Grading school choice

Among the options that school choice advocates have championed in recent years are education savings accounts. Also known as ESAs, the accounts help parents pay for private school tuition and school supplies. Since Arizona launched the nation’s first ESA program in 2011, 17 other states have added their own versions.

But now, data about the effectiveness of ESA is arriving, and it has raised serious concerns about student underperformance. According to a report released last month, Tennessee students participating in the state’s education savings program scored lower than their public school peers on standardized tests. While some say the problem may be a lack of private school accountability, others argue the long-term value of school choice programs includes factors other than test scores.

The number of students using education savings accounts to attend private schools or homeschools has ballooned in recent years—by one count, growing by at least 1,200% since 2022, when Tennessee launched its pilot ESA program. Students below a certain income level who attended public school near Memphis, Nashville, or Chattanooga became eligible for over $9,000 annually to ease the switch to private school. Last month’s report from the Tennessee comptroller’s office offers some of the country’s first test score data on an ESA program.

According to the report, parent satisfaction with the program is high. But the data showed at least two shortfalls: Few students have enrolled, and participating students scored lower in standardized testing than peers outside of the program. Test scores did show slight improvement over time, but remained consistently lower on average than peers’ scores.

The Tennessee Education Association, Tennessee’s largest teachers’ union, held up the results as proof of the program’s failure. “Recent reporting confirms what educators and parents have warned from the beginning: Tennessee tax dollars are being diverted to private schools with almost no transparency or oversight … the students who are using the vouchers are worse off academically than their public-school peers,” the group said in a statement. The association did not respond to a request for comment.

Shelby Doyle lives in Nashville and serves as vice president of policy for the National School Choice Awareness Foundation. She told WORLD that parent satisfaction with the program has consistently remained near 95%.

“That’s a value judgment of what’s important to us as a society,” Doyle said. “Do we trust parents’ self-evaluation of whether their child is receiving the education they think they need?”

Arizona originally launched its ESA program to provide funding options for students with disabilities. Unlike vouchers, ESA money can go toward expenses besides tuition, including tutoring and textbooks. Parents access the money through an online account and submit receipts for education-related purchases.

The popularity of ESAs accelerated after pandemic-era remote learning prompted parents to look for education alternatives. But before this year, little information was available on how ESA programs affected student grades. The nonprofit research group Rand reported in late 2024 that state ESA programs have lacked the criteria needed for a rigorous study of results. Some states don’t require private schools or homeschools to administer the same standardized testing as public schools or report student scores, while other states have programs that are too small or too new to study effectively.

Doyle pointed out that while public school students are specifically taught to meet standardized testing benchmarks, private schools often rely on different assessments. That might explain why ESA students sometimes seem to underperform their peers, she said.

“Not all private schools are perfectly aligned in curriculum and in focus and in content to your Tennessee neighborhood public school. In fact, if they were, why should they exist?” Doyle said. “I think it is an apples-to-oranges comparison.”

Tennessee isn’t alone in finding mixed results with ESAs and similar school choice programs, according to Michael Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. He pointed to studies from Ohio, Louisiana, and Indiana that reported detrimental effects on test scores among students in those states’ voucher programs.

“Just because somebody is attending a private school, or in some cases now a homeschool, that doesn’t mean that those schools are necessarily better than the traditional public schools that they left,” Petrilli argued. “I think we can say that that private school choice has not been as much of a slam dunk when it comes to student achievement as some of its backers were hoping.”

Petrilli said Tennessee’s charter schools have shown better results than its ESA program.

“My reading of it is that the voucher programs [and ESAs] don’t have the same accountability for results as you see in charter schools,” Petrilli said. “There’s not a similar mechanism in most places when it comes to private school choice.”

Charter schools must meet the strict, measurable provisions of their charters or risk being shut down. They are publicly funded and don’t charge tuition. But many of these schools also suffered during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Schools were closed for a long, long time, and kids fell way behind,” Petrilli said. “We have some evidence that charters are doing better post-pandemic, but again, it’s hard. … We lost a lot of time and ground.”

In Tennessee, the comptroller’s report attributed low ESA enrollment at least partly to a failure in advertising. Even the few parents who realized they were eligible couldn’t always get past the demanding application process. And now more students meet criteria to participate: Last fall, Tennessee instituted a new ESA program that offers universal eligibility for students around the state. The state said it would award up to 20,000 scholarships, with some reserved for middle- and low-income students and those with disabilities.

Doyle said parents care about performance metrics other than test scores.

“It's often about how their child feels when they wake up and go to school every day, or about a way that their family’s lifestyle was able to change now that they're part of a different community,” Doyle said. “And I think that’s hard to capture.”

Families benefit from having multiple school choice options, said Molly Macek, a former public and private school teacher and now director of education policy at Michigan’s Mackinac Center for Public Policy think tank.

“That’s really the ideal scenario—by having a more diverse educational ecosystem, by bringing greater competition within the education system, that it will drive schools to improve,” Macek said. “And those that don’t improve, that don’t change their ways? Some of them will close, but that’s what needs to happen if those schools aren’t serving their student population.”

National School Choice Week, an offshoot of the National School Choice Awareness Foundation, teaches parents how to find and apply for alternative K-12 programs, such as ESAs and charter schools. More than 28,000 schools registered to participate this year. The group was scheduled to hold one of its flagship events in Detroit last week until a weather cancellation.

Michigan does not have an ESA program, but the idea has found supporters around the state. Bernita Bradley runs Engaged Detroit, which offers coaching and other homeschool resources for parents. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Bradley pulled her 11th grade daughter out of a Michigan charter school over her frustrations with remote learning. “They literally had started making Google Meets themselves, and they were on with the [homework] packets, working with one another,” Bradley said. “The teachers were not on with them.”

Bradley blames a 50-year-old state law for holding disadvantaged children back from private schools that could be a better fit. Michigan’s 1970 Blaine Amendment makes students attending a private school ineligible for public tuition assistance. Supporters of the law argue that publicly funding private religious schools violates the separation of church and state. Although similar amendments in other states have been overturned, Michigan’s has stood because it does not explicitly single out religious schools.

Meanwhile, Bradley hopes Michigan families will soon get more school choice options.

“If I’m able to pick from the options that I like and go somewhere else, that should actually make the schools look at themselves like, ‘Oh, what am I doing wrong?’” Bradley said. “Realistically, it hasn’t yet. But the more this stuff is pushed, this is going to make schools really turn … and say, ‘OK, we got to do something better.’”