7 tips for improving news coverage of private school choice

We updated this tip sheet on private school choice, originally published Feb. 7, 2024, on May 12, 2025, to provide more recent data on school choice legislation, the number of states and students participating in these programs, and state funding for private schools.

More than half of U.S. states offer private school choice programs, which help students pay for private school. It’s a highly politicized, complicated issue involving multiple types of tuition assistance, hundreds of thousands of children and billions of taxpayer dollars.

It’s an issue journalists must examine closely. News coverage grounded in academic research is particularly important as more states consider starting these programs and lawmakers in states that have them push to expand.

So far in 2025, legislators in 30 states have introduced a total of 114 bills aimed to growing, revising or scaling back private school choice, according to FutureEd, a think tank at Georgetown University that tracks this legislation.

“Private school choice is once again shaping up to be a major policy battleground in state legislatures in 2025,” Bella DiMarco, a senior policy analyst at FutureEd, writes in an analysis updated May 6.

To help journalists strengthen their coverage of this issue, we asked for advice from seven university professors who study private school vouchers and other types of private school choice. Here’s what they said:

1. Explain how private school choice programs differ.

In the U.S., the three most common private school choice programs are tuition vouchers, tax-credit scholarships and education savings accounts. Although many journalists refer to them all as “voucher” programs, there are key differences:

• Private school vouchers are public funds that generally cover all or a portion of private school tuition. Families typically do not receive this money, however. Program administrators pay the private schools. In a landmark ruling in 1998, the Wisconsin Supreme Court found that allowing religious schools to participate in the state's voucher program did not violate the state or federal constitution, partly because of the way funds were distributed. Although the state sent voucher checks to participating private schools, it required parents and guardians to “restrictively endorse” the checks to the schools.

• Tax-credit scholarships also cover all or part of a student’s tuition bill. This money also tends to go to directly to the private schools. A primary difference between these two programs: While government agencies take money from their own coffers to offer vouchers, they fund tax-credit scholarships indirectly. They give businesses and other taxpayers tax credits in exchange for donating money needed to provide scholarships.

• Education savings accounts, often referred to as ESAs, contain public funds that students can spend on a variety of education-related items and services. Allowable expenses frequently include private school tuition, online courses, tutoring, standardized testing fees and homeschooling materials.

As of May 2025, almost 1.3 million students across 35 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico participate in private school choice programs, according to EdChoice, a nonprofit organization that advocates for school choice. The 2025 edition of EdChoice's annual report, “The ABCs of School Choice,” provides a state-by-state look at the various programs currently in place.

2. Find out how families decide whether to participate in private school choice programs.

Vanderbilt University researcher Claire Smrekar urges journalists to ask families how they decide whether to participate in these programs and ask school officials what kinds of information they provide.

Policymakers and school officials often assume incorrectly that parents and guardians all have access to the same information, says Smrekar, an associate professor of public policy and education who’s also editor of the Peabody Journal of Education. But studies consistently show that lower-income families and parents with lower levels of education generally do not receive or seek out the same information that higher-income families and parents with college degrees do, she adds.

Parents and guardians who aren’t familiar with education jargon or certain terms might not fully understand what school officials convey about private school choice programs in person or in writing. The same is true for parents who don’t speak English or aren’t fluent in the language.

The method of communication matters, too, Smrekar points out. School officials often use email and social media to share information. That’s a problem for families who don’t have internet service or use those social media platforms. 

“This is not an indictment of or finding fault with parents,” she says. “It’s a problem with the assumption that all families have access to high levels of information.”

Josh Cowen, a professor of education policy at Michigan State University, says journalists should pay attention to enrollment patterns. Students aren’t leaving public schools in droves. Many kids using public money to pay for a private K-12 education were already enrolled in private schools, he notes.

In Arkansas, for example, 95% of the 4,795 students who received education savings accounts from the state in late 2023 were either kindergarten students or students previously enrolled in private schools, a 2024 report from the Arkansas Department of Education shows.

In Florida, nearly 70% of the 122,000-plus students who received tuition vouchers for the first time during the 2023-24 school year were already attending private school, the Orlando Sentinel reported in February.

3. Scrutinize private schools.

Researchers we interviewed stressed the need for more in-depth reporting on private schools in states that have introduced school choice programs and states where lawmakers are considering it.

Questions they say journalists should answer in their news coverage:

• What assumptions are being made about the quality and number of private schools willing to participate in these programs?
• What’s the history and track record of private schools that participate in these programs in your state or other states?
• What’s the capacity of private schools in your community and state?
• What are the types and locations of private schools that have the most room available for new students?
• Are the highest quality private schools willing to participate? If so, are they also willing — and able — to expand to accommodate students using vouchers, tax-credit scholarships or education savings accounts?
• What rules or other factors could deter the highest quality private schools from participating?
• If a private school has limited seats available, which types of students are most likely to be admitted?
• Do any private schools in your state or community bar certain types of students from enrolling — for example, pregnant students, LGBTQ students, students with disabilities or students who don’t speak English?
• If a student’s voucher, tax-credit scholarship or education savings account doesn’t cover the full tuition amount, which schools will help students cover the remainder? How?

4. Note that using public money to pay for private education is not a recent development.

State and local governments have funded private K-12 schools and private colleges and universities for generations. Rural communities in New England started offering “town tuitioning” to school children after the Civil War, starting with Vermont in 1869 and Maine in 1873.

In these communities, local governments give families money to pay for private school because they don’t operate public schools that serve all grades. About 90 towns in Vermont paid tuition for students in some grades in 2023, the Valley News in New Hampshire reported. Next school year, Vermont towns will pay $20,910 in tuition, on average, for each student in grades 7 to 12 and $19,120, on average, per child in the lower grades, according to the Vermont Agency of Education.

In parts of the U.S. South in the 1950s and 1960s, governments paid for white students to attend private schools so they could avoid learning alongside Black students in public schools. “Securing public funding for all-white private schools was the go-to solution in the face of integration mandates,” researchers Kathryn Edin, H. Luke Shaefer and Timothy Jon Nelson write in a 2023 analysis in the Daily Beast.

In 1989, Wisconsin enacted the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, which provided private school tuition vouchers to lower-income children in Milwaukee, the state’s largest city. The program has been expanded multiple times over the years. Florida launched the first statewide voucher program in 1999, giving students in failing public schools the option of transferring to private schools.

State governments have long provided funding for private colleges and universities, as have federal government agencies. States gave private institutions about $3 billion in fiscal year 2023 — $394 million to help them with operating costs and $2.6 billion to help their students pay for tuition and other expenses, according to a report the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association released last year.

5. Push back on claims made by advocates on both sides of the issue.

“More journalists should challenge the slogans and talking points of policy advocates on both sides of the school choice debate,” Patrick J. Wolf, a professor of education policy and the 21st Century Endowed Chair in School Choice at the University of Arkansas, wrote to The Journalist’s Resource. “For example, if a [school] choice supporter declares ‘school choice is a lifeline for needy students,’ ask them: ‘What proportion of students who switch from public to private schools clearly benefit from the change?’ [and] ‘What proportion leave the private school within two years and just end up bouncing around from school to school with no stability?’”

Wolf also suggested journalists push back on claims from school choice critics who declare, for example, that private school vouchers will destroy public schools.

“Ask them: ‘Why are public schools so fragile that they can only endure if students have no other option?’ [and] ‘Where has school choice destroyed the public-school sector? Give me an example,’” he added.

Huriya Kanwal Jabbar, an associate professor of education policy at the University of Southern California, advised journalists to press supporters of private school choice to explain their reasons why.

“The slogan we hear is that choice is good in and of itself,” Jabbar wrote to The Journalist’s Resource. “I’d be curious to see if leaders advancing this are also concerned about school quality or accountability or student outcomes — or if their main goal is simply to give families more choices, even if they end up selecting schools that are worse for their children’s academic outcomes. In other words, what are the main priorities driving these policies? It seems important to be transparent about the aims so that we can then assess the evidence associated with those goals/aims.”

Christopher Lubienski, a professor of education policy who directs Indiana University’s Center for Evaluation and Education Policy, suggests journalists ask about potential learning loss: How would parents and guardians react if their children's standardized test scores drop after enrolling in private school? How much of a decline is acceptable? Which should be policymakers' priority: Getting the biggest positive impact they can for taxpayer dollars or giving families the ability to choose for themselves the type of education they want for their kids?

6. Familiarize yourself with the research on private school choice.

Academic journals have published dozens of studies on private school choice in various parts of the world. Studies of U.S. programs tend to focus on vouchers or tax-credit scholarships in a single city or state or a small group of states. That makes it difficult to draw comparisons or make predictions in other parts of the country.

Still, the research provides valuable insights and context for news stories. For example, journalists can report on patterns revealed in studies.

While studies in the 1990s and early 2000s generally indicate U.S. students who used vouchers and tax-credit scholarships performed as well or better on standardized tests than their public school peers, more recent analyses provide a different picture. In Indiana, Louisiana, Ohio and the District of Columbia, test scores fell after public school students transferred to private schools, according to papers published or released in 2016 and 2018.

Cowen says the challenges associated with scaling up these programs are reflected in the newer studies.

“There are not enough good private schools to take these children,” he says. “It’s that simple.”

The Journalist’s Resource has gathered and summarized several peer-reviewed papers on private school vouchers and tax-credit scholarships. They are among the most recent and offer valuable information on how these programs affect student achievement in the U.S., Chile, Colombia, Denmark, India and other countries.

Rand Corp., a nonprofit global policy think tank, released a report in December pointing out a lack of evidence on whether education savings accounts influence U.S. student performance. “No state has the necessary program characteristics and data infrastructure to measure the impact of ESA participation on academic outcomes,” the report notes.

Journalists who need help vetting research should read our tip sheet, “How to Gauge the Quality of a Research Study: 13 Questions Journalists Should Ask.” We also have tip sheets on academic journals that offer journalists free accounts and other ways to get free access to academic articles.

7. Report on long-term trends in test scores and other indicators of progress.

M. Danish Shakeel, who co-edited the book Educating Believers: Religion and School Choice, says it’s important that journalists look at how individual private school choice programs perform over time. Academic studies often provide a snapshot of a program over the span of several months or a few years.

In addition to standardized test scores, journalists should examine other indicators of student achievement, including civic engagement, college graduation rates and the development of non-cognitive skills such as problem solving and communication skills, says Shakeel, a professor at the University of Buckingham in the United Kingdom and director of the E.G. West Centre for Education Policy there.

Journalists need to keep in mind that parents and caregivers have many reasons for seeking a private school education for their children, Shakeel adds. Some families prefer religious instruction or want their children to learn in a faith-based environment, neither of which is available in American public schools. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2022 that religious schools cannot be excluded from government programs that help parents and guardians pay private school tuition.

Shakeel recommends journalists look at how students’ lives, as a whole, have changed with private school choice.

“Start asking questions on outcomes that are not typically discussed,” he says. “[Academic] outcomes are important, but those things that are important to the family get missed in the news reports.”

Some questions to ask:

• What have their children’s interactions with teachers and classmates been like at their private school? If their kids transferred from a public school, how has their learning experience changed?
• Have families’ attitudes about education or schools changed?
• Do parents and guardians feel supported by teachers and staff at the private school?
• How have their parenting styles changed since their children started private school?
• Has the family or child become more religious, compassionate or civic-minded?
• How has the child’s behavior at home and in the community changed?
• How satisfied are parents and guardians with their children’s education?

This article first appeared on The Journalist's Resource and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.