How Private School Choice Triumphed in GOP-Led States

Editor's Note: This article appears in Governing's Summer 2025 magazine. You can subscribe here.

It took decades to happen but Texas has joined the ranks of states where parents can support their children’s private or parochial educations using taxpayer dollars. Gov. Greg Abbott, who had pushed hard for the change, was triumphant when he signed the state’s universal school choice bill in May. “Gone are the days that families are limited to only the school assigned by government,” he said. “The day has arrived that empowers parents to choose the school that’s best for their child.”

Long controversial, private school choice programs — notably universally available education savings accounts (ESAs, a form of vouchers) — have been one of this decade’s biggest public policy success stories. As recently as 2020, no state offered ESAs universally; those that had them in place limited them by geography, income level or other forms of need. By the time Texas took its step, 10 other states already had adopted universal ESA laws.

“The movement is at a tipping point,” says Robert Enlow, CEO and president of EdChoice, a nonprofit group that supports school choice. “It’s got momentum from parents, good quality evidence behind it and a political infrastructure that’s supporting people who support it.”

Political infrastructure is key. Where even many Republicans were once skeptical about private school choice programs — especially those from rural areas that lacked many alternatives to traditional public schools — support has become nearly a given within the party. In last year’s elections, Abbott helped take out numerous state House Republicans who had sunk a choice bill during the previous session.
Vouchers, ESAs and tax-credit scholarships, which are funded by donors who receive tax breaks in return, remain a tough sell in Democratic states. Democrats and teachers unions argue that such programs serve to strip public schools of funding without demonstrating notably superior results. Most money from voucher programs is going, at least so far, to parents who were sending their children to private schools anyway.

Despite its recent legislative success, school choice has not proven to be all that popular among voters. Last year, voters in three states — including distinctly red Kentucky and Nebraska — rejected choice measures that were on the ballot.

But advocates are gaining strength even in areas where they remain defeated. “If you look at the results of school choice referendums over the past 25 years, you will see that they used to lose 80-20, and now they lose 55-45, or 60-40,” says David Griffith, associate research director at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative education policy think tank.

It’s clear that these universal ESA programs are quickly turning into a major expense for states that adopt them. But choice supporters argue that all parents deserve the “education freedom” to send their children to the schools that best suit their needs. Until a few years ago, choice proponents touted the benefit of voucher programs that would serve disadvantaged students, such as children with disabilities or those from low-income households. Since then, the goals have expanded, with advocates wanting choice available to everyone, allowing parents to select schools for cultural, religious or safety reasons.

Even a few years ago, it was tough to get Republicans on board with expansive school choice programs, which is why conservative states including Texas, Arkansas and West Virginia came late to the game. Rural legislators were concerned not only about the lack of options in their districts but also the fact that public schools were often among their leading local employers.

Still, every state that managed to pass school choice legislation seems able to expand its programs over time. And the political dynamic shifted entirely with the COVID-19 pandemic. Parents were sometimes angry and often overwhelmed when teachers at their local schools insisted on keeping classroom doors shut.
While most public schools closed, often for months, non-unionized private and parochial schools, for the most part, stayed open. In 2020, when most public schools were fully remote, a majority of private schools were offering classroom instruction. A survey that year found parents whose kids were getting in-person lessons were less likely to say the pandemic had harmed their educations than parents whose kids were in remote or hybrid situations.

Parents who tried to help their children pay attention to remote lessons didn’t always like what they heard, with conservative parents in particular upset about topics such as gender identity and the history of racial discrimination in this country. In 2019, there was no real partisan divide when it came to support for public schools. By 2023, only 9 percent of Republicans had large amounts of faith in public schools, compared with 43 percent of Democrats.

“COVID shutdowns truly opened up a window into the classrooms that parents saw, and were very disappointed with, both from the curriculum as well as the classrooms, even the decor that’s in classrooms” says Mandy Drogin of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative group that supported pro-school choice legislative candidates. “Children, far too many of them, are not receiving a high-quality education that is value-aligned.”

Other parents, having to scramble, became more open to alternatives. Some turned to homeschooling or microschooling, putting their kids in educational settings alongside their neighbors. “Prior to COVID, the common cultural experience was we all took our kids to school,” says Enlow, the EdChoice president. “All of a sudden, everyone had a different cultural experience together at the same time and that really unbundled the myth of the public school.”

The pandemic shifted attitudes toward public schools, creating an opening for school choice advocates. They were quick to take advantage, turning this into a voting issue in many districts.

In 2022, Iowa GOP Gov. Kim Reynolds saw the legislature reject her proposal for a relatively modest private school scholarship fund. She went after legislators who opposed her bill – specifically Republican legislators. She unseated several in primaries that year, including the chair of the state House Education Committee. Almost as soon as the legislature was sworn in the following year, lawmakers passed a far more ambitious private school bill.

That approach of making support for school choice a dealbreaker issue provided Gov. Abbott with a template. He also saw a major school choice bill defeated and he also decided to get even. By the beginning of 2024, Abbott had raised an incredible amount of money – nearly $40 million – to go after school choice opponents within his own party. A sizable chunk of that money came from Jeff Yass, a Pennsylvania billionaire who’s been a big backer of the school choice movement.
School choice was not the only issue that led to intraparty fighting within the GOP last year. Separately, state Attorney General Ken Paxton targeted state House Republicans who’d voted for his impeachment. Abbott framed his opposition to some anti-voucher legislators by portraying them as generally unreliable votes for conservative causes. “The governor was able to use his power behind border security to take out pro-public education, rural members of the Republican Party in the House,” says Jaime Puente, who works on education for Every Texan, a public policy nonprofit. “He was able to target them and say, ‘I don’t trust them on border security. Please vote for someone else.’”

It worked. Nine state House Republicans who’d opposed vouchers lost their jobs in the primaries (eight to candidates supported by Abbott), while four retiring anti-voucher Republicans were replaced by backers. Two other GOP voucher supporters backed by Abbott won seats that had been held by retiring Democrats.

The bill that Abbott signed provides $1 billion right out of the gate for school choice. As has been the case elsewhere, its price tag is likely only to grow over time. Arizona created ESAs with, in retrospect, a modest bill back in 2011; their cost will top $1 billion in that state in the fiscal year starting July 1, according to Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs.

Despite the cost and continuing political opposition at least among Democrats, school choice proponents are convinced that their recent run of success is only the beginning. Iowa Gov. Reynolds, along with former GOP Gov. Doug Ducey of Arizona, are co-chairs of the Education Freedom Alliance, an initiative from the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the powerhouse conservative policy group.

Its goal is to have fully half the states pass universal ESAs. The movement may be running out of red states, but it can count on support for school choice coming from the White House under President Donald Trump.

“Parents are the ultimate form of accountability,” says Andrew Handel, ALEC’s education director. “Test scores are one thing, but the reality is, parents, if they’re not happy with the education that their kid is receiving, then they’re going to find a different option.”