 793, which would create a cross-district public school open enrollment law. Due to Rep. Tricia Cotham switching from the Democratic to Republican Party, the Republican-controlled General Assembly appears to have the votes to override potential vetoes from Gov. Roy Cooper.

Nebraska lawmakers passed Legislative Bill 753, which would create a tax credit scholarship program for students previously enrolled in public schools or entering kindergarten or ninth grade. The bill still awaits a final reading and vote in the legislature.  

In Alabama, Senate Bill 202, a bill to create universal ESAs, was voted out of committee on May 10. The bill is slated for a vote on the Senate floor.

What to watch

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott threatens to veto watered-down school choice legislation. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said he would veto a proposed pared-down version of Senate Bill 8–which would create universal ESAs. Abbot claimed a “failure to expand the scope of school choice to something close to the Senate version of the original House version of the Senate bill will necessitate special sessions.” If Texas Republicans can garner enough support in the House to send an expansive choice bill to the governor, it would likely be the country’s most extensive school choice program.

How the federal debt ceiling fight could affect federal K-12 spending. President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy continue negotiating a bill to raise the federal debt ceiling. House Republicans passed a bill in April that would cut discretionary spending, including the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and Title I, the two largest federal K-12 programs. The House bill would restore federal discretionary spending to where it was in the 2022 fiscal year, but the cuts to these K-12 programs are unlikely to make it into a final debt ceiling deal approved by the Senate. The debt ceiling debate exemplifies the difficulty of reducing federal involvement in K-12 education.

Recommended reading 

What is an education savings account, and why does it matter?
by Rick Hess at EdWeek

“The distinction between ESAs and school vouchers (or charter schools) is clear in theory. In practice? Not as much. Eleven states now have ESA programs on the books, and, given that, it’s natural to think that these are, you know, full-blown ESAs. In truth, though, the ESAs created by these laws frequently work a lot like lump-sum voucher programs, with families quite limited in their ability to mix-and-match.”

Suburban charter schools, open enrollment pushing over the first domino
by Matt Ladner at reimaginED

“It’s best to turn the choice knob all the way to ‘11.’”

Listening to educational entrepreneurs
by Mike McShane at Forbes

“Access to capital, help navigating regulations, and support for educators who want to become businesspeople is a short but simple summary of what entrepreneurs say that they need. If we want to see more educational entrepreneurs, we need to figure out how to support them with information, resources, and training so they can thrive in an evolving K-12 education ecosystem.” 

The post Funding Education Opportunity: Estimating costs for universal school choice, new choice programs, and more appeared first on Reason Foundation.

In the 21 states examined, public K-12 enrollment declined in every state except for three states and the District of Columbia. The AP and Stanford found that public K-12 enrollment dropped by approximately 711,000 students in those locations. California and New York experienced massive enrollment declines, with nearly 271,000 and 133,000 students leaving public schools. 

By contrast, K-12 enrollments increased in other schooling sectors. Homeschool enrollment grew by about 184,000 during the pandemic, as likely would’ve been expected, with the homeschooling sectors in Florida and New York growing the most. 

Private school enrollments also grew, but more modestly, increasing by nearly 103,000. Florida, again, and Tennessee experienced the most significant growth in their private schools. 

Yet, the private and homeschool sector growth only accounted for about 40% of public school enrollment losses. Dee estimated that population changes, such as students moving to other states and declining birth rates, accounted for more than a quarter of public school enrollment losses. 

At the same time, the report estimated that 240,133 students remain unaccounted for. These unexplained losses featured most prominently in California and New York, where nearly 152,000 and 60,000 students remain missing, respectively. 

Some absences are likely due to unregistered homeschooling and families not enrolling their children in kindergarten, which is optional in nine of the 21 reviewed states. In these cases, Dee estimated that skipping kindergarten accounted for almost 40% of unexplained absences.

Nonetheless, some students have not attended school for multiple years now. Researchers have previously estimated that the lifetime earnings of students who experienced just one year of learning loss could be reduced by more than 9%, so there will be long-term concerns about many of these students and their futures. 

These public school enrollment declines have also hastened financial crises for many school districts that were unprepared for them, especially urban ones. For instance, Minneapolis Public Schools announced an impending fiscal crisis due to declining enrollment last fall.

With fewer students in public schools and an increasing number of families more comfortable with switching schools, public school districts will need to up their game as they navigate a more competitive education marketplace. Research shows that school districts can positively respond to competitive pressures by implementing measures like open enrollment. 

Policymakers should weaken school district monopolies, so students have options outside of their residentially-assigned schools. Oftentimes students drop out of school because of bullying by other students, not feeling like they fit in with classmates, not getting the academic attention they need, or conflicts with teaching staff. Policies, such as education savings accounts and open enrollment, provide students with flexible schooling options to transfer to schools that fit their needs. Education savings accounts, in particular, allow for significant educational customization, paying for tuition, books, physical therapy, transportation, and much more.

From the states

State policymakers continue to advance school choice proposals nationwide.

The Utah State Senate failed to pass a proposal (S.B. 166) to make microschools legal in the state.

In Idaho, the Senate Education Committee passed a proposal (S.B. 1038) that would establish approximately 6,600 education savings accounts. These accounts could be used to pay for various approved education expenses, such as private school tuition or textbooks. There are no income restrictions on the accounts. 

The Arkansas Senate passed Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ LEARNS Act (S.B. 294), which would initially establish education savings accounts for students who are homeless, in foster care, have disabilities, or are assigned to failing public schools. However, student eligibility would expand by 2026 to all K-12 students. At the same time, the proposal would also remove any caps on charter schools and student transfers through open enrollment. Currently, the bill has 25 cosponsors in the Senate and 55 cosponsors in the House, providing a supermajority and majority, respectively.

What to watch

South Carolina policymakers are thinking about expanding open enrollment. Proposals in the South Carolina House and Senate would expand public school choice, allowing students to transfer to public schools other than their assigned ones. Currently, some public school districts in the Palmetto State permit students to participate in within-district open enrollment, but the new proposal would require all school districts to participate in cross- and within-district open enrollment. During his testimony, Reason Foundation Senior Policy Analyst Christian Barnard recommended adding transparency provisions to strengthen the proposal.

Texas governor’s State of the State address calls for school choice reforms. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott called K-12 education an “emergency item” this legislative session. Noting that Texas successfully implemented education savings accounts (ESAs) for students with special needs during the pandemic, Gov. Abbott stated that Texas now needs to establish universal state-funded ESAs for all Texas families. 

Recommended reading 

A Poor Poverty Measure
Ishtiaque Fazlul, Cory Koedel, and Eric Parsons at Education Next

“While it has been understood for some time that school lunch enrollment as a poverty indicator is blunt and prone to error, the magnitude of the problem has not yet been fully appreciated. In exploring the rules, features, and processes of the National School Lunch Program, we find that the program’s design, incentives, and lack of income-verification enforcement likely contribute to the oversubscription.”

Stockton, Calif., School Officials Could Face Criminal Charges after Audit Finds ‘Sufficient Evidence’ of Relief Fund Fraud
Linda Jacobson at The74

“The audit by an independent California agency largely focused on a questionable $7.3 million contract paid for with pandemic relief funds. In 2021, former officials appeared to ram through the purchase of 2,200 ultraviolet air filters designed to kill COVID despite multiple warnings that they weren’t following laws and procedures, the report said.”

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Are you a state or local policymaker interested in education reform? Reason Foundation’s Education Policy team can help you make sense of complex school finance data and discuss innovative reform options that expand students’ educational opportunities. Please reach out to me directly at jude.schwalbach@reason.org for more information.  

The post Funding Education Opportunity: Examining public school enrollment losses and sectors with gains, state education legislation, and more appeared first on Reason Foundation.

Reason Foundation’s Ari DeWolf and Christian Barnard recently sat down with the bill sponsor, Arizona State Senator Sine Kerr, to discuss the new policy and how she believes removing unnecessary busing regulations will help families and schools across the state.

DeWolf: Before we talk about the substance of your K-12 transportation policy reform from the 2022 session, would you share a little bit about your background before becoming a member of the Arizona State Senate? What got you involved in public policy and in public life?

Senator Kerr: Yes. Thank you so much for that. I always love to talk about my background because I think it is relevant to any American citizen who has even had a fleeting thought of becoming an elected official. My husband and I are longtime dairy farmers in Buckeye, Arizona, which is about 35 miles west of Phoenix.

Through agriculture, I got involved in leadership programs from the Arizona Farm Bureau with United Dairymen. I began taking leadership classes and anything else I could get my hands on. That’s where I learned to love engaging in public policy. I spent a lot of time at the state legislature meeting with members and advocating on behalf of agriculture.

Early on, it was apparent to me. that government regulation could really hurt you – and hurt you quickly. I understood how critical it was to have decision-makers who understood the impact each and every piece of legislation could have on farmers and ranchers, not only in Arizona but across our country. That carried over for me a love for policy and a recognition of how critical it is to have decision-makers who understand their impact on small businesses and other entities and folks trying to do what they do best.

DeWolf: What first made you see the need to reform the way K-12 institutions are incorporating or utilizing 11-to-15-passenger vans to meet students’ transportation needs?

Senator Kerr: This was a result of a first-of-its-kind in-the-nation grant program put into effect in Arizona last year. Through the granting application process, they found a large number of students came from rural schools. Lack of transportation flexibility was a frequently made comment, especially in those areas.

Great Leaders, Strong Schools, asked if I would be interested in the issue. I said, “Absolutely.” I represent a rural area. I raised our family in a rural area and they all attended, what I call, a small, rural farm school. Oftentimes, in rural areas, the roads are not maintained like in our urban areas. There are long distances that many of our bus drivers had to go, either to pick up students or deliver them at the end of the day. It was, in my opinion, a no-brainer and very common sense. We would offer flexibility to districts wanting to take this up. I heard from Reservation school officials about how this could be beneficial. And when, in our urban areas, there is a route that didn’t have a whole lot of students, then they could use this type of vehicle and be way more efficient.

Most importantly, are the safety features added to the program. These vehicles are already being utilized by sports teams and other groups. They have already been utilized to safely transport children for many, many years. This new law just allows these vehicles to be used on regular bus routes.

Barnard: I think every state needs these flexibility measures, especially as school choice proliferates. Students are zigzagging everywhere, trying to attend the school best for them. Yellow school buses are great, but they’re not able to serve every student, in every case. And they can be really expensive for districts trying to pick up only four or five students. So where do you see the benefits of this legislation? How do you see it affecting school choice students in Arizona?

Senator Kerr: There’s a great benefit to school districts of any size. As we all know, there’s currently a shortage of drivers who have CDL licenses. Fuel costs are through the roof. And there are maintenance costs for the standard 80-passenger buses.

For our school choice students, it provides an opportunity for those who wouldn’t have it. Parents could not always secure transportation for their children. This could be organized in those circumstances. I heard from a wonderful woman who oversees a school for autistic students and she expressed how beneficial this will be. Again, providing that flexibility too often lacking in public policy. And helping the drivers, who have to go through all the safety training with only one exception – they don’t have to have a CDL.

Barnard: What kind of pushback did you get to the legislation? What kind of pushback can policymakers in other states expect if they introduce similar legislation?

Senator Kerr: The biggest pushback was around safety concerns. And, again, it’s clearly outlined in the bill. Our Department of Public Safety, which oversees our current training for our bus drivers and bus safety, will oversee this program as well. The same agency dealing with safety and rulemaking on all the important safety decisions will still make decisions for these 11-to-15-passenger vehicles. There is also the Student Transportation Advisory Council overseeing the use of any vehicles. They will work in tandem. They are able to offer opinions and oversight on safety features as well. That was the biggest pushback I got. And really, I argued against that because it simply isn’t the case. It will be a very safe program.

The other pushback was with insurance concerns. If a district doesn’t have an insurance company agreeing to back them, then obviously, they are unable to utilize this program. It’s an opt-in opportunity, it’s not required. Hopefully, most of the districts needing the flexibility are be able to work with their insurance agencies to establish a good plan.

Barnard: What interest have school officials shown so far? You said school districts that were applying for the grant wanted more flexibility. Do you think there’s going to be a lot of take-up by districts in the next year or two?

Senator Kerr: I do. Many rural districts, and even our larger, urban districts, have thanked me for the opportunity to have more tools in their K-12 transportation toolbox. I’m excited to learn how districts utilize this refreshing flexibility.

Barnard: And that makes sense because schools are already using them for things like transporting the tennis team or debate club. There are some federal barriers to purchasing vans for school transportation, but many districts already have these vans and they’re just sitting in the lot. Do you think many districts already have 15-passenger vans?

Senator Kerr: I do. And with the bus driver shortage, some bus routes get canceled. I can’t imagine, as a parent, getting a message while running out the door that says, “Oh, I’m sorry, we don’t have enough drivers. We won’t be running your route today.” It creates quite a bind for families. We’re going to alleviate a lot of bus schedule challenges because again, those drivers won’t have to have a CDL. But they are trained. The students are in good hands. The vehicle will have all the required safety features. It’s going to be a win-win for everyone.

DeWolf: As Christian referenced before, this is an idea policymakers in other states are likely to take up. Do you have any advice on how your leadership style allowed you to shepherd this bipartisan bill into law?

Senator Kerr: Yes. I guess I just bring the way I’ve always conducted myself. I’ve always been a good listener and, especially with all the bills we go through, I’m always listening to the pros and the cons. I feel it’s in that tension, it’s in that discussion, where we really craft the best legislation for the state or for that group a bill is affecting. I used to resist the tension and the fight. You can be at odds with members in your own caucus or members in the party opposite. I finally learned to embrace that tension, because again, that’s where the best legislation is hammered out and ideas emerge that you didn’t consider. Perspectives from all angles are really important. They can be put into a bill, making a good bill, a great bill.

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