Voucher Push Is Reshaping Private School Education, Study Finds

Some private schools are raising tuition, and others are able to enroll more students as publicly financed voucher programs begin to reshape education across the country.

But the biggest beneficiaries of the new programs so far may be families whose children were already attending private schools, according to a new study.

The authors of the study, Douglas N. Harris and Gabriel Olivier, both economists at Tulane University, found that many students who did use vouchers to move from public to private education had enrolled in small religious schools with a median tuition of $7,000.

Spending taxpayer dollars on private schooling upends several core traditions of American public education, Dr. Harris argued, including public governance and the separation of church and state.

“This is the biggest change in education policy since Brown v. Board,” he said, referring to the 1954 Supreme Court case that outlawed Southern school segregation.

The report is one of the first to measure the effects of a relatively new type of private school voucher, called an education savings account. The accounts allow parents to spend public dollars on private education and home-schooling. They are available to families of all income levels in the 11 Republican-leaning states included in the study.

Of those students who moved to private education as voucher access expanded since 2021, many appeared to land in “under-the-radar” religious schools, mostly non-Catholic, the authors found.

These schools often charged well below the average tuition across American private schools — $13,000 per year.

But as vouchers expand, those tuition costs may rise, at least modestly.

Private schools in states with broad access to vouchers increased tuition by 5 to 10 percent more than private schools in states without such policies, according to the paper, while enrollment increased by 3 to 4 percent more than in other states. (Tuition increases were more likely in secular schools than religious ones.)

The paper’s findings could provide fodder for both supporters and critics of vouchers, as the number of students using them grows exponentially.

This year, that number increased to about 1.3 million, from 500,000 in 2019. Now, governors across the country are facing the decision of whether to include their states in President Trump’s new federal private-school choice program that expands access, including to families earning up to 300 percent of their area’s median income, equivalent to more than $300,000 in some parts of the country.

Opponents have argued that universal voucher programs are a giveaway to parents who can already afford private education, and that public money should be spent on public options, which are more transparent and accessible.

Supporters say public schools have failed some students, and that parents should have the freedom to use taxpayer dollars on schools that align with their values.

The findings suggest that vouchers have not yet made a major dent in public school enrollments, even as they begin to transform the American private school landscape.

The paper also provides a rare snapshot of what that landscape looks like now, and how it is changing.

Name brand, academically elite prep schools are a tiny slice of the private school market. The typical American private school serves just 30 students, has modest tuition and might meet in a church basement, according to the data.

Those sorts of schools are benefiting from a sea change in Republican education policy. During and after the Covid-19 pandemic, states from Arizona to Florida to Texas created or expanded education savings accounts, often making them available to all families. The accounts range in size from about $4,000 to as much as $30,000 for students with disabilities.

Dr. Harris, the lead author of the paper, argued that spending taxpayer dollars on private education and home-schooling upends several core traditions of American public education, including public governance and the separation of church and state.

Because private school enrollment increased by about 35,000 students in states that adopted universal education savings accounts — while an additional half-a-million students used vouchers across the country — the data suggest that the “lion’s share” of voucher recipients were already attending private schools before the new accounts became available, Dr. Harris said.

The new research echoes data from Arizona, which began providing universal access to education savings accounts in 2022. Initially, the vast majority of recipients were already enrolled in private school, but that share decreased over time, and is now down to about 45 percent of new participants in the program. Still, uptake has been highest in some of the state’s most affluent neighborhoods.

It can be difficult for low-income families to take advantage of private school vouchers. They may lack transportation to get to private schools, and the value of a voucher can be less than the full cost of tuition.

That could be why it was smaller, cheaper and less established private schools that expanded most during the early years of the universal education savings accounts.

The study found significant state-level differences in how these policies played out. While private school tuition generally increased in states with taxpayer subsidies, that was not true in Florida, the state with the largest private-school choice program, serving over 400,000 students. There, average tuition went down.

Patrick Wolf, a voucher expert at the University of Arkansas, posited that could be, in part, because Florida parents are able to roll over unused dollars in their education savings accounts, using the money in future years. That could put some competitive pressure on private schools to lower annual tuition costs.

He argued that overall, the new study bolstered arguments in favor of private-school choice. He noted that the paper showed the average private school charging modest tuition and spending less per pupil than many public schools. And at least so far, there has been no mass exodus from public education in states that embraced education savings accounts.

“The doom and gloom forecasts of many critics are dispelled,” he said.

Still, recent research has been mixed on whether students who accept vouchers perform better academically than similar students who remain in public schools.

There is no comprehensive government data on who is using a voucher and how the money is being spent. That challenge required the Tulane team to draw conclusions based on trends in private school enrollment and tuition in states with these policies, comparing them with other states. They based the research on private school tax filings, on federal data and on information from Private School Review, a website where schools advertise their programs and prices. They were able to examine private school data from 45 states overall.

Dr. Harris, the lead author of the study, is a prominent expert on school choice. He is best known for his research on how Hurricane Katrina reshaped the education system in New Orleans, as many of the city’s schools were turned over to charter school operators.

That body of research suggested that increasing school choice within the public sector improved student outcomes. Charter schools are public schools managed independently of school districts, and are required to admit students by lottery.

Voucher policies are different in that they send public money to private entities, which are free to select which students they serve. Private schools are not required to provide disability services, for instance, and can expel students with academic and behavioral challenges.

Often, they do not have to follow the same rules about testing students and publicizing the results.

So far, private school enrollment has increased only modestly because of the voucher push. But Dr. Harris predicted that in the coming years, as parents become more knowledgeable about these programs, private enrollment could grow substantially.